Marine Le Pen got just 4.0% of the vote in the 11th arrondissement of Paris in the first round of the French Presidential elections.
Emmanuel Macron, who said that terrorism will be part of our daily lives for years to come (echoing London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s sentiment that this is just “part and parcel of” life in a major city), got a stunning 34.8%.
It is an elite central district, where the average house costs about 10,000 Euros per square meter, and hosts relatively few Arab-African immigrants.
It also hosts the Bataclan theater, the site of the worst terrorist attack in Western Europe in the past decade.
And Le Pen here got 1% point lower than the 5.0% she got in Paris as a whole, and the 4.9% she got in the previous Presidential election in 2012.
It’s time to take the #blackpill on France. Le Pen isn’t going to win, or even come close.
Not unless there’s a dirty nuke attack in the center of Paris, and as per above, I’m not even sure that would do the trick!
There was a hope, one which I subscribed to, that the polls were understating her support, due to the Front National’s lack of respectability and the hostile media climate. We saw it with Brexit. We saw it with Trump. But France refused to complete the trifecta.
The French pollsters, apparently, were better than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts (or luckier), and if anything, somewhat overestimated Le Pen’s popularity.
Overall first round election results:
| Liste des candidats | Voix | % Inscrits | % Exprimés |
|---|---|---|---|
| M. Emmanuel MACRON | 8 657 326 | 18,19 | 24,01 |
| Mme Marine LE PEN | 7 679 493 | 16,14 | 21,30 |
| M. François FILLON | 7 213 797 | 15,16 | 20,01 |
| M. Jean-Luc MÉLENCHON | 7 060 885 | 14,84 | 19,58 |
| M. Benoît HAMON | 2 291 565 | 4,82 | 6,36 |
| M. Nicolas DUPONT-AIGNAN | 1 695 186 | 3,56 | 4,70 |
| M. Jean LASSALLE | 435 365 | 0,91 | 1,21 |
| M. Philippe POUTOU | 394 582 | 0,83 | 1,09 |
| M. François ASSELINEAU | 332 588 | 0,70 | 0,92 |
| Mme Nathalie ARTHAUD | 232 428 | 0,49 | 0,64 |
| M. Jacques CHEMINADE | 65 598 | 0,14 | 0,18 |
Her final result of 21.3% was considerably below the ~24% average of the nearly one hundred polls one month prior to the election.
As such, we cannot hope for the polls to be cardinally wrong, and there are looking very, very bad for /ourgal/.
Direct polls of her performance against Macron show a consistent lead for him of 20% points.
Likewise, simple arithmetic models of second-choice preferences applied to the electorates of the knocked out candidates also suggest that she will lose by at least 20% points.
Even most of Fillon’s voters will go with Macron, especially after his endorsemenet of the Establishment candidate. Melenchon refused to endorse either, but the polls suggest his voters will overwhelmingly go with Macron as well.
There’s no much hope from other quarters, either. Dupont-Aignan is a solid Gaullist, but even his base are split on Le Pen. Most of the rest are Communists and anarchists of various hues who are going to vote for Macron the Outsider.
Turnout was already high, at 78%, and cannot be increased much further.
My back of the envelope – well, jotted down on Excel – calculations suggest that if the electorate voters as in the first chart above and the rest splits 50/50 between Macron and Le Pen – the latter, an assumption highly favorable to Le Pen – Macron will still win by 63% to 37%.
This ENEF poll (via Philippe Lemoine, see chart right) confirms the dismal outlook for Le Pen.
This is due to the fundamental differences between the French and American political systems.
If the US was a multiparty democracy, then somebody like Trump representing the nationalist part of the political spectrum would also have gotten 25% of the vote, with the constitunet elements of the Republican party splintering between religious conservatives like Cruz (Fillon) and financiers (Jeb!/Rubio), and with Hillary Clinton proceeding to wreck him in the runoffs. It was ironically by dint of its electoral system, long considered by observers as being very much resistant to populists from one extreme of the political spectrum or another, that someone like Trump could come to power by dint of Republican party loyalty. (Of course, Trump’s subsequent moderation/neoconization – cross out as per your own ideological preferences – might yet prove that said observers were right after all).
In France, it is basically Gallic Jeb! – successfully portrayed by the “free and impartial Western press” as an outsider, despite him having served as a Minister in Hollande’s government, worked at a Rothschild bank, and attended Bilderberger conferences – with the support of both Hillary Clinton, Cruz, many of Bernie’s voters (if not the man himself), and the entirety of the international globalist cabal against the true political outsider, Le Pen.
As regardless the future of nationalism in France, and indeed of the French nation, I suppose the only realistic way forwards is to focus on widening the Front National’s reach so as to prepare the way for a more effective challenge in 2022. For the first time, nationalist forces are now outright winning many regions, and ironically, the Bilderbergers’ anointment of Macron as their representative in France has redefined the political struggle to be more in line with Marine Le Pen’s own formulation: “There is no left or right, only nationalists and globalists.”
Though in net terms, this is still a disaster. Especially jarring is the apparent obliviousness of both the affluent, well-educated French elites in places like Paris, and the as yet non-enriched majority French areas in places like Britanny, that overwhelmingly vote against Le Pen and their own demographic dispossession.
As always, the race is between uncuckening and demographics; between White-World Supremacy Conservation…
… and the Rising Tide of Color.
France might only have a couple more electoral cycles to start reversing things before its submersion into Sub-Saharan Africa becomes irreversible.
In the second sentence I guess you meant Trump.
“France might only have a couple more electoral cycles to start reversing things before its submersion into Sub-Saharan Africa becomes irreversible.”
If the under-5 population is 1/3+ or maybe even 40% non-white in France I think with increasing mixing every generation, most people will be biracial or partially mixed in the distant future.
Viva la Françafrique-in-Europe.
I wonder how much of the result in Brittany was Breton, anti-French nationalism. It must exist, I just don’t know how strong it is.
If she gets 40% nationally, I think that will be an all-time high for FN. So the global populust-nationalist trend continues.
By the way, I saw a SiP article that praised Macron, a former investment banker, for taking away vacation days and the like from people who do useful work in France. He pushed through some kind of a libertardializing economic package while in government some years ago.
It may not be quite that bad. She’ll probably still lose, but Patrick Le Brun suggested that the sudden rise of Melenchon had come at greater cost to Le Pen than pollsters realised. With him out of the second round and Macron being Macron, they can be expected to vote for her if anyone.
It would fit into the narrative of the pollsters and media constantly underestimating the appeal of anti-immigration parties to the working class. (Presumably because this defies the world view of the mostly upper middle class people who work for them) Most of the time underestimating the losses to traditional centre-left parties to anti-immigration parties. This time an anti-establishment old-school socialist came through and they underestimated how many of Le Pens voters preferred him.
Either way I can think of no finer way to usher in the end of the current French Republic than with a Hollow Man like Macron. Death by post-modern ennui, it’s what the whole post-war era has been leading up to for France.
I fear that by 2022, the demographics will be stacked against French nationalists. If they can’t wake up after the Bataclan, then they can’t wake up full stop. Au revoir, France.
Should be “understating” here, I think.
But how is that to be done?
The French commenter Lemoine suggested in one of Sailer’s comment threads that Le Pen was gravely hurt by her anti-EU and anti-Euro stance (didn’t she even state she wanted a referendum on the Euro – and would resign if she lost??? That seems like a high-risk strategy for no obvious benefit to me). Would be interesting if there are any surveys supporting that view.
Given that Germany seems hopeless (I mean, the only question is whether an even bigger leftwing cuck can replace Merkel or not), and the UK is not that far behind, not to speak of Sweden, it would rather seem au revoir, Europe.
I would say that tactical and operational realities on the ground are already stacked against them. France simply doesn’t have a pool of people who would be able to take weapons to stand their ground. I constantly refer (for comparison reasons) to Russia’s events in Kondopoga and Sagra, many may not remember but real “taming” (or “conversion”) of Ramzan Kadyrov happened namely then. I can only express my condolences to (real) French people and assume that Elena Chudinova’s prophecy about Lefebvrists blowing the Mosque Of Notre Dame De Paris in the last act of defiance may not even come into reality.
Yeah, it’s depressing, I can’t understand how people can be that stupid. In a way their demise would be just evolution in action, problem just is they’re taking the rest of us with them into the abyss.
40% voting for Le Pen would be huge
Macron looks unstable to me – reasonable chance he’ll implode
Le Pen’s stand on the EU and the Euro must be true conviction, because it is certainly turning away a number of “middle of the road” voters who are sympathetic to the anti-globalist, French-nationalist position. A more nuanced position — re-orienting the EU towards its original sense of a customs union without political centralization, and loosening German control over the Euro — would certainly bring her considerably more support, without damaging her base.
Here is a 12-second video of Macron that in a fairer campaign should be his downfall:
“There is no culture in France, there is a culture in France, it is diverse, it is multiple”
Btw news from Austria:
http://diepresse.com/home/innenpolitik/5207179/Wir-werden-alle-Frauen-bitten-muessen-ein-Kopftuch-zu-tragen-aus?xtor=CS1-15-%5BEconomistn
President van der Bellen has stated in an interview that Islamophobia is rampant in Austria…and that the day might come when ALL women would have to be asked to wear a headscarf, out of solidarity with Muslim women doing so for religious reasons.
Remember, Van der Bellen was sold during the election as a nice bourgeois moderate (whereas Norbert Hofer supposedly was some kind of Hitler reincarnation).
If people don’t get it by now, will they ever understand?
He’s also in favour of discrimination positive (which I suppose means something like affirmative action in the US) and wants to make naturalization easier. Truly dreadful.
Thanks for the h/t. If anyone is interested, I wrote another blog post in English about this, in which I say very similar things. The National Front won’t be able to win until it softens its leftist stance on the economy. Of course, it shouldn’t adopt a laissez-faire platform, but it’s currently too far to the left on the economy, which makes it difficult to gain support among right-wing voters, which is where its real potential is. In particular, it should stop saying that it wants France to leave the euro, which turns off a lot of people.
No. Inertia and wishful thinking that things will somehow work out is huge in any society. I remember people still trying to live their normal lives (even partying) when there was shooting outside, the city was split in special zones, block posts everywhere–it is human nature. Now multiply this nature by coefficient from 1 through 10-15 for Europeans and there you go.
Very interesting, thank you. So that seems to confirm that FN has major problems among people with university education and/or higher income. Hard to see how this can be overcome unless the general intellectual climate becomes more favorable towards nationalism.
You’re referring to your experiences in Central Asia (or the Caucasus?) after the dissolution of the Soviet Union?
Not encouraging, if anything the population in Western Europe is much softer nowadays than people in the Soviet Union ever were (and I don’t say this doesn’t include me, I’m just aware of the fact)…the capability for collective action is very low.
The author is aligned on the Media which were very successful in having Macron winning the first round. Fillon and Juppe calling to vote for Macron on May 7 has been a shock to many people. It shows the collusion between what used to be the right and the left, both acting as surrogates of the New World Order. In doing so they commited suicide.
A new left is borned with Melanchon and Marine Le Pen. The first one represents the Free-mason left: this elite which pretends to have the knowledge to lead the people which is not supposed to be adult. They consider the people as the Jews see the Goyim: talking animals. For them all the people are equal as they are “untermensch”.
Marine Le Pen is working for the French people and she sees her as one of them. She is not part of an elite above the people. She wants to give them back some pride in participating in the development of the country. She wants to get rid of the international finance yoke.
I still hope that she will win on May 7, for Macron’s Victory will means the Triumph of the corrupt media and the dirty international money over what makes the difference between the Humanity and the animals: the lack of a soul.
Yes, Caucasus. But you confirmed my point–Europeans are simply not even in the same universe when it comes to comparison with Soviet people. Do not forget that even today Russian Armed Forces retain a significant portion of ground troops staffed with enlisted personnel who really gets the real school of life. Actually, observing today a truly stunning reversal in attitudes towards serving in armed forces among young people I literally have to pinch myself. The inverse corruption has started, if in the past (say in 2000s) people would pay to military commissars to not enlist their kids, an opposite today is true–there were cases when young people offered bribes to get enlisted in units such as paratroopers or border guards. A truly stunning reversal. It is also a very healthy sign.
If I understand correctly Russia has also reintroduced some sort of paramilitary training in the school system. Now I’m very much a civilian myself and not into flag-waving patriotism, but I have to admit in some ways this is probably quite a good idea…certainly far preferable to the absolute helplessness among most of the population in Western Europe.
Only Fillon had a chance against Macron. He would be ok, but unfortunately he came third. It would be better if Le Pen voters voted for Fillon. Also FN shoud try to keep the voters for parlamentary elections, and maybe make inroads into Assembly, but where they have no chance they should support Republicans. Also they should reconsider their hate of euro and the EU. Instead of fighting against the euro and scaring people with that talk, they should focus all energy on immigration, that’s the real problem.
Yes, of course, it’s a very good idea. Don’t you have scouting and that general sort of thing in Germany?
Yes. It used to be called NVP (Nachalnaya Voennaya Podgotovka–Initial (Introductory) Military Training). Many schools (students of 9-10th grades) used to field trip to nearest military ranges and shoot AKMs, live munitions, learned basic tactics on squad and platoon levels etc. Girls also had their basic field medicine training. Today it is called something else, but pretty much same vector–boys must know what real weapon is, they must be able to handle AK-74s or AK-100, know how to throw RGD-5 etc. Reintroduction of Yanarmia (Youth Army) is also a great idea. Military games for younger students are also back (it used to be called Zarnitsa), I am not sure how they are called today. But the idea is very simple behind all that–a man goes to battlefield to fight for his woman, who, in her turn, needs to know how to treat her wounded man. So not PC and not-tolerant.
I’m still reading Frank Dikötter’s trilogy on Mao’s China, the Great Leap Forward is perhaps the most frightening part.
The dictator declared that China will reach the industrial production of the UK (then still considered a major industrial power) in 15 years. With sycophants the required time is soon reduced to perhaps a few years. Mao wants to avoid the famine of Stalin, so decides to triple agricultural production, too. (A mere doubling wouldn’t be ambitious enough, I guess.)
Now, the whole country is made into a huge forced labor camp. The people are made to work on huge irrigation projects: many die. (The projects would later turn out to be totally useless.) To increase agricultural production, new methods are devised: close cropping (the farmers know it’s going to be harmful, but nobody dares say a word), fertilizer use (they demolish mud huts for fertilizer, the people are forced out of their homes), nobody thinks about how the harvest will turn out a year later when they run out of mud huts… (The harvest would turn out disastrous already in the first year, the new methods are actually harmful, the people forced to work on irrigation projects work less on the fields, a lot of land is left to fallow.)
They start increasing the magical number of steel production in rural village furnaces by melting all available agricultural tools (and some buildings are demolished or at least rid of their doors or windows for the metal parts found there), the steel produced is (predictably) so poor quality that it’s useless, scrap.
The foreign currency is used to import industrial equipment in very large quantities: the country goes bankrupt (within two years they cannot pay for their obligations), but the imported equipment is poorly handled, often is left on construction sites to rust in the rain.
After a year famine starts, while the country is already experiencing difficulties paying for its imports. The top leaders sit together at a conference to discuss how to divide the record harvest and what to do with the record steel production (neither of which went through the formality of actually existing). They are congratulating each other on the record harvests and the record industrial production. (Everybody was reporting bogus inflated numbers to get approval.) Then the unexpected happens: a high ranking official, the defense minister tells the others that the emperor has no clothes: there is famine, industrial production is actually dropping, housing stock etc. are getting destroyed, it’s all madness.
The defense minister is quickly demoted, forced to apologize, and then the leadership doubles down on the Great Leap Forward. Two years later the economy’s collapse reached such dimensions that the leadership is forced to readjust. They blame natural disasters. (There were some, caused by the already mentioned irrigation projects…) By that time, approximately 40% of the housing stock is destroyed, perhaps 5-10% of the population dies of famine (or of being worked to death, being killed, etc.), countless agricultural tools etc. are destroyed. In the end it shakes even Mao’s personal power.
All this on a project that anybody with half a brain could have seen could only end in disaster.
I’m betting on our elites continuing to congratulate themselves on the wonderful results of multiculturalism until the very end.
No, I don’t think scouting is really a thing in Germany. And paramilitary education in the school system wouldn’t have a chance of being introduced given Germany’s general mental state (I think the GDR did have it though, but then they were more “German” than West Germany anyway). Probably better anyway, given how “diverse” Germany’s young are, it might turn out to be just weapons training for future Islamists.
That’s not surprising though, after all they and their predecessors are responsible for the disastrous policies that led to the present situation. I just don’t get though how many supposedly educated people can’t see that this will in all likelihood end pretty badly. Karlin has written in the past – and commenter Philippe Lemoine has confirmed it – that FN does pretty badly among university-educated people, and I guess the same is true for most even vaguely nationalist parties in Europe. I really don’t understand that given events of the last 15 years or so.
Interesting, thanks for the answer.
“I think the GDR did have it though, but then they were more “German” than West Germany anyway).”
I’m curious, in what ways was DDR more German? It doesn’t surprise me that it was, but I don’t know the details. Of course I know that there were no immigrants, but there must have been more to it.
There must have been fewer Hollywood movies and less American music, so more of the entertainment would have been German.
All Soviet people of my generation remember an insanely entertaining East German TV show for kids. It was a team competition with a big race at the end of each episode.
I’d say it arguably was more German in its general character, both for good and ill…of course it was pretty authoritarian and preserved the traditional Untertanengeist (but then West Germans are pretty spineless too, they just don’t know it). But curiously it seems to have preserved more of a sense of German nationhood than the west. You could see this in details like GDR military uniforms which were recognizably in line with German military traditions whereas West German forces adopted really crappy-looking American-style uniforms (and East German propagandists were aware of that fact and made use of it). I don’t really fully understand the details myself (I’m not from East Germany, so my insight is limited)…of course there was a lot of official “antifascism” in the East as well (and someone like Merkel may be seen as a product of that), but on the whole it seems to have led to rather different results than in the West.
It was the German Democratic Republic, not the Federal Republic of Germany.
There was not just a population in Germany*, the population was German.
*According to Merkel, her people are everyone who lives in Germany which is unconstitutional.
Excellent show: Do as we do, Do with us, Do better than us (Mach mit, machs nach, machs besser…)
https://youtu.be/UlBNz4QYpZ0
It is quite telling that the first leader of the FRG/BRD was not a German patriot (Kurt Schumacher), but a Rhenish separatist who wanted that the Saarland does not rejoin Germany (Konrad Adenauer).
Thank you. That was interesting.
Del
This happens to me when I edit a comment after I post it. Seems to be a feature of Unz software. The comments reappear after a few minutes.
A Le Pen win was always known to be a fantastically long shot (my understanding, though not base upon any inside knowledge, was that the FN long term planning aimed at having their best shot at a Marine presidency in 2022). The knowledge that even getting through to the second round is no use when both sides then gang up on you is nothing new.
The excitement over the possibility this time was always largely based upon overblown comparisons to Brexit and Trump, which were always questionable.
That said, I think this piece is unduly negative. There is still an outside chance of a Le Pen win this time, though certainly not based upon the current electoral arithmetic. The chance is based upon the fact that there is a fortnight to campaign in, and Macron is anything but a solid and proven candidate. If MLP and the FN can successfully campaign against him as an insider, then the electoral arithmetic could chance very substantially, especially if he blunders in his response (which is entirely possible).
Voters, whatever they say now, must be much more up for grabs in this campaign than they ever would be in an ordinary campaign between established parties and politicians.
Regardless, the fact remains that even if MLP loses as expected, this election has already demonstrated another example of the general climb in support for parties of national survival and the likelihood is that gain will be reinforced by the second round vote. It’s another battle in the war, not the final decision on anything.
It’s really hard to overstate how much fun that show was.
Other East German stuff that we saw: toy train sets. Very well done. I had an incredible East German constuctor set. Lots of gleaming steel planks of every shape that you put together with screws.
Whenever I hear people say that East German-made stuff was of low quality, I attribute it to Western propaganda. The stuff I saw was top-notch.
Among the incalculables: will there be a Marine-Marion split analogous to the Marine-JM split?
(I doubt it, but who knows?)
You’re right that Marine had no chance, essentially, ever, so there’s no reason to be disappointed.
There were excellent equivalents of LEGOs, actually, but toys aside, GDR’s made X-ray and other hi-tech diagnostic medical equipment was great. All Soviet schools’ annual fluorography was done on East German-made trucks stuffed with X-ray diagnostic equipment, as one example among many. Sadly, GDR is remembered for Trabants only.
It’s maddening. The guy comes right out and says “I’m going to screw you to the wall,” and still he will win.
We had a Wartburg car. It was horrible, but very reliable. My father used to say that compared to the Dacia (a Romanian make based on a Renault model) that the Dacia was a great car produced in very bad quality, whereas the Wartburg was a shitty car produced in great quality.
The two-stroke engines (besides the Wartburgs, a lot of Trabants also on our streets) poisoned us in our childhood. The East German engineers wanted to improve them, but the party prohibited it, because production couldn’t keep pace with the demand (in the Eastern Bloc), so they just kept producing a heavily obsolete car (albeit in excellent quality).
You sound like a French version of GOPe.
FN don’t need to soften on the economy because neoliberal economics doesn’t work – for obvious reasons – so the economy will continue to degrade.
At this point, I’m about to start rooting for the muzzies. Clearly France doesn’t want to live.
The EU wants mass immigration to undermine national identities.
The FN needs to link the two issues – the EU wants open borders for divide an rule.
That’s certainly true to some extent (and I’m not in favour of the EU as it is now), but France didn’t acquire all those Muslims and Africans because she was told to do so by Brussels (same for Britain and its Pakistanis). And I think a lot of people are repelled by anti-EU talk, because they fear an end of the EU might lead to a return of the intra-European conflict of the 1914-45 era. That may be irrational and misguided, but one has to take it into account.
Pretty much all the cars you saw in the USSR were Soviet-made. We didn’t own one, but I think there’s a consensus that they weren’t as good as Western or Japanese ones.
However, the subways – not just in Moscow, but in every large Soviet city – were better than anything that exists in the West. Not just looks-wise. The trains ran on time and very often, the stations was super-clean. No stoppages.
By the way, in the 1980s about half of all the buses on Soviet roads were Hungarian Ikaruses. I’ve never heard any complaints about them.
Here’s the kind of story that has the potential to really damage Macron, because it hits him right where it hurts – in his “Socialist” hypocrisy and artificiality:
France election: Macron heckled by pro-Le Pen workers
“As Emmanuel Macron was holding talks at the local chamber of commerce, the National Front leader made an unannounced visit to the picket line at the Whirlpool factory where she was greeted with enthusiasm by many of the striking workers.
She told reporters there that Mr Macron’s decision to meet union officials in the comfortable surroundings of an office – rather than come to the factory gates as she had – was a sign of someone who deep down was contemptuous of working people’s lives. “
true but the EU of today wants open borders to destroy national identity for divide and rule
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18519395
fair enough – the above point would have to outweigh that, at least partially
Well yes, as I stated I’m definitely not in favour of the EU as it is now, its entire anti-national ethos is totally wrong. But still, Le Pen’s stance might come across as purely destructive to many who are in favour of some sort of cooperation between European countries (and memories of the world wars definitely play a role here imo, even if they are exploited for scare tactics by EU proponents). To me it also seems a bit like she wants to dodge the issue of Islam and immigration with its inevitable accusations of racism…attacking Brussels bureaucrats, German hegemony etc. is much safer than any honest discussion about France’s demographic transformation. I have my doubts whether such a strategy can work…but admittedly my knowledge about the political situation in France is limited.
Hey Daniel,
Ethnic French can be Muzzies.
“Conversions to marry have long been common enough in France, but a growing number of young people are now seen as converting to be better socially integrated in neighborhoods where Islam is dominant…In some predominantly Muslim areas, even non-Muslims observe Ramadan, the Muslim holy month that requires fasting during the day, because they like ‘the group effect, the festive side of it’…”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/world/europe/rise-of-islamic-converts-challenges-france.html
It may be a new paradigm, but it’ll be interesting seeing the French demanding a seat at the OIC.
Peace.
Honestly, that sounds like a defeated people submitting to its new masters.
I don’t wish ill on Muslims, but an islamicized France wouldn’t be France anymore, but something totally different.
That might well be true and there’s plenty of polling evidence for it, at least so far as outright “leave the EU” policy options are concerned, but consider this (counting all the main parties’ first round votes):
2012
Pro-EU
Socialist Party 10.3m
UMP 9.8m
Democratic Movement 3.3m
23.4m
Anti-Euro/EU
FN 6.4m
Left Front 4m
10.4m
2017
Pro-EU
En Marche 8.7m
Republicans 7.2m
Socialist 2.3m
18.2m
Anti-Euro/EU
FN 7.7m
France insoumise 7.1m
Debout la France 1.7m
16.5m
The future belongs to national sovereignty!
It remains just to decide whether France will ultimately go with the “far right” anti-EU option, the party of national survival, or the “far left” anti-EU option which believes in escaping submergence into the pro-big business/finance aspects at least of the EU superstate only to commit national suicide anyway by mass immigration.
[Cue rapid small print readout – past trends cannot necessarily be extrapolated into future ones, etc etc]
I honestly don’t think these people would change their mind if a hot nuke went off in Paris, those that manage to survive would still not change their minds. And I am completely sincere in this opinion, this is not sarcasm or snark, I believe nothing can change their minds.
You’re right, I didn’t take into account how anti-EU Melenchon’s party is…have to say I find this somewhat confusing. If there’s that much anti-EU sentiment in France, just what is helding Le Pen back? Is it really just accusations that she stands for racism, the tradition of Vichy etc.?
Hey G_R,
It’s a back and forth. None of the Muslims in the Western countries are exactly like the same as from their origin countries either. Within my own children, within the next generation or so, Urdu will likely be gone. Much of their norms are also Western and anyone can tell that they are foreign when they take trips to visit Muslim countries.
Correct – for one thing they’d probably be having babies again and it would likely ward off the White French demographic decline, there’d be a return to more patriarchal norms, etc.
Peace.
Race is important to me, but it’s not everything. I think if Europe became Islamic, even if it stayed majority white, I’d rather flee to Brazil. If Europeans embraced Islam, they wouldn’t be my people anymore, and I’d rather live among foreigners of another racial background, but who have some connection to what Europe once was.
Honestly, the segment you cited makes it pretty clear imo that many of those converts don’t convert because of inner conviction, but because they want to fit in with the demographically dominant Muslims…it’s a matter of conforming to social pressure by a dominant group. And given what I know of the behaviour of a non-trivial part of Muslim immigrants in Europe, this process is certainly greatly aided by all manner of harassment (“Hey you slut, how dare you walk in your immodest dress in our street! That’s haram!”).
I don’t blame you though that you view the spread of Islam positively. You’re a devout Muslim and cannot but see conversions to Islam as part of God’s plan for mankind. It’s equally clear however that a secular nationalist like me can only view this development with horror (as presumably would most Christians, and probably even many non-Muslim immigrants who had somewhat unpleasant experiences with Islam in the old country). On that question there just isn’t any common ground between us and can’t be.
That certainly seems to be the reason for most of the left anti-EU types who simply refuse ever to consider voting FN (more perhaps amongst the over-70s where the FN is noticeably under-represented) even when faced with the alternative being a more or less admitted big business shill like Macron. Though the point made by several people here is plausible, that anti-EU feeling does not necessarily always go as far as actually wanting to leave the EU, so maybe the FN is just over-egging the pudding on this, for many.
Also of course there are the more general effects of the massive media bias against nationalist parties that is common to all US sphere states.
By the way, apropos of your comment above about the EU having an anti-national ethos, this story reminded me of the way laws in the US are being selectively interpreted by activist judges to block executive actions that are fundamental to national sovereignty (immigration restrictions in the US, the control of subversive foreign organisations in Hungary). This is a problem of a fanatically anti-nationalist and ruthlessly dishonest trans-national elite ideology, as much as it is of the EU in particular.
Orbán on offensive after EU takes legal action over Soros university
Macron should ask for observer status.
I think at this stage it’s clear it’s just about power and one can forget about any notions of rule of law, democratic accountability, fair play etc. It’s quite scary how openly ruthless the establishment has become…here in Germany violent “antifascists” regularly attack property and persons of AfD politicians (and hardly ever get caught or prosecuted for it). Not a word of condemnation of this by mainstream politicians, instead they’re organizing demonstrations against the AfD. And of course Marine Le Pen is also constrained in many ways in her actions. The threat of prosecution under France’s draconian hate speech laws is very real after all.
yes. i knew an early teens white brother and sister who were the last white kids in their neighborhood and the girl converted because of the constant bullying and threats.
i think the simple explanation is
– the trad Left are economically Left and socially Left
– the trad Right are economically Right and socially Right
– the globalist uniparty are economically Right and socially Left
– nationalist parties tend to become economically Left (ish) and socially Right
so nationalist and globalist are irreconcilable opposites but to get the others nationalists need to
– persuade the Left on social issues
– persuade the Right on economic issues
both of these are difficult but not impossible
apart from persuasion in those areas if people on the trad Right and trad Left feel the situation is dangerous enough they’ll trade security for only getting half of what they want
I think all the points people have made about the likelihood of Marine doing very well are all valid and it may just be wishful thinking on my part but to my eye Macron just reeks of mental instability so i don’t think it’s 100% certain.
they all have day jobs, families, mortgages, in short, too much to lose. There are people for whom being out of work is a huge deal and those for whom a stint in prison is no big disruption to their life (incl. social life.) Naturally, the second type are at an advantage when the state defaults on its duty to protect citizens.
Kondopoga is a monotown (“a city/town whose economy is dominated by a single industry or company”) and a problem region though. The thing there was desperate and non-systemic (politically helpless) as far as these things go.
I don’t know where I’m going with this. Must it get much worse till it gets better?
Andrei Martyanov,
Elena Chudinova’s “The Mosque of Notre Dame De Paris” is a very riveting dystopian work although I’m afraid it hasn’t got the attention is deserves.
Excellent analysis, thank you.
But we are being too hard on ourselves here: Unlike Brexit or Trump FN never had a chance to actually win. The key is to double her old man’s result from 15 years ago. 15 years from now, her niece can win.
Did the bullying stop?
At this point? Sure – I mean Thailand has that status! If population reaches close to 50%, they should demand a table. And show a little bit of Teutonic gumption, as for a seat near the head of the table.
Peace.
Hey G_R,
Historically, some convert due to conviction, some for social or economic reasons, some to fit in, some because they want to get with that honey from the Maghreb – human beings are rarely predictable or black and white. If I remember correctly, the Golden Horde became Muslim simply because their chieftains did and that’s what you did if you were a Mongol and your chief asked it of you.
From the materialist framework – conviction presupposes a ‘ghost in the machine’ which doesn’t exist. Faith (sincere or insincere) is an illusion – the entire matter boils down to adaptation strategy and survival instinct – the same as when Europe went Christian or post-Christian.
I definitely share your concern about the bad manners that many Muslims show in Western countries – that is not the right way to be.
I can see your apprehension about a growing Muslim presence. I shudder thinking about a society or planet devoid of faith so I can empathize with what you may be feeling. I think that is simply natural since each side’s vision of society is different. As I’ve said before, I think healthy distance between people holding divergent views is a good thing – good fences make good neighbors. I’m personally a fan of the enclave/millet model.
Peace.
The problem is a lot of formerly (or even now) pro-Fidesz respectable conservative types are cucking on this issue in Hungary.
CEU was of course probably the best university in the humanities and social sciences in Hungary, even though it had the only gender studies department on any university, there was a lot of genuine scholarly work going on. For example their medieval studies department is very good. They also operated a great university library together with the biggest state university, where they provided most of the money. Soros knew that the best way to create an ideological university is to create a genuinely good university and then add queergendered holocaust studies etc. courses to it. The best propaganda always gives you something else (for example good entertainment, or in this case genuine scholarship) as bait to make you take the propaganda, too.
Their economics department is considered very good, for example, but of course it employed an economist who, together with a sociologist also working there, produced a working paper which “proved” that accepting hundreds of thousands of refugees would be a huge economic boon for the country.
Fillon had an (apparently) rather strong position on immigration:
He was also “pro” Russian and less “extreme” economically than Le Pen who proposes reducing the retirement age to 60 and maintaining the 35-hour work week.
Prior to his “arranged” implosion, Fillon was the overwhelming favorite to win the election, which is presumably why the decision to implode him was taken. Le Pen never had a chance and, I am convinced, will never have a chance. For better or worse the FN is simply too “toxic” among “educated” French. This I know first hand, as I have 2 sons who were educated in France and for all intents and purposes are French (one even has a French passport).
https://www.ft.com/content/935a7d98-12e2-11e7-80f4-13e067d5072c
I think she will find a way beyond this roadblock.
Instead of being about leaving the EU/Euro …. I think she needs to come up with a French idiom for ‘building the wall’ and make it about borders. And argue the willingness to leave the EU/Euro if this core demand can’t be met within the EU/Euro.
Or something like that.
Frankly, I don’t get why the elite is so enamored with this obviously unpopular idea. Their intelligent response to nationalism would be to start enforcing current rules without announcing it. With some minor changes.
Here it is: https://sputnikipogrom.com/politics/70380/election-presidentielle/
That was a very sad affair.
We are actually planning to dissect it on the next ROGPR podcast.
France is far more anti-capitalist than the US, and considerably more so even than Russia (according to opinion polls). If the FN moves right, she will simply lose the white proles who have defected en masse from the Socialists to the FN.
In any case the race/nationality issue in France is now at least 10x more important than any economic considerations, so it is especially maladaptive for a nationalist resource to make that a focal point of their critique.
(1) University educated people live with other university educated people – other whites, as well as the cream of the immigrant crop.
This trend is actually intensifying due to the increasing cognitive stratification that Charles Murray has written about.
(2) Sailer has also written a lot on the class war element of pro-immigration/minority virtue signalling.
Decreasing the pension age seems dumb to me, though. Perhaps it could be lowered for some backbreaking blue collar occupations, while simultaneously increased for white collar types. I’m sure it’s possible to do office work well into ones sixties (perhaps even over 70, though I think much less intensity), but backbreaking blue collar work might become impossible already at age 60.
Worth noting that France has become one of the more Euro-skeptical countries in the past few years.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/06/24/12/359EAB3D00000578-3657965-image-a-61_1466768246214.jpg
As with economics, I doubt Le Pen’s stance on the EU is hurting her that much, considering her electorate.
Hungary really needed strict rules governing the formation of private universities, like we have in Britain. There are 5 private universities, largely based near London, dealing in vocational subjects and catering largely for foreign students. With the exception of the University of Buckingham, none has a high profile.
Prevention is better than cure, especially when dealing with a parasite like Soros.
These incidents likely reflect state helplessness as much as they do Russian vitality. Chechens have a reputation of being able to do things to Russians with impunity, so desperate ethnic Russians took things in their own hands because the state refused to help them, the police would let them go.
In contrast, the state does go after such people in most Western countries. Who fills up western prisons? So there is little need of vigilantism.
That’s not necessarily true anymore. Hardly anybody has been tried, let alone convicted for the 2015/16 sex assaults in Cologne (and there must have been at least dozens, if not hundreds of perpetrators). Or look at how “grooming” by Pakistani gangs has been covered up in Britain…certainly many of the perpetrators there felt above the law for a long time (and may still do so, although there have been some trials by now).
And at least here in Germany, punishments for violent assault are also often quite low, especially for juveniles (which often includes people until their early 20s). You can kick or beat someone to death for some absurd reason and expect to spend at most a few years in prison…and those from certain violent-prone backgrounds act accordingly.
I take no position on how good/bad things are in Russia (I just don’t know), but your view of much of Western Europe might be too positive nowadays.
German Reader,
This sounds utterly horrible. I was so miserable when Hofer lost the second election and by a reasonable margin (the polls had placed him ahead, and he probably legitimately won the first time).
Europe is going to have to purge itself of islam some day if it wants to save itself. Or at the very least, individual countries are going to have to purge themselves, either as a whole or via some kind of partition. (For that matter, Russia really ought to partition off the North Caucasus). The longer they wait, the bloodier it’s going to be.
Van der Bellen does sound like a slimy, sleazy little freak. I hope that most Austrian women laugh him off if he ever asks them to wear a headscarf, and respond by removing him at the next election, if not sooner. Allow the headscarf and sooner or later it will become semi-compulsory. My fear is that a lot of them would actually think it’s a good idea. For a certain sort of american SJW, it’s always Selma in 1963, and I think a lot of Europeans probably interpret all history through the lens of the Holocaust.
The only hope I have here is this: Europe has been saved by foreign invasions before. Everything seemed lost when the Moors had advanced to the middle of France, when the Turks were besieging Vienna, and when the Mongols were on the Hungarian frontier. Europe outlasted its enemies then- I’d credit that to some kind of divine intervention myself, but maybe you don’t- and my hope is that she will do so again.
And also, let’s put this in context. The FPO went from a fringe party to nearly winning an election. We are making progress. Last year wasn’t the year, but by 2022, who knows what would happen? Same with the National Front. The loathsome Van der Bellen is right about one thing: “Islamophobia” (which I’d call, rational and healthy suspicion of Islam) is on the rise in Austria from an already reasonably high level, and most Austrian Muslims, as I’ve pointed out in the past, say that Islamophobia is intense enough that they would leave if financially compensated. Austria may yet solve its problems through peaceful measures.
Not sure why so many people are unaware of this, but in the UK, south Asians are eleven to twelve times more likely to commit statutory rape than white English people.
And as for Austria, did you hear about that migrant who raped a ten year old boy, and then managed to get a retrial by pleading that he didn’t speak German, so he didn’t know what “no” meant?
Cultural liberalism in Europe right now really is a national suicide ideology. My hope is that in the last analysis, most people aren’t convinced liberals.
That’s certainly true, I just wonder how supposedly educated people with high IQs can be that ignorant…it’s not like those issues haven’t been discussed to some extent even in mainstream media. It was quite revealing here in Germany a few years ago when Thilo Sarrazin published his book which among other issues dealt with hereditary factors for intelligence. Now Sarrazin probably could be criticised for many details or even for his general tone, but it was quite astonishing (in a bad way) how many supposedly smart people had really weird ideas of the sort “NO hereditary factors at all for intelligence”. There’s just a whole nexus of unexamined ideas that are just taken for granted and defended with the utmost vehemence (if you dissent, you’ll get excommunicated immediately). It’s pretty hard to act against such extreme conformism.
I wish there were ethnic statistics on this, though as in France, the Russian state is in no hurry to release them.
Still, the fact that there is now talk of a “civil war” between the vory (mostly Georgians, Russians, other non-Islamic minorities) and the djamaats (Muslim minorities, esp. North Caucasus) in Russia’s prisons does at least indicate that many of them are going to jail rather than getting off scot-free.
Yeah, like the Russian Union of Veterans openly inviting Kadyrov and his people to Kondopoga–sounds really “helpless” to me. As per Sagra–I don’t know, shooting a bunch of a-holes and making them run. Maybe we are talking about some other events. no? Let’s not invent things which were not there, including whole “Caucasus” diaspora simply disappearing from localities I mentioned. It is also remarkable how all those Caucasus “warriors” disappear from the streets on occasions of Paratrooper Day, Border Guards Day, Navy Day celebrations.
As per state–it depends greatly on particular locations. In the end, the guy who killed and wounded a bunch of Gypsy thugs recently got acquitted completely by the court. In the end, the existence of real ethnic mafias in, say, Moscow was a result of Luzhkov’s rather “liberal” attitudes to them, the same goes to a number of other locations. Russian state only recently began to regain some departure from 1990s and it will take some time before it becomes more or less effective. Events on Manezhnaya (as an example) were allowed to happen and guess what? After that inter-ethnic relations improved. So, yes, vitality is there.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/13/two-dead-football-racist-riot-moscow
Talha,
I’m not materialist (I’m Christian of a heterodox sort) and neither are you, so I’m not sure why either you or I would find a ‘materialist viewpoint’ convincing. Why are you even making that argument then? Conversion out of genuine faith is entirely different than conversion for social reasons.
Like German Reader, I think conversion of Europeans en masse would be a horrible prospect, both because I think Islam is false at the level of theology, and because I disagree with the kind of social and cultural values that it promotes, specifically stuff like you mention (larger families, more patriarchal norms, etc.). I actively don’t want a Muslim society or a Muslim world and it makes me shudder to exactly the same degree that a society without faith makes you shudder. My hope is that the sexual revolution eventually makes enough headway in Muslim societies- as it has in Latin America, Asia, and the developed world- to result in the consequent drop in Muslim fertility.
I care about Europe maintaining both its ethno-racial and its religious identities: they’re both important to me. I don’t want a Europe where blonde hair and blue eyes have become rare curiosities, even if everyone was Christian or agnostic, but I also don’t want an Europe full of blue eyed Muslims.
“Healthy distance between people holding divergent views” is certainly a very good thing, but surely you realize that mass migration, as currently constituted, is destructive of exactly that vision? You could maybe get there by partitioning European borders so that you have self contained Muslim nations within Europe. I would be certainly open to something like that: it would be more humane to French Muslims to let them keep part of ‘their’ country rather than send them back to Algeria. But the most meaningful, enforceable and significant kind of community today is the national community, so if you want a world of distinct and divergent visions of society, they really need to coincide with national boundaries.
That seems reasonable. From what I’ve read the way Fillon’s little scandal (probably no worse than what most French politicians do) was brought to light and investigated was very dubious, with obvious interference from the Élysée and some special court that normally wouldn’t have investigated the case.
And maybe you’re right and FN just is too toxic even for many patriotic French. Maybe non-French don’t understand all the historical baggage that’s playing a role here (it suppose it’s growing less important now, but as I understand it Vichy, and later the Algerian war, left some lasting divisions in French society).
I don’t think you need to worry about that. I’m not religious now, but even I had some vague belief in God when I was younger. Atheism isn’t a very comforting world view when you think about it, and most people will probably always rather seek meaning in some form of religious faith.
Good analysis. I’m not sure however how much of a traditional Left still actually exists in Western Europe. And their views on social issues are pretty much contradictory in my opinion…once the Left after all did stand for secularism, women’s rights etc. Hard to see how their current enthusiasm for Islam (which nowadays seems to be the standard among most socialists) can be reconciled with this.
Western “intellectuals” prefer Houellebecq’s derivative, plus Chudinova is too “violent” and tactically and operationally realistic about what is already beginning to happen in Europe. Nah, ideas of some pseudo-intellectual French cuck in justifying betrayal of his own culture, evidently, are more interesting for them. While Europe “intellectually debates” Houellebecq’s book, they forgot that they better start learning how to shoot, organize patrols, block posts etc. Daria Aslamova (a famous Russian reporter) recently made a huge expose on this:
https://www.thelocal.fr/20161104/french-look-to-arm-themselves-after-attacks
She stayed with older French couple near Calais, those people are basically ready to die in their house (and shop) and bought Mosin’s gun, but those people are not majority: Europe today is basically a concentration of urban metrosexual wussies who tremble at the idea of having a gun.
anyone noticed how r/jokes is full of “page 2 of google search results” jokes? (what’s the best place to hide a dead body etc.)
It used to be funny (there was an xkcd about it) but after the “fake news” hysteria I can’t help but think this could be the long arm of the State Dept. Makes Zuckerberg’s and what’s-the-google-guy’s-name job so much easier if people just don’t look. Seriously, I’m this paranoid right now.
Admittedly – I was thinking more of the USA, where incarceration rates closely match crime and certain groups do not “get away with” crimes that much.
It is a common knowledge today that Marseilles is basically not a French city anymore. It is not going to be regained.
I suspect that things have improved since I was last in Russia, in 2013. At that time, everyone was complaining that the state did nothing about Chechen criminals (or worse, punished ethnic Russians who dared to fight back). An anecdote includes, for example, bikers following a police vehicle and escorting an arrested criminal all the way to the police station for fear of the police just letting him go once they are out of sight…
Kontopoga occurred in 2006. The whole incident captures Rusisan state helplessness:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_ethnic_tensions_in_Kondopoga
So – Chechens behaved with impunity, terrorizing ethnic Russians while the state did nothing, so locals are forced to respond with vigilantism.
Well, there isn’t a general ban for headscarves in Germany or Austria…it’s not even like in France which, if I understand correctly, bans it for Muslim pupils in state schools (that isn’t the case in Germany, and consequently you can see fairly young girls in their early teens or even younger wearing one – and I doubt this is always a result of totally free choice). But of course that’s not enough for Islamic activists and you get court cases in which headscarf-wearing Muslim women lay claim to their “right” to wear their Islamic garb as teachers in state schools or as clerks in lawcourts etc., that is as representatives of the state. And they’re supported in this by many socialists and even some conservatives who frame this as a human rights and religious liberty issue.
Van der Bellen is just a typical Green…but if I understand correctly he was sold to voters as some bourgeois moderate, patriotic (but not nationalist!) and not radical at all…we have a similar figure here in Germany, Winfried Kretschmann who’s leading the Green-Christian Democrat government in Baden-Württemberg and is portrayed by media as some kindly grandfather figure who loves hiking and is deeply attached to his native region (and regularly prays for Angela Merkel’s wellbeing…). Personally I think it’s transparent nonsense, but at lot of people seem to fall for it (just like Macron is some young, dynamic “outsider”…).
See my other post. Kontopoga highlights Russian state helplessness and Russian vigilantism.
And I suspect not many Muslim fanatics show at Pegida or National Front rallies.
This is, of course, a good thing, but the 1990s ended 17 years ago. Why so slow?
But that is the whole point of this exchange. State may or may not be functional, but people still do organize. Today it is even more so. Compare this to Europe, where men (such as in Holland) wear skirts to “support” their women.
I think I read about that case in Austria, but frankly, by now there have been so many cases of extreme crimes (like “Pensioner murdered by Pakistani asylum seeker in her own home – prosecutors claim he wanted to kill an infidel”, “Teen stabbed to death in Hamburg – IS claims responsibility”, “Somali asylum seeker rapes two men in care center and kills pensioner”, “African men gang-rape nurse in Hamburg” – just a selection of a few cases I can remember, and NOT ONE of them made national news in Germany, it’s all kept to local newspapers) committed by recent immigrants, that isn’t even remarkable at all anymore. Even the official crime statistics for 2016 show violent crime, including sexual assaults, is on the rise in Germany, with “refugees” being massively overrepresented among the perpetrators…but apparently one just has to accept that.
Realistically, 1990s ended not in 2000, a pronounced break with 1990s “setup” started to manifest itself only around 2007-08. So no, not 17 years, maybe 10 max. Yes, the going could have been faster but this is the topic for separate discussion.
As I said earlier, what you call vigilantism is one of the signs of the ability of people to self-organize–a crucial metric when one begins to assess a national will for survival.
Yes,yes,yes. I watched it regularly too.
Can Marseilles be reclaimed as an European city?
Not in the current political and ideological setup in France.
Regarding German train toy sets. I had two. Excellent quality. Bought my son China made. Complete garbage
Well, if Christians can’t seem to maintain norms that allow them to survive, and indeed can’t seem to elect someone to allow them to survive, then its perhaps nature taking its course. I don’t like this at all – but I’m getting really pessimistic these days.
I suppose an Islamic world is better than an atheist world. I’ll rather live without a hand than without a leg, you?
Anon:
Probably not. But really in the last analysis, who cares? It’s better to have half a country that’s still French, than a whole country which really isn’t.
Hey Hector,
For the benefit of others. I find when I am conversing with materialists, they often reference something outside their framework. I’m simply saying (not that I believe it) that from a materialist standpoint, this is simply survival of the fittest working itself out – details about conviction being a spiritual issue which has no place at the table.
I would say this is not likely – the religion places a great deal of emphasis on modesty and public sexual norms – it is built into the framework at an immutable level. The regions in the Muslim world where this did take root (for instance, a traveler once reported the ubiquity of pornography in parts of Turkey in the 90’s) and the base level of the population; they are also in demographic decline. Drinking the post-modern koolaid has the same effect on all people. They are simply being replaced by the more religious and prolific population:
http://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/demography-vs-peak-reason-in-turkey-and-the-west/
There is a serious problem in the West if this is the road at the end of the sexual revolution:
http://www.rooshv.com/the-documentary-hot-girls-wanted-shows-the-destructiveness-of-porn
I believe the two are intertwined; a Europe (or any people) that wish to maintain its ethno-racial identity will be able to do so with a religious and spiritual framework. Question: do you see a revival of traditional Christianity in the future? One that will restore healthy families that have replacement-level children? If not, the writing is on the wall. In my local community, the Bosnians are some of the most healthy and prolific families (blond hair, green/blue eyes abound). I don’t know, maybe the Orthodox church will sweep up followers in the West as the Latins empty their pews.
I’m not a proponent of mass immigration. The Muslim countries would never accept mass immigration that would destabilize them – I see no need for the same to be asked of Europe. In fact, most Europeans probably don’t want mass migration of other Europeans; I doubt the French would think it’s a great thing if millions of Irish or Austrians or Greeks settled into their country.
This is basically the millet system of the Ottomans (inherited and modified from earlier rulers) and this was even done by the Hapsburgs when they inherited Muslim lands as the Ottomans vacated. They were able to find a workable solution where tension was relieved to the point where they even provided elite soldiers for the empire (just as many of them had served courageously under the Ottomans):
“The Bosniaks, who were seen as an elite group within the k.u.k. Army and who – with their strange uniform and fez headgear – attracted much attention from the various formations of the Austro-Hungarian Army, are the focus of the book….Feared by their enemies, respected by their comrades for their fighting spirit, the Bosnian-Herzegovinian troops were a reliable component of the Austro-Hungarian Army until the end of the First World War.”
https://www.militaria.at/Book.aspx?book=9009000&Language=en
Hapsburgs were also wise to adapt a millet-like system for their Bosnians to make things run smoothly:
“As for legal jurisdiction, allowance was made for the specific situation. As citizens of the Habsburg Monarchy, Bosnian Muslims were subject to Austro-Hungarian civil law, but questions of family and inheritance law were left to the sharia. The Muslim legal scholars were not only appointed and paid by the Austro-Hungarian administration but also constrained to cooperate with the civil jurisdiction, also in terms of court procedure.”
http://ww1.habsburger.net/en/chapters/sharia-under-double-eagle-austria-hungary-and-bosnian-muslims
I don’t think France would need to separate out parts as different countries, but could have parts as a semi-autonomous regions that have local jurisdiction and report to the federal government with an explicit agreement that any terrorism coming out of those areas will not be tolerated else the local authorities would be replaced. Trust me, local Muslim governments would take care of the problem with fairly harsh measures if the federal government would look the other way as to how they did it. We have similar frameworks with Native American tribes in the US and Russia has done a reasonably decent job with its Muslim areas.
Peace.
Would she even have gotten to the second round without populist (or “far left”) economics? If she had come out and said, you know, maybe we need to increase the work week, fire a bunch of workers, and cut taxes for the wealthy, her coalition would have been hamstrung from the start. The numbers I saw showed that at least around a tenth of her voters classified themselves as far left. Without populist economics, the second round would have been Melenchon v. the banker parasite. Melenchon, not Le Pen, would get the boost that she’s going to get after the entire apparatus of the state and capital gang up to deny her.
The future in France, as in the US, is a coalition of the right and the left against the elites.
Hey G_R,
I guess German courts will ultimately decide, but isn’t it a religious rights issue? I mean if a Islamist government took over Egypt (which may be possible within the next decade or so) – should the Coptic female public school teachers be forced to wear a headscarf or ousted since now they do not represent an “Islamic” government? Why or why not?
And if the idea is that, it’s not German enough to represent the state; well, there are plenty of historic German styles to choose from:
http://www.costumegallery.com/part3.htm
Peace.
yes, the Left now is SJWs and immigrants hence the poor showing of the Socialist parties except in specific areas. however i don’t think the ex trad Left voters have fully made the transition to nationalist yet so there’s room for improvement there imo
that plus GOPe type voters getting scared enough about the future to vote for security first
of coursh
The trouble is it is too simplistic to frame it as a purely religious freedom matter. If it were just that then I would be wholeheartedly and enthusiastically on the side of headscarf wearing for those who choose to (or whose families choose for them in the case of minors).
But it isn’t just that, because muslims in western European countries are not longstanding parts of the national scene like Copts in Egypt. They are overwhelmingly recent (the past 2-3 generations) immigrants, and ongoing immigrants, and converts as a result of recent immigration and the presence it has created, and they are in the process of changing the target country forever.
Defence against that process is in itself arguably a legitimate reason to make things more difficult for muslims in the target countries, including by headscarf bans.
It isn’t ideal. I’d far prefer to have a complete ban on immigration, bar a few individuals admitted on merit, and be able to extend full liberties again to all groups. But I do not live in that world, as my grandparents did.
I’m strongly opposed to blanket headscarf bans, including niqab or burqa bans. I think seeing all those niqabs and burqas is a great redpill for the normie masses.
But it’s probably a good idea to make it difficult for Muslims (especially strongly committed Muslims) to join the government, military, or educate our children.
Hey Randal,
I realize this is a complicated issue. And what of Germany’s growing convert population – are they to be considered a foreign import?
“The number of Germans who have converted to Islam has increased fourfold within one year — despite the negative perception of Islam among the general public.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/muslim-converts-in-germany-angst-ridden-germans-look-for-answers-and-find-them-in-the-koran-a-460364.html
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10404.html
Look, I understand where you are coming from. There is great wisdom in how Islam did not grant full enfranchisement to non-Muslim citizens or that we have current constitutional rules in Muslim countries that make it clear the official state religion is Islam and the leader has to be a Muslim.
Like I’ve said before, Europe is in a bind – basically a judo hold on itself that only it can release. It wants to be egalitarian to a fault and lecture to the Muslim world over it, but then it has to deal with the demographic reality of its declining population and a growing minority that is confident in its faith (something Europe didn’t think was important anymore). Is the future going to be a Muslim citizenry that is second-class, does not have voting rights, etc.? It wouldn’t surprise me.
The Germany of today would shock the Germany of by gone centuries. Human institutions are hardly ever static – history rides on.
Peace.
I would say this is not likely – the religion places a great deal of emphasis on modesty and public sexual norms – it is built into the framework at an immutable level.
Well, we used to think high fertility was built into Catholicism at an immutable level too, but then the sexual revolution conquered Quebec and Latin America. Latin America is heading towards below replacement fertility right now, and Asia has already gotten there. Some Muslim societies have already achieved below replacement fertility (Iran and Lebanon) so I don’t think it’s out of the question that the rest of the Muslim world will get there too.
For clarity, the specific aspect of the sexual revolution I’m interested in here is the drop in fertility rates that’s associated with thinking about sex as primarily recreational rather than procreational. I don’t know (or really care that much) if Muslims become more accepting of premaritial sex, extramarital sex, prostitution or so forth, but I do care very much about fertility dropping in the Muslim and African worlds. I think the world is overpopulated as it is, and that the problem (which is now essentially an African and to some extent South Asian one) is just getting worse from here.
There is a serious problem in the West if this is the road at the end of the sexual revolution:
I mean, it’s Roosh after all, who has to state it minimally an exteremely unhealthy view of women. More seriously, while I don’t particularly approve of pornography, I think the increased sexual openness of women in the Christian or post-Christian worlds is a very good thing. I’m more or less on the free-love, sex-positive side of things (which is yet another area where I strongly disagree with Islam). You claim that increased sexual openness is a problem, but I think this is only going to be convincing to someone who already shares your premises.
Question: do you see a revival of traditional Christianity in the future? One that will restore healthy families that have replacement-level children? If not, the writing is on the wall. In my local community, the Bosnians are some of the most healthy and prolific families (blond hair, green/blue eyes abound).
I think there may well be a revival of Christianity in some form, but it will not be “traditional” at least as far as high fertility goes. I see this as a good thing, not a bad thing. As a biologist I’m quite aware that the world is arguably already overpopulated, so I don’t see why you want a world or a society that/s more focused on procreation and family. I would much prefer a world with 2 or 3 billion people to the 7 billion we have today, much less the 11 billion expected if African fertility continues on its current trajectory. I think fertility rates in much of Europe are a bit too low- I’d prefer to see TFRs of around 1.6 or 1.7 rather than 1.3- but the bigger problem is that African and Muslim fertility is too high, and we need to combat that with increased contraceptive availability and efforts to convince people of the merits of smaller numbers of children.
That’s nice to hear that your Bosnian neighbors are replicating a beautiful Bosnian phenotype, but statistically Bosnia has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world (1.2) and it’s one of only a few countries where Muslim fertility is as low as CHristian.
I’ve often felt that chaos favors conservative attitudes, when self-rising organization tends to lean toward natural and traditional methodology. Most people would be conservative if electricity stopped working, for example.
Men are still men there, whereas men in the rest of the West seem to have become sperm-bearing women.
But in that case, I suppose those men deserve to cease to be. Despite what the popular consensus says, violence IS a meaningful method of change. And it should be utilized when necessary. And those who would deny themselves such methodology should be with the dodos.
“The number of Germans who have converted to Islam has increased fourfold within one year
Nordic princesses for everyone!
My point was that because the Russian state failed to do its job (indeed, it had been shielding the criminals) people were forced to act out on their own. The acting out was not necessarily simply a function of vitality, but of government negligence. There seem to be fewer mass Russian vigilante actions nowadays. Have Russians gotten “soft,” or is the Russian government finally doing its job now?
In the West (at least the USA) the people rightfully expect the government to deal with the criminals, and it does (check incarceration rates). So they generally don’t have to act out on their own.
I agree. My point is that in countries, unlike Russia until recently, where the state actually catches and punishes criminals, there is less need for self-organization. In such countries the people let the police and the courts do their job, which they do. Such circumstances don’t simply a lack of vitality, they simply reflect a functioning state.
Hey Hector,
Nice to hear you are a biologist.
I don’t think so either – it’s basically a thinning of the herd by self-inflicted choices.
I have no problem with the world’s population decreasing though I think the world could easily support five times our current population – it all just depends on the level of resource depletion. I’m sure you know that an urban dweller of Paris likely consumes energy at the rate of probably half or more of a small village in the Sahel area of Mauritania.
It doesn’t have to convince anybody – the sexually open societies that lead to a decline in the family are writing the proof. For instance, a growing homosexual population in any people leads to genetic dead-ends. And that’s all fine if people don’t think dropping fertility rates are bad – in fact, sexual promiscuity is a good thing to promote in that instance if that is your goal – hell, if I was the Earth and wanted to get rid of the biggest resource drains, I’d do exactly that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita
The only question is, can you pull the populations out of the nosedive once you’ve started. My guess? Yes, but the populations that arise out of the process will not have congruent values as the once being selected out.
Yup – again, the ones that I’m around are religious/traditional families that attend weekly spiritual gatherings with other families. The post-modern Bosnians are in the process of eliminating themselves – they will be replaced by the religious folk that look like them.
Like I have said, if you want to preserve the ethnic/racial aspect – then you cannot diverge enormously from the paradigms that preserved it for centuries and centuries and an integral part of that was traditional religion. As Toynbee stated; man’s nature abhors a spiritual vacuum.
Peace.
Hey iffen,
And good, solid, traditional Nordic princes should keep them as mates.
Peace.
And yes, I agree Roosh has an unhealthy (possibly bi-polar) view of women. For instance, his claim to fame is teaching men how to get into womens’ pants, but then he complains about degeneracy in women. However, that blog post had a lot of excellent points in how ubiquitous pornography and decadence has become.
Peace.
They can also reflect the atrophy of individual will, though. If a muscle is never used, it can also decline and ultimately cease to be.
I do not know the situation in USA, but in France, Italy and in general in southern Europe (which I know well) the situation is degrading fast.
My experience with Russians is that they remain suitably violent and sexually dimorphic in personality in ways that the West aren’t. This is just ancedotal, but when I went to a banya with Russian friends, the men regularly mocked me and each other for being pussies for not inflicting more pain upon ourselves and my friends’ wives regularly made declarations such as “Russian women do this…” or “Russian women do that…” that you don’t see in the West at all anymore. Women seem to put in more effect to be, or even fake femininity such that there’s an opposite dynamic to what I usually see, where men try to be sensitive and women try to prove they are tough.
That said, it does seem like progressive ideology is making inroads with young, who want to be “rich like American” but perhaps the picture is better than I think. I do hope that not all humans become domesticated animals. The Russians I know are after all, the typical “want to be American” types who take some degree of pride on putting down their own people.
No, I don’t think it’s a religious rights issue, imo people who represent the state shouldn’t advocate for a certain religious or political world view through their dress or other signs (e.g. I’d also include conspicuous crosses on necklaces and similar things in this), and that includes teachers in public schools. Arguably it could be different in Muslim faith schools (not that I think those, or any other faith schools, are necessarily a good idea since they’re contributing to segregation). I know many people will think this unfair and even many Christians and conservatives will disagree with me about this, but frankly, if someone takes his/her religion that seriously that he/she’s unwilling for some compromise, he/she just can’t have everything. Teaching children isn’t a human right and no one said following God’s commandments (if you believe in them) should be easy.
Marine LePen’s party only has 2 MPs so anyone who thought she stood a chance of becoming president was cracked.
Is there any evidence that this is even possible…I mean that the percentage of homosexuals drastically increases? Now I guess it might be possible that some environmental factors might increase the incidence of homosexuality (maybe certain chemicals, material in plastics etc…but as far as I know we don’t really know what causes homosexuality, but it probably must be something during fetal development or early childhood at the latest). But I seriously doubt it’s possible people just decide to become homosexuals because it’s somehow regarded as cool nowadays.
According to writer Robert Greene, in places like LA those pick up tactics have been so well used that almost all the women can immediately realise what a man is up to. And Roosh is Middle Eastern, what worked for him probably had something to do with that. he probably has had a net deleterious effect on the effectiveness of men’s courting skills and he certainly damaged women’s trust that men were genuine.
As for France , the commentator Eric Zemmour, noted the white proletariat’s helplessness before the “ostentatious virility of their black and Arab competitors seducing numerous young white women.”.
I agree with that…here in Germany “conservatives” regularly bring up the topic of a general burqa ban. In my opinion that’s just for show, to pretend that they’re doing something while in fact everything continues as before. And such a ban would be meaningless anyway (it wouldn’t strip people with Islamist sympathies of voting rights, or take away welfare benefits from them), and probably wouldn’t be enforced (can you imagine Muslim women would be sent to prison for wearing dress like that? I can’t, there would be a huge outcry, it would generate lots of sympathy for those affected – who might even intentionally provoke punishment -, and in the end authorities would just give up). It would solve absolutely nothing.
No, the real issue is to keep people with potentially hostile intentions away from positions of power.
Hey G_R,
Certainly – lots of societies dabbled in homosexuality whether the person had an innate proclivity towards it or not. The Greeks were into it, it even shows up among the samurai:
“The people of the West are not aware that there once existed in Japan a cultural tradition of homosexuality comparable to that of ancient Greece. During a period of time in which the traditional civilization of Japan reached its perfection, the homosexual love was considered a passion more noble and more gracious than heterosexuality. Over time, this tradition of homosexuality would quickly become discouraged, and eventually it was kept so hidden as it was thought to have disapeared altogether.”
http://www.stthomasu.ca/~parkhill/cj01/irepam.htm
The Turks were often into it and it shows up in parts of Afghanistan. When you open it up publicly, some people will gravitate towards it while in another context they wouldn’t. Human beings are hardly black and white on a sexual spectrum – most are probably solid heterosexuals, but I think plenty would dabble in homosexuality/bisexuality if the right partner/opportunity arises especially if the culture deems it appropriate.
A society could possibly manage with it as long as the person was also carrying out traditional family roles, but in our post-modern society, we have given homosexual marriage a legal sanction – something I don’t believe any prior people did. In an era when heterosexuals themselves aren’t having many kids, this just exacerbates the issue.
Peace.
Hey Sean,
Blacks and Arabs (if Muslim) have no business seducing, let alone ogling, any women. They should keep that behavior under serious check. That would never be tolerated by Muslim fathers.
I’m pretty sick and tired of these ethnic Muslims acting in such predatory behavior that is completely unsanctioned by Islam and then the religion getting blamed for it. I would never let my daughter anywhere close to these club-frequenting, alcohol drinking, etc. losers.
Peace.
That is a strong argument, admittedly.
Another consequence of the evil policy of mass immigration.
Indeed, there are no plausible good outcomes. To coin a phrase, rivers of blood will likely be shed thanks to the crime committed by the mass immigration advocates and enablers. This is one of those cases where hatred is imo justified. I never hate people for membership of a group, even if the group is an enemy of my group. The only justification for hating someone is something harmful they individually have done. For instance, I do hate Blair and Cameron for the wars of aggression they have gratuitously implicated my country in (though whether that hatred is good for me or for anything is admittedly questionable).
As for demographic decline, that’s not even a particularly bad thing in itself, provided it is not allowed to trigger inflows of foreigners. It causes economic issue that need to be managed, but so does population growth.
The fact of impermanence is no excuse for harmful actions.
I see homosexuality as purely a behavioural issue, and it seems to me there can be no question that the numbers of homosexuals – meaning people who will engage in homosexual acts – changes according to environmental (and especially social) cues.
The notorious prevalence of homosexual behaviour in coerced male only environments – boarding schools, prisons, naval ships (back when the crews were press-ganged and not self-selecting volunteers) renders that beyond reasonable doubt to my mind.
The male sex drive is notoriously indiscriminate, notoriously confused with behavioural dominance/submission issues, and also notoriously variable according to activity. It’s also likely in part a matter of learned responses.
anon said “…Macron looks unstable to me…” Indeed, he screws up his face and screams in an unseemly, and unmanly manner. I’m hoping he may pee himself live on TV at a large rally in front of his Mum, Brigitte. This might stop the Parisian sophisticates voting for him.
Seriously though, looking at the very real death wish that we can see in action in UK and French white populations I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that (white) people who want to preserve their race need to move NOW. There are still large numbers of whites who could just about afford to voluntarily relocate to a place which we could in time take over and run, the European ethnostate. Some nationalists have already identified Hungary as the place where we would be most likely to thrive. If people don’t start to move NOW I really think it may be too late.
But that’s in environments where people don’t have any other option. Is there any evidence that people who have engaged in homosexual acts in prison, continue to do so after their release? I’d expect that many revert to purely heterosexual behaviour, but I don’t know if there are any studies about this.
I probably shouldn’t have asked though, it’s not a topic I care that much about. It’s also a subject where research is probably quite constrained under present conditions.
How do you propose we get rid of the Feminists and the gays without Islam?
I’m against mass immigration, but we still need an alternative.
If Valencia, Granada, and Malaga could, why not?
I agree, and I’d also add that sexual perversion in general seems to be a characteristic of decaying societies; twentieth-century England for example, ancient Rome (I seem to recall some authors charged part of the decline to the rise of this sort of thing; I myself am inclined to reverse the relationship), late modern (especially 19th-century) Islam, etc.
I don’t know how much effect “Roosh” and “game” have had; from what I’ve heard they don’t seem much more than standard bar-pickup posturing, to be practiced in a milieu in which degeneracy is expected of all sides. I can’t imagine that he personally can have had much effect in damaging trust in that environment.
I’m posting up a storm here, so I apologize, but: Mme. (?) Le Pen has the same level of support (5 %) among Parisians and among Muslims?
I wonder about her support among Mulsim Parisians.
Maybe we can ask Kim-Jong-Un about it?
The problem for Le Pen is that it tends to be older, conservative French people who are most keen to stay in the EU. As is the case everywhere in the West, urban middle class whites are allergic to nationalism, which only leaves working class whites who will vote for her nationalist, anti-EU policies.
Difficult to get around this. If she backs off from her anti-EU focus, she may attract some traditional centre-right voters, but if France stays in the EU it will be very hard to revive the economy and put in place tough immigration policies.
When people with similar political views only socialise with people like themselves, they tend to reinforce each other views. Hence a political moderate who lives around lots of left-liberals will tend to become more liberal, while a moderate left-liberal who is surrounded by lots of left-wing people will move further to the left.
What’s happened over the last century of urbanisation is that many whites with liberal inclinations have moved to large cities where they have turned into staunch liberals and leftists. A hundred years ago most of them would have lived in smaller towns and cities where they would have had to socialise with a lot of people with more conservative political views.
It also needs pointing out that there are now very few poor white people in large cities, Hence, liberal urban whites only see relatively wealthy whites and economically struggling minorities. This is one of the reasons why they tend to take the side of non-whites on immigration and law and order matters. In the geographic space they inhibit, only non-whites struggle economically.
They are dominant, so it’s to be expected.
I also hate people less who are just doing what they are ethnically predisposed to do. I hate black criminals less than white criminals, for example. The bulk of the responsibility for black or Muslim crimes lies with their white enablers. I feel similarly about Jewish neocons vs. gentile neocons: the latter are more culpable. Jews arguing for Israel as a Jewish state but European countries as multicultural countries vs. gentiles arguing for the same: ditto. (Sorry, Iffen, I’m sure you’re a nice guy.) Though smarter people are more responsible than dumber ones, so I normally give Jews less slack for being neocons than blacks for being dumb criminals.
(Sorry, Iffen, I’m sure you’re a nice guy.)
Thanks, this depends upon one’s definition of nice. I know from past exchanges that defining the terms that we use is not high on your to do list. 🙂
I take note that you are consistent in your application of group identity rather than individualism. I like consistency and strive for it myself.
You misrepresent my views. I am not opposed to ethnic nationalism per se. I make no prescriptions for countries other than the US. I do offer opinions on other countries as to whether they have ethnic or civic nationalism and which I think is more appropriate for that country based mostly on their history but also current conditions and the prospect of changing conditions in the future.
Did you note the speech where Le Pen said that halal slaughter should be banned?
Hey G_R,
I may not agree, but at least you are consistent in your application.
Agreed – I’m a bit tired of snowflake Muslims actually – again this is part of post-modern entitlement attitudes. I feel like telling them; man up guys, this kind of stuff is supposed to happen – you think paradise is free? Own it – and sweat a little for it – the struggle is part of one’s spiritual journey:
“Do men think that they will be left to say, ‘We believe’ and they will not be tried? And indeed We tried those before them, thus Allah will certainly know those who are true and He will certainly know those who are false.” (29:2-3)
“And We will surely test you with something of fear and hunger and a loss of wealth and lives and fruits, but give good tidings to the patient; who, when misfortune strikes them, say, ‘Indeed we belong to Allah, and indeed to Him we will return.'” (2:155-156)
Peace.
Hey iffen,
The litmus test is if she says the same thing for Kosher slaughter – otherwise it’s just posturing. If that does happen – it’ll just boost sales for imported meat from New Zealand and Australia honestly.
Peace.
substituting “reduce the negative influence of” for “get rid of”
genetics – the excessive influence of both is the result of the culture being poisoned by the Boassian bank slate nonsense
there’s a theory that one cause of homosexuality is some kind of bug or STD – if so then socially conservative societies e.g. the West before the 1960s or early Rome, prevented the spread of that bug but if a society becomes more libertine so the bug spreads faster creating a vicious cycle
I like the idea of people moving to places where they can live with like minded people (and in this case of like ethnicity), and would greatly encourage people who want to live surrounded by blue-eyed blonde-haired people to consider moving to Eastern Europe. I have considered doing so myself, although I’m not white, and though in my case I’d be looking for a country distrustful of capitalism as well as one distrustful of mass migration and cultural liberalism. (Maybe Belarus?)
If you have news about people moving en masse to Hungary for ethnic identity reasons, can you link to it? I’d love to hear more.
That being said I’d advise you against thinking of Hungary as the one country to move to. It’s a relatively small country which can’t accommodate that many people, and basically all of Eastern and much of Central Europe would serve the purpose as well. Public opinion in essentially all Eastern Europe is strongly ethnocentric (the World Values Survey data is informative here, as are the policies on the migrant crisis followed by countries like Poland, Slovakia etc.). Also, there is no such thing as ‘white’ ethnicity, there are lots of different European ethnic groups (albeit they share some physical traits in common), so you’d need a more specific locus of identity than just considering yourself white. The ethnic nationalist party in Hungary doesn’t even consider Hungarians to be part of the same racial group as Europeans (they see themselves as racially ‘Turanian’).
That being said, Hungary seems like a nice country to live in. A family friend (he’s Indian, not white) lived there for a few years in the 1960s, became fluent in Hungarian and developed some deep friendships with his hosts; he went back several times including while the Cold War was going on, and still keeps in touch with people he knew.
You misrepresent my views. I am not opposed to ethnic nationalism per se. I make no prescriptions for countries other than the US. I do offer opinions on other countries as to whether they have ethnic or civic nationalism and which I think is more appropriate for that country based mostly on their history but also current conditions and the prospect of changing conditions in the future.
BTW I entirely second this.
They wouldn’t be if they knew the truth about how the banlieues were cleansed because they’d be terrified for their own children’s future.
The reason they don’t know is the media lying – people who live or used to live close to the immigrant youth gangs know the media is lying but the upper middle class people who believe the media don’t know what’s happening. Getting around the media’s wall of lies is the key – although that’s a lot easier said than done.
The current “fake news” charade coming from the MSM is because the media knows this.
Kudos for consistency!
The weird thing is, the reasons why Muslim scholars are prohibiting stunning is because it has been determined to add extra pain to the animal during the process.
“There are numerous types of stunning including the pneumatic stunner which delivers a blow to the head of the animal, captive bolt pistol which shatters the brain of the animal, electric water trough which delivers a electric shock to poultry, and electric brain stunner for sheep…The common factor in all these methods of stunning is causing extra pain to the animal above and beyond the pain experienced during the slaughter itself. For this reason, many scholars have declared that the act of stunning is extremely disliked and close to being impermissible…Stunning is a unacceptable action and the person who stuns will sinful for causing extra pain to the animal. However, the impermissibility of the act of stunning does not influence the lawfulness of the animal which was stunned and does NOT necessarily mean that all stunned animals are also unlawful to consume.”
http://halaladvocates.net/site/our-issues/stunning-animals/
So I don’t get what the push is for (it seems it’s to avoid the animal thrashing about when being slaughtered) – but I’m not an expert on this field.
Peace.
IMO white men seem less relaxed about approaching women and just less ardent, although they are more faithful once in a relationship. I suppose that is a result of monogamy in which men traditionally had less hard work to do getting a girl and could stop when they got one. Black men are are adapted to getting girl after girl after girl . I don’t know if it is properly called dominance. I suppose in places where blacks have the numbers or cases where they are bigger and stronger their physical threat dominance does drive white boys away from spare girls, but there are other ways blacks win out. I know of a a slightly chubby working class 21 year old girl , good looking (she turned heads in the street) and tall, who got well and truly seduced by an African after a few years away at university. She was mixing with an affluent upper middle class almost entirely white (the odd south Asian) crowd, and then had her first serious relationship with a young black man. She didn’t talk to me about her love life obviously, but I heard from women she had confided in that that she found the posh white uni boys she went on dates with to be arrogant, which I suppose meant they acted like she wasn’t all that sexy to them. The young black man who she fell for was described ( I avoided seeing them together) as slender and boyish average height and very, very dark skinned . He was well spoken through having been to a expensive private school, though he only worked in a bar.
So blacks, from what can gather from this one case I know a bit about , hit the jackpot through making young women feel desirable. The girl had got a very striking hairstyle before this happened , bleached an with long extensions. A big blonde mane like that bespeaks seeking attention, and while the black boy was obviously not repulsive to her, I think he won her over by giving her the feeling she was the sexiest girl in the world . She was left distraught when he finished with her (later he, likely realising girls like that didn’t grow on trees, tried to get her back but got nowhere) Blacks’ testosterone makes than fight each other a lot, but they are also noticeably outgoing , joyous and of course more sexually driven. Every woman wants to be thought beautiful and desirable, and blacks are there for women unsatisfied by the attention they are getting. Testosterone-mediated driven-ness, extroversion and enjoyment of showing females a good time explains black success with white girls I think. There is polygyny in Africa and women choose in poligyny.
I am not knowledgeable enough to know if she bases her objection on the pain to the animal angle or acculturation or both. We would have to inquire into her intent and motivation and I get into trouble in the comment section when I do that so I will leave it alone.
“Hence, liberal urban whites only see relatively wealthy whites and economically struggling minorities. ”
I don’t think that’s true in Europe. Britain has a large urban, white underclass. Things aren’t quite as extreme in Germany, but you’d have to be blind not to see there are plenty of white proles around in urban settings. And where I live (and it’s not some slum area), you regularly can see native, German pensioners looking through trash cans for recyclable plastic bottles (Germany has a system where you get money for bringing recyclabe bottles to collecting centres).
Breaking News:
Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (1,7 million votes in the first round) endorsed MLP.
Might be true in comparison with blacks. Untrue in comparison with most Muslims. The reason they are often attractive is because they are socially dominant: they have brothers and cousins coming to their aid, and so have little fear of a fistfight, which lets them act dominantly in interactions with white guys. They also fear prison less, which makes them ever more fearsome. This is what makes them attractive to white women – women dig socially dominant guys.
I judge individuals as individuals, but group membership is often a very strong mitigating circumstance. Except whites, who I expect to have full agency and so have no such mitigating circumstance. In other words, I hold whites more morally culpable, while I reckon that others have less agency which partially absolves them of their crimes, at least in a moral sense. This makes me a little bit like leftists – not a surprise, since I used to be one.
Where I differ from leftists is that I think nonwhites should also be punished as if they were whites, exactly because of their predisposition to commit more crimes, or else we are encouraging them to be more criminal. (Actually, theoretically they should be punished more to counteract their predispositions. But I’d find such practice repulsive.)
I gave up leftism when I realized it was unsustainable, but it didn’t make me less understanding to nonwhites, I still don’t consider them much morally responsible. Low-class Pakistani guys gang-rape white women because that’s just what they do. It’s like lions will eat people if you let them loose in a big city. The responsibility is not with the lions or with Talha’s dumber and embarrassing ethnic/religious brothers but with the whites who let them loose in our cities.
Homosexuality is a question of preference – I cannot imagine a heterosexual guy preferring to have sex with guys unless he had absolutely no other chance. Actually, even if I was dominant in a prison I’d very much prefer masturbation over sex with another guy. I really find the idea of sex with guys repulsive.
The very existence of homosexual porn proves that there are guys who at least occasionally prefer sex with other guys. Greg Cochran wrote how bisexuality is actually rare.
Greg Cochran’s explanation is the Gay Germ Theory, that some kind of bug (a virus, bacterium, or some other such thing) causes it. It could be a very common illness that somehow in a small percentage of its victims causes destruction in some part of the brain responsible for sexual preference. (Much like how polio cripples a very small percentage of those infected, with the vast majority either showing no symptoms or recovering after a serious illness.)
The Gay Germ Theory’s weakness is how to explain the Samurai and the Spartans. Though it’s possible that somehow those populations got heavily infected and then cultural pressure forced those not infected to actually engage in homosexual acts. Another possibility is that neither the Spartans nor the Samurai were gay as we understand it – they didn’t really prefer having sex with other guys, but their culture did. In any event, they did have sex with their wives, too, so weren’t exclusively homosexual.
very strong mitigating circumstance
It might just be me, but I don’t think this describes what you have written in the rest of your comment; more like nearly insurmountable would be more accurate.
I lean to the left. Within the last few years I have had my Blank Slate and my Natural Rights knocked out from under me so the foundation has been destroyed. I am still trying to piece together a rational politics. It is quite clear to me (and others, of course) that Houston has a problem.
I don’t know about Samurai, but if I understand correctly ancient Greek homosexuality was very different from homosexuality in Western countries today. It was mostly about a youth being “mentored” (or you could say, abused) by an older man. This was a phase however, the youth was eventually expected to marry a woman and procreate with her, for the good of his polis and the continuation of his lineage. Apart from the older man-youth type of relationships homosexuality was often regarded as shameful, especially if the passive partner was being anally penetrated (instead they did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercrural_sex ) which was seen as unmanly.
Anyway, personally I don’t see any grave danger of homosexuality spreading. I may be in the minority here, but I don’t think a modern nationalist movement should focus on anti-feminism or anti-homosexuality, despite the excesses of some feminists and the LBGT movement. In my opinion, this would only alienate many potential supporters for little appreciable gain.
It’s never really insurmountable on an individual level. People are not lions, it was a hyperbole. Those dumb gang-raping Muslims are people, too, and they surely know on some level (on many levels) that what they do is wrong, both morally and legally. But as a group, because of their lower average IQs, possibly higher sexually predatorial tendencies, etc., it’s inevitable that statistically many more of them will commit such crimes than from a similar number of whites.
Hey rT,
LOL! It’s funny, but I hold Muslims far more morally culpable than anybody else precisely because we have a well-defined moral and ethical framework that does not allow for certain behaviors and these guys know it, but do it anyway.
Peace.
I was watching this live, on the 8 pm news on France 2, and the reaction of the anchor (Laurent Delahousse) was one to behold, essentially accusing him of “treason” to the principles of France.
The other interesting item on the news tonight was the extraordinary treatment of Orban at the European Parliament (yesterday actually) in a speech by Guy Verhofstadt, former Belgian PM and currently the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator. Here is a video of it:
A better example of the conflict between national rights and supra-national domination would be difficult to find.
Cultural Marxism is shorting our civilization. Whatever is or seems harmful, they support it.
I don’t know if “gay marriage” is harmful per se or not. It surely opens the door to a number of other things (like, polygamy), which I would think are definitely harmful.
With feminism, it is easy to see that it’s harmful. For example, feminism strives to emasculate men, but only white men. It is harmful, definitely. Then, their important goals (like having 50% or at least 40% female MPs, female government ministers, etc.) can only be reached by affirmative action (which, by the way, also opens the door to other kinds of affirmative action), such affirmative action appointees will then make stupid decisions (or at least won’t question others’ stupid decisions – see what Steve Sailer wrote of how Colin Powell and Condi Rice weren’t really helpful in Iraq etc.), because affirmative action appointees don’t do good things.
It’s also only against white men, rarely against other men, like how a Swedish woman didn’t want to press charges against the Iraqi who raped her because he might be sent back to Iraq etc. Feminism is cancer.
But my most important reason to oppose feminism is that it insults my intelligence. It’s so very very dumb, like Maoism or holocaust denial or reptilian or 911 truther conspiracy theories or something.
Talha,
Yes, that’s what I’d have expected of you based on your previous writings. In any event I think it’s best if you hold members of your ingroup to the highest ethical standards.
سلام عليكم
(I wrote it without help from Google, I hope it’s good. I have Arabic script on my computer, but my Arabic typing skills consist of trial and error – basically I try half the keyboard before finding the one letter I need.)
Well, I’m definitely against that kind of feminism.
I do think though there’s a real danger to just falling automatically into reactionary positions of the sort “Women’s place is in the kitchen, they should give birth to as many children as possible and be subordinate to their husbands” or “Homosexuals should be shamed back into the closet”. I do believe you’re going to repel a lot of people with such positions. And who finds such positions appealing? Mostly reactionary religious types. Often the same kind of people who dream of some sort of alliance with Muslims to promote religious values and are rather positive on mass immigration (though admittedly in Europe at least there are now a lot of pro-homosexual Christians as well)…because you know, Muslims and Africans are such wonderful family people with great values, our common Abrahamic heritage, blablabla. I regard these people as my enemies and think pandering to their sensibilities is useless…they’ll never come around to my view of things on the really important issues anyway.
And there’s at least some potential to actually use pro-women and even pro-homosexual arguments for immigration restriction. Point out that many immigrants come from countries where rape culture actually exists, and list the many, many cases that show they don’t change their attitude towards women in Europe (you can even bring in some white identity politics by pointing out that women have always been treated much better in Europe than in most other parts of the world, or how un-European practices like polygamy are). Point out how reactionary Islam is and how ridiculous those claims of the headscarf standing for female empowerment actually are. Point out who actually assaults homosexual men (the organized LBGT movement is totally subversive of course, but a non-trivial member of homosexuals is well aware that certain immigrants are a threat to their physical safety, and it’s not like homosexuals can’t be nationalists…just think of Ernst Röhm 🙂 ).
Of course you’ll never get through to committed “progressives” with that kind of argument, but you might reach a lot of people who have doubts.
“Gay marriage” is harmful because it continues the undermining of the family as the foundation of civilization which has been a long and ongoing effort. I don’t see it as that potent in itself, rather significant only as a mile-post in the long march into the night.
Again, “gay marriage” is a measure, not an ideology, and so can do only limited damage, unlike feminism which, being an ideology, has many more such measures up its sleeve.
Not true.
You have a well-defined moral and ethical framework which explicitly condones that behavior against non-muslims – with the proviso that behavior is condoned in the context of a legitimate jihad.
So who is to say when a jihad is legitmate – their local Saudi funded preacher maybe?
I agree with most of your points, though I don’t think pointing out how women were better treated or considered more equal in Europe is somehow feminist. Though it’s just a question of wording, anyway. If you call this “feminist light”, then yes, I’m all for this kind of “feminist light” positions, though not only for political expediency but because I genuinely don’t believe women should be oppressed like in Saudi Arabia.
And yes, homosexuality is not really my focus at all. I don’t care what they do.
They target girls of 12 and 13 because they’re not attractive.
It only happens because the agencies that would normally stop adults chasing 12 and 13 year old girls turn a blind eye because of their skin color.
I think Talha is a member of an Islamic school which has a much more restrictive interpretation than you do, but I don’t mind if you as an Islamic scholar try to convince him that his interpretation is wrong and yours is correct. In any event, I have little opinion on the question, and I’m just heavily opposed to the presence of huge Muslim masses in our lands, who are bound to cause problems to us and to themselves.
Occasionally they are attractive, a few such cases are mentioned here.
So do I, of course.
(I really need to remember to activate this “agree” button…I think I’ve never used it until now).
Maybe, but have you ever looked at the pictures of defendants in “grooming” cases which you can see in the Daily Mail? I don’t think it’s an exaggeration that you can see the consequences of generations of cousin marriage and inbreeding in their faces.
he’s lying
the Koran explicitly condones those behaviors be used against non-Muslims under certain conditions
once you know he’s lying you know he’s acting in bad faith – which is useful info
if occasionally then it’s not the main reason
http://i1.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article2947614.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/Grooming-Gang.jpg
Hola Senor,
Nonsense – show me what qualified Muslims scholars have approved of roving gangs of Pakistanis (or others) that groom and drug and rape young girls in non-Muslim countries. Don’t give me your interpretation of our texts because that counts for zero since nobody in the Muslim world in history has ever cared about a non-Muslim opinion on a juridical matter. You have made a claim, pony up the evidence.
The qualified scholars capable of making that decision. Like they did when Afghanistan was invaded by USSR and Iraq was invaded by USA. Certainly, ethnic gangs of Pakistanis that frequent bars/clubs and drink and do drugs and fornicate with women are unqualified to present a legitimate opinion on the matter.
LOL! You think our framework is that simple?? Here have a read a short introductory article as to how proper fatwas are considered for soundness in just the Maliki school:
https://bewley.virtualave.net/fatwa.html
This is the book I was studying with my teachers in the school I follow before our teachers had mercy on us and let us move to a different text because of how complex it was:
https://kitaabun.com/shopping3/product_info.php?products_id=3057
Here is a qualified mufti who (will also be visiting our area in Chicago next weekend – very exited to see him again since he taught us a course on Marriage and Divorce 7 years ago) makes it clear that Muslims are to obey the law of the land in non-Muslim countries as part of our social contract:
“In Dar al-Aman (such as many non-Muslim countries in the west), many of the injunctions and rulings are very similar to Muslim lands (dar al-Islam), thus the command of following the laws of the land would also apply in these non-Muslim lands. (See: Radd al-Muhtar)”
http://www.daruliftaa.com/node/5852
Peace.
Oh noooo! The taqiyya card! Like I never expected that one – again! LOL!
Try harder man, don’t be lazy. Find me a fatwa from a qualified mufti – c’mon – it’s got to be out there if it’s that clear.
Peace.
Hey rT,
Bro, not a single school condones this behavior – guaranteed. That non-Muslims think we are permitted to do this is irrelevant. Let’s see if he comes back with evidence.
Watch – if he responds, he’s going to come back with Qur’anic verses and hadith showing that he thinks it’s allowed. They always do. It just shows me how dangerous of a Muslim this guy would be if he converted in his present state of understanding.
Peace.
Talha,
I mean, you do realize that the rest of us have well defined moral and ethical frameworks as well, which also rule out sexually assaulting fifteen year old girls, right?
For what it’s worth, I’m also especially outraged by the South Asian rape gangs in England, not because I share a religion with them but because I’m also racially South Asian, and so their bad behavior is something I feel implicated in at least to a small degree.
Do you get any converts like this, or people who claim to want to convert and think like this?
What do you do in that scenario?
RB (different anon)
Talha,
I know very little about Islam, but I will say that watching atheists proof-text in the context of Christianity is usually alternately depressing and hilarious, because they very often have so little understanding of what the texts mean or of how Christians read their own scriptures and traditions. I wouldn’t be surprised if the people opining on what Islam says about taqiya, rape, etc. are just about equally ignorant.
Hey rT,
Wa alaikum (right back at you) – that was pretty good man! I honestly want places like the UK to deal with these guys with fists and not kid gloves in court. Do it the way these guys would be treated if they were non-Muslims trying to pull this crap in Muslim countries – there should be a zero tolerance for this behavior; ship them overseas if you want. Put the fear of God in them because they apparently haven’t learned it on their own through the religion.
Plus- as I pointed out in another post, these kind of guys are the most likely to go ballistic if they get into extremist circles:
“Most of the new radicals are deeply immersed in youth culture: they go to nightclubs, pick up girls, smoke and drink. Nearly 50% of the jihadis in France, according to my database, have a history of petty crime – mainly drug dealing, but also acts of violence and, less frequently, armed robbery. A similar figure is found in Germany and the United States – including a surprising number of arrests for drunk driving. Their dress habits also conform to those of today’s youth: brands, baseball caps, hoods, in other words streetwear, and not even of the Islamic variety.”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/apr/13/who-are-the-new-jihadis
Peace.
Hey Hector,
Sure, but ours is very specific about this kind of sexual predation. Honestly, it is haram to even look at (let alone touch) any woman that is not your wife with lust – period. There is no school of law that disagrees on that point.
Again, it pisses me off because these guys are into so much haram and only have a tangential relationship with Islam and then the religion gets blamed for this. These guys have no idea that their selfishness is going to bring down lightning and thunder on thousands of Muslims in the West because Europeans will get completely fed up if this kind of behavior continues.
Peace.
Parisian men are mostly cuckois.
Parisian women are mostly junglois feverois.
Hey Anon (RB),
Unfortunately, if he is a convert – he needs to be sat down and have a serious talking to because he is a security threat right now – stat – and I do not mean that as hyperbole. Converts that have this mentality are disproportionately represented in extremist-jihadi circles.
I would point him to a scholar that would have to talk sense to him. If I knew he was going to make these views actionable – I would call the authorities. I have three sons – I am bringing them up under the wing of traditional Muslim scholars (and Sufi dhikr circles) so that someone else doesn’t feed them a nonsense version of Islam (note also that most of the extremists are very ignorant about Islamic practice). I have had a talk with my wife and we both agreed that if we see signs of extremism in any of them and it looks like they will do something harmful to themselves and others – then I am calling the authorities on them. It is much better that they spend some time in jail for something they may have potentially done than destroy a bunch of lives and face the consequences on the Day of Judgement for murder and mayhem.
Peace.
you just proved my point
Sure, so’s everyone else’s, except a few Spanish anarchists:
(J. Langdon-Davies, describing a CNT meeting in Zaragoza, referenced in Arnold Lunn, Spanish Rehearsal, p. 155)
RB
just think of Ernst Röhm
I don’t think I would bring him up, people might want to know what happened to him.
You’re lying – rape is acceptable in a legitimate jihad, “what you take with the right arm.”
That’s how you lie without technically lying – the caveat is a legitimate jihad needs to be called by a legitimate authority hence you can say Islam doesn’t condone what Isis does e.g. take Yazidis as slaves – but it does. The difference is most muslims don’t accept Isis as a legitimate authority.
The Koran has specific rules about not having sex with slave girls after you’ve beaten them too hard.
C’mon bro – try harder – what in “qualified Muslims scholars” does not compute to you.
1) Find me an opinion from our qualified scholarship that states this is the case.
2) Find me an opinion from our qualified scholarship that states Muslims in the West can go jihadi in the countries in which they reside.
I’m right here waiting for citations to fatwas.
Ho dang! Shafi’i school in the house:
http://www.livingislam.org/maa/dcmm_e.html
Peace.
Oh no!!! Ignorant Muslims have ignorant interpretations of the religion – and then they are doing crazy things!!! I never knew – I’m just going to have to apostate now because you’ve just knocked out the foundations of 1400 years of scholarship from under my feet.
I should consider myself taught!
Peace.
are you denying there’s a rule about not having sex with slave girls if you’ve beaten them too hard?
There’s a lot to consider in these sex grooming cases.
I think that we should ask ourselves whether or not most of these girls were not failed by their society.
Well, he was a victim of homophobia of course…maybe the LGBT movement should commemorate him as one of their martyrs?
of course – the people whose job it was to prevent packs of adult men preying on 12 and 13 year old girls turned a blind eye because of the predators’ skin color and religion
I’ve never come across something that confusing. I need a citation from a proper qualified Muslim authority – what don’t you understand about this?
For all I know -you are referencing something from a non-existent school (like that of Imams Tabari [ra] or Dhahiri [ra]) which died out centuries ago. Or you’re making it up. The burden of proof is on you – I can’t say prove to me that your mom’s not a whore. I am obligated to provide the evidence in an accusation. And your word is not qualified because – frankly – you are a non-Muslim and your opinion on any religious matters is completely irrelevant – this is our religion, we come up with the parameters. If you don’t like it, invent your own.
Peace.
If I understand correctly, the taqqiva thing is actually a Shia concept, developed when Shia were persecuted by Sunni…according to that it’s ok to leave your religious identity ambiguous or even lie (?) about it to avoid persecution (and there seem to be a lot of strange sects in the Near East who don’t make it clear to outsiders what exactly they are, as a survival mechanism).
So that at least is probably somewhat of a myth in the form it’s used by critics of Islam.
That being said, I feel there are many legitimiate reasons for criticising Islam (and Christianity as well), even though many atheists may indeed be pretty ignorant.
Good to hear.
I’ve always liked Dupont-Aignan, it is a pity that the person who is probably closest to Gaullism scores so low in the polls.
Also author of the best statement of political principles ever:
PS. Fun fact. Russia’s most famous gay rights activist Nikolay Alexeyev has steadily become a nationalist over the years to the extent that he is now palling round with the LDPR in between sending complaints the ECHR. This has resulted in him getting blacklisted from the globalist LGBT rights/promotion clique.
Talha,
I don’t actually think the rape problem among British Pakistanis is a religious thing, per se. It’s a cultural thing. Hindus from northern India have horrific rape problems too. Ask any Indian woman whether they feel secure in Delhi, and be prepared to hear some horror stories.
Anatoly,
I figured my politics would assign me either Le Pen or one of the communists, when I took that online poll, but it assigned me Dupont-Aignan.
Perhaps this is because I’m not really as cool as all that with Melenchon’s brand of socialism. I like his ideas about confiscatory taxation a hell of a lot, but I’m distinctly turned off by the French 35-hour workweek and by his interest in reducing working hours even further. My own brand of economic leftism inclines to a world with more Alexey Stakhanovs and fewer Pajama Boys.
Islam sanctions sex with slaves, correct. No one denies this. The victims in Rotherham were legally free women (or children really) so what does that have to do with anything?
Yes, I guess he really was into dominance 🙂
I hope it’s clear I was writing in jest, I’m not an admirer of Röhm and his cult of violent streetfighting (though he’s admittedly a very interesting figure).
As for what the people want, that’s a mystery to me…seems like many are just fine with the way things are going.
Amusingly, my own ethnic group (I’m Tamil mostly, with a bit of Anglo-Scots admixture) is very highly inbred too. In rural Tamil Nadu during the 1960s, the median degree of relatedness among spouses was equivalent to third cousins. Strangely enough it hasn’t stopped TN from being one of the most, uh, civilized states in India (for lack of a better word).
That’s probably true, and clearly the perpetrators in Rotherham and similar cases weren’t religious scholars, but mostly fairly ignorant people. However that doesn’t mean there isn’t a religious dimension to this imo. A lot of Muslims may not really know what’s in the Koran (if I understand correctly, most can’t even read, let alone really understand it), but they do have a feeling that they’re superior compared to non-Muslims. Religion becomes a main element of their group identity and legitimizes antagonistic behaviour towards outsiders (e.g. even 20 years ago my father was called a kafir by Pakistani youths in Northern England). If you live with such a sharp mental division between believers and non-believers (the latter being regarded as morally worthless, and destined to hell anyway), it may make committing acts like those in Rotherham at least psychologically easier.
Just pointing out Talha lies about Islam.
“Allama Ibn Abidin writes in his Radd al-Muhtar:
‘If one fears Fitna or lust, then it will be Haram for him to look at the face of a woman. This was in the early days. However, in our times (Ibn Abidin’s), one is not allowed to look at the face of a non-Mahram* woman, not because it’s part of the Awra**, rather due to Fitna.’ (Radd al-Muhtar)”
http://www.daruliftaa.com/node/5725
Again from Mufti Ibn Adam (may God grant him a long life) referencing the Radd al-Muhtar which is the book one has to master to become a mufti in the Hanafi school around the world.
http://kitaabun.com/shopping3/product_info.php?products_id=5536
No other school needs to be referenced because it is well known the Hanafi school is the most permissive on this issue.
Peace.
*one not related by blood or marriage
**nudity
Hey Hector,
Good point – I do remember reading (not too long ago) that women in India were protesting this en masse and asking for laws to be updated. That is truly a shame. I guess people like you and me have an obligation to help turn that franchise around. Though you guys are so far south you only have a tangential relationship with Northern India.
I tell you man, India is more like Europe than a singular nation – sometimes I wonder how it keeps from falling apart (other than the normal military coercion). I have a co-worker from the Malabar area of Kerala – he speaks about the rest of India as if it’s a different country altogether.
Peace.
Let’s say Le Pen wins 37% (Karlin’s estimate). That’s still double what her father won in 2002.
She should do even better in five years, unless the French economy booms like it hasn’t in decades, and there’s a huge reduction in crime and terrorism.
Talha: If Muslims aren’t even allowed to look at women that aren’t their wives, then I know a lot of really bad Muslims.
I didn’t realize that Islam had such strict sexual mores, I had thought Islam was relatively laid back on that front.
Hey Greasy,
Not with lust. But with our wives – oh yeah – game is on bro! Bada bing bada boom!
“When I get that feeling, I need…”
As my teachers (and really any of the paths of spiritual rectification in our tradition) will tell you; the easiest way to corrupt the heart is through the sins of the eyes. This is tazkiya 101.
And yes – most don’t keep to this rule, but it doesn’t change just because we live in the age of smut – which, by the way Jews had way too much influence on – you gotta keep your boys in check bro! If one slips, one should ask for forgiveness – I mean it’s not like one is automatically condemned to hell or something; we’re weak and the Master knows it. In fact He made it clear that he made women the biggest weakness of men:
“Beautified for men is the love of things they covet; women, children, heaps of gold and silver, fine branded horses, cattle and well-tilled land. This is the pleasure of the present world’s life; but Allah, with Him is the most excellent abode.” (3:14)
Also – a man who keeps his eyes only to his wife will be blessed to go to bed with the most beautiful woman in the world every night.
Are you telling me Orthodox Jews say it’s ok to gaze at the opposite sex with lust?
I know what the Christians say that (our mutual master) the Son of Mary (pbuh) said – whether they take it seriously or not:
“27 You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away! It is better to lose one of your members than to have your whole body thrown into hell.”
(Matthew 5:27-29)
Peace.
So, you live in Chicago and feel the need to develop contingency plans in the event your children show signs of religious extremism? Coming from you, that’s pretty revealing. And frightening.
No but I’m a pretty terrible Jew.
I know what the Christians say that (our mutual master) the Son of Mary (pbuh) said – whether they take it seriously or not:
“27 You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away! It is better to lose one of your members than to have your whole body thrown into hell.”
(Matthew 5:27-29)
There’s certainly no denying that He said this, but I think a great many Christians today would hold that this (and many other aspects of the Jewish law) aren’t binding on us any more, or that it only refers to some women (e.g. those whom it’s illicit to desire, those who didn’t consent to be looked at, etc..).
I certainly admire the strength of your convictions, I just don’t happen to share them.
The key point isn’t that Islam is bad. Everything condoned in the Koran e.g. the rape and killing of infidels during jihad, was considered completely normal at the time and everyone did it. If anything the restrictions – like not having sex with a slave after you’ve beaten her to the point of drawing blood – were probably improvements on existing behavior.
The key point is the lying about what is in it.
It’s not strange that Tokyo Rose lies about Islam – he’s engaged in stealth warfare – it’s the entire political-media class lying about Islam since 9/11 – that’s the kicker.
I was liberal-ish before 9/11 and it wasn’t studying the koran etc afterwards that gradually turned me alt-right but the entire political-media class blatantly lying about what was in it.
And getting back to the original point – Saudi has been funding jihadist preachers in jihadist mosques all over the world for 30+ years. So it doesn’t matter what some scholar in Egypt says –
what matters is what have those individual Saudi-funded preachers in their local mosques been preaching to the men involved in the Muslim rape gangs
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/muslim-leader-blames-women-for-sex-attacks/news-story/d8b6a183c6a976752cb07be532543afd
The other key element of Islam which the political-media class won’t report which explains what is happening is the Muslim belief that you go to heaven if you die during jihad.
This is the reason why so many jihadists come from a petty crime background and also why getting themselves killed in the process of massacring some non-Muslims is a key element – dying in the process of killing non-muslims is their path to redemption.
(This is also why you get so many petty criminals from non-Muslim backgrounds converting in prison and engaging in jihadist attacks afterwards.)
The media’s lies make no sense. If you know the truth it all makes perfect sense.
Hey Greasy,
The Abrahamic faiths have some divergences, but there are some principles that are form a common thread.
Well, the first step to rectification is recognition. You guys have a tradition of repentance, right?
“God the Almighty said: ‘O son of Adam, so long as you call upon Me and ask of Me, I shall forgive you for what you have done, and I shall not mind. O son of Adam, were your sins to reach the clouds of the sky and were you then to ask forgiveness of Me, I would forgive you. O son of Adam, were you to come to Me with sins nearly as great as the earth and were you then to face Me, ascribing no partner to Me, I would bring you forgiveness nearly as great as it.'” – reported in Tirmidhi
You’re nowhere close to these guys:
“A story little told is that of Jews in Hollywood’s seedier cousin, the adult film industry. Perhaps we’d prefer to pretend that the ‘triple-exthnics’ didn’t exist, but there’s no getting away from the fact that secular Jews have played (and still continue to play) a disproportionate role throughout the adult film industry in America. Jewish involvement in pornography has a long history in the United States, as Jews have helped to transform a fringe subculture into what has become a primary constituent of Americana. These are the ‘true blue Jews’.”
http://www.jewishquarterly.org/issuearchive/articled325.html?articleid=38
Peace.
I don’t think that’s actually correct. I dislike much about Christianity, and of course the Church fathers accepted that slavery existed in their time, but I don’t think you’ll find anything in their writings that suggests it’s permissible for a master to use a slave’s body for sex. They certainly knew that such things happened in their time, but if they mentioned it, they were strongly against it.
For much of the 7th century Near East Islam was a clear moral regression.
Hey Hecctor,
No problem – it’s not my religion so I will not comment on what I believe is correct interpretation or not. That is up to the Christian scholars themselves. What I do know is that medieval Christians placed a great emphasis on modesty and public decency. Women often wore clothing that would be hardly distinguished from Muslim dress (head covered, loose and flowing) other than from a cultural perspective:
https://www.google.com/search?q=medieval+european+dress&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjktsqn_snTAhULHGMKHeD3CXUQsAQIMg&biw=1536&bih=760
This was normative for centuries. It is fairly recent that Christian women started dressing the way they did. What is funny is that when Christians came across other people in the time of the Age of Exploration was that a mark of the people they considered uncivilized in the world was lack of proper dress.
If one removes emphasis of modesty in the public sphere, then one has to deal with the societal consequences.
Peace.
And what exactly would those be? I hope you don’t want to tell us that women dressing “immodestly” leads to more rapes or something of the sort.
You’re right; I wasn’t clear. I meant the behavior was normal behavior for armies or tribal desert raiders at the time. To a large extent Islam promoted specific improvements on behavior that was normal at the time. It’s just 14 centuries later those restrictions on 7th century behavior can be used to condone 7th century behavior.
Hey G_R,
My wife being Swedish, I’m a history buff when it comes to their history. They happened to have been a very heavy slave society in their origins and Christianity eventually got rid of that. However, it is fairly clear that concubinage with slaves was recognized in law by the Church for those people. The only thing the Chruch really had a problem with (as it has always had) is if a man tried to combine a normal marriage along with a concubine on the side – that was seen as form of polygamy (and apparently fined at half the rate of normal polygamy):
“As in all slaveholding societies male slaveholders had sexual access to their slaves, and often purchased women alone for that purpose…From a very early period the Church treated the concubine, sensu strictu, as a wife without benefit of legal marriage. That understanding of course excluded concubinage as a form of plural marriage; such a relationship could exist only where there was a possibility of Christian marriage.”
http://historyonline.chadwyck.co.uk/getImage?productsuffix=_studyunits&action=printview&in=gif&out=pdf&src=/pci/a263-1990-062-02-000001/conv/a263-1990-062-02-000001.pdf&IE=.pdf
I believe this was practice among the Merovingian Franks (though you can look it up for confirmation) and Charles Martel had a concubine.
Peace.
Hey G_R,
Of course it does – this a cause and effect relationship. It’s not right for men to do that, but the fact is that some criminal elements will be catalyzed by it.
One can also wear wads of money and lots of jewelry openly while walking through a seedy part of downtown. That doesn’t justify them getting mugged or robbed – but the causal relationship is clear and logical to anybody.
You don’t have to watch out for those that obey the law – criminals don’t and one attracts their attention to their own detriment.
Peace.
That statement refers more or less to pagan times in Scandinavia. I’ve yet to read the entire article (and it may well be that for some time the Church afforded a degree of toleration to existing practices), but it seems pretty clear that with increasing Christianization such practices were more and more regarded as illegitimate.
I don’t think there is a causative relationship at all. Rape rates in America at least have declined over time, even while women dress more ‘provocatively’. Society has also gotten more stringent in our definition of rape- we now recognize that a man can rape his wife, for example. I also think that if you looked at police blotter records, you’d find that there isn’t a strong correlation with what a rape victim was wearing the night of the attack. Most rapes are crimes of opportunity, and criminals choose their victims based on who seems the easiest to rape, not who looks the ‘hottest’.
In any case, you can turn that around and say, “if women choose to wear headscarves, it’s inevitable that men are going to yell anti-Islamic insults and treat them badly.” I don’t think that’s right either, and I don’t think we should simply accept it and say “don’t wear the head scarf then.”
You are correct that head covering and emphasis on female modesty were features of (most of) medieval Christendom as well. (One should hesitate to make generalizations about what Christians believed or practiced: we don’t have an equivalent of the Jewish or Muslim ‘law’, there has been a certain element of antinomianism in Christinaity from the beginning as one would expect of a religion whose central claim is that Christ’s death set us free from the law, and even the Bible is not taken as an uncreated authority in quite the sense that the Vedas, the Quran or the Torah are by Hindus, Muslims and Jews.) I think medieval Christendom was wrong about that, as they were about many other things. I think we were correct to grow out of that phase, and I would be very unhappy if someday Christians start re-adopting the older Christian codes about modesty, sexual ethics, etc.. in order to fit in with their Muslim neighbors.
My own Christian faith is of a very heterodox, Gnostic-influenced variety, and I’m at least halfway convinced that the gnostics were right in their rejection of strict monotheism, the created world, and the Jewish moral law. I’ve moved in that direction more and more over the last few years, partly as a reaction to Islam. You are quite right to point out that there are a lot of theological and moral elements that orthodox Christianity and Islam share in common. My response is that this is a good reason for Christians to question and be more critical of their own tradition.
I can’t say I have much sympathy for that view, sorry. Probably most Westerners today don’t. That difference in basic views of social relations is a prime reason why Islamic immigration to the West needs to end. Such incompatible views can only lead to conflict and civil strife.
There isn’t really a logical connection between those two sentences (on p.1 and p.3 of the document). In fact the context of the 2nd sentence makes it clear that the Church regarded concubinage as “a monogamous and quasi-marital relationship in which a couple live together and often are faithful to each other” (p.2).
That’s very different from the question of whether a master can have sex with (a potentially unlimited number of) slaves.
Why? Assuming Christianity to be true, the things that Christianity and Islam share are the truths of Christianity that were too blindingly obvious for Mohammed to deny, given that he certainly had at least a vague understanding of the Christianity of his day.
Consider that Christianity also shares a great deal with Stoicism and Neoplatonism, that Aristotelianism is compatible enough with Christianity to be the basis of the greatest system of Christian philosophy ever produced, and that the Jesuits did a fair job of doing the same with Confucianism!
It’s true that semi-civilized warlords like Charles Martel (or his grandson Charlemagne) had sexual relations with several women who bore them children. However I’ve never seen anything to indicate that those women were slaves.
And in any case, during the later Middle ages the Church strictly enforced monogamy even on the most powerful members of the laity. This is very different from the Islamic position.
“The key point isn’t that Islam is bad. Everything condoned in the Koran e.g. the rape and killing of infidels during jihad, was considered completely normal at the time and everyone did it.”
Here’s the problem with Islam.
It combined tribalism with universalism.
Judaism is a tribal religion. It applies to Jews, so if some of its laws and customs seem weird, it’s a Jewish thing, so Jews can keep that stuff among themselves. It works as tribalism.
Christianity is a universal religion. It is about credo than ethno. Thus, it emphasizes ideas and values. As for what to eat, how to dress, and nitty gritty cultural details, it say little or nothing. It’s about what one believes in the heart. It works as universalism.
Problem with Islam is it’s both tribal and universal. If Jesus and others divorced the new universal Faith from the particularism of Jewish tribal laws and customs, Muhammad wedded all the Arabic customs(and some of Jewish laws) to a universal faith.
To be a Christian, you don’t have to eat, dress, or live like a member of the ancient tribe. But to be a Muslim, a lot of old customs have to be maintained.
If Muhammad had developed Islam as a tribal religion for Arabs only — a covenant between God and Arab folks — , Islam would have made more sense. But as a universal religion, it says infidels must not only accept Allah as the one and only God but eat, dress, and live like Medieval Arabs.
There is another problem with Islam vis-a-vis Judaism.
It’s true that God has many faces in the Old Testament. Sometimes, He can be cruel and ruthless and smite entire folks and tell Jews to whup the Canaanites and etc.
But the Old Testament God is a Deity in development. He is always growing and changing and evolving. So, the nature of God in one part of the Bible is different from another part of the Bible. There is no Final truth about God. There are only fragments of God’s manifestation through prophets, kings, and other folks.
So, even though God tells Jews to do ruthless stuff in one part of the Old Testament, it doesn’t mean He means that way to be the Only Way for all times and places. God has what might be called ‘bad hair days’.
Also, the fact that there are several Gospels in the New Testament with varying accounts suggest a Rashomon-ish need to interpret and reinterpret.
In contrast, Muhammad is billed as the final and last Great Prophet. He is said to have corrected all the mistakes and fixed all the bugs in the Old and New Testaments. So, the stuff in the Koran are for all times and all places. It’s not a case of Allah with ‘bad hair day’ acting especially cruel or ruthless on occasion. The Koran is The Truth for all times.
In the Old Testament, the cruelty of God and Jews is historical. There are times when there is a need for Hiroshima-like ruthlessness. But there are times when God urges another way and tact for the Jews. Times change, and rules change.
In contrast, the truth in the Koran is supposed to be timeless and eternal, for every moment of every year of every century. Thus, Allah becomes more one-dimensional than the God of Old Testament.
A cynic might say Islam is Judaism-Christianity for dummies.
7th century Christian England unlike 7th-century Arabia shocker! Latest.
After conversion
You could wear a diamond tiara, and a ballgown made of twenties through my town at night, and at worst you’d likely end up rather bedraggled, due to the eternal rains.
Things seem to be different, where Diversity obtains.
What you wrote is my impression based on what little I know of the Quran and Islam in general, but I don’t rush to judgment so readily.
You know, I used to be a fierce anti-Christian New Atheist crusader on internet forums, arguing about how the Bible was stupid, inconsistent, etc., and of course I deeply regret it. I’m still not a believer, but I think taking other people’s beliefs without giving them anything in exchange is evil, and perhaps not even a small evil.
In any event, it also dawned on me that probably the Bible is not nearly as stupid, deranged, inconsistent, etc. as I was arguing, and the ambiguities that are left there are (as you write) actually positive things. In any event, because once in my life I formed judgment on some sacred texts of a religion based on unsympathetic interpretations of passages taken out of context, and I regret it, so now I’m reluctant to form judgement on Islam the religion (or its potential, as opposed to how it’s practiced or how the majority or large plurality of its adherents interpret it in general, which is readily observable), especially based on a few verses of the Quran or some hadith, which I will be given usually by unsympathetic right-wing (often somewhat neoconnish) websites devoid of context (if there is such). Frankly, I have little energy to find the verses in standard translations, and try to interpret them myself, and I’m not even very interested in it. (Same thing with passages from the Talmud, where truly interesting things could be found about what is permissible to do with gentiles, unless of course there’s danger that the gentile brutes will take revenge in the form of a pogrom.) I don’t like Islam’s (and especially MENA and South Asian people’s) presence in Western Countries, whatever there is in the Quran.
It’s also not totally sure that Christianity as practiced was necessarily better from some kind of 21st century hippie morality viewpoint. Religious toleration is a case in point. In Hungary some Protestants (most notably Thököly) were forced to ally themselves with the Ottomans during the counter-reformation because the Catholic Habsburgs left little quarters to them. Ottoman rule is usually considered a national catastrophe in Hungary (especially because they didn’t rule the whole of the country, and so there was constant warfare for two centuries which thoroughly destroyed most of the country), so it’s all the more remarkable that this religious tolerance aspect is mentioned so frequently. Might be a case of cucking (since the 1960s-70s there has been a lot of self-flagellation for our having oppressed minorities before 1918 which supposedly led to the loss of two-thirds of our territory, including one third of the ethnic Hungarian population), but probably there is some truth to it.
It’s possible of course that Christianity was more beneficial to scientific inquiry, but now that the scientific method has been invented, it gets more or less independent of religion (apparently Iran is producing ever more scientific papers). In any event, these things are difficult to disentangle from racial predispositions – maybe Arabs suck and have always sucked at science not because of Islam but because they are dumb? Maybe Europeans were good at it because they were smarter, on average? Maybe the difference in rape statistics is also due to these factors? Does it matter that much?
Christianity at present is practiced as a cuck religion (except maybe some smaller groups, perhaps Saint Pius X Society or something?), while Islam seems to be really practiced like a 7th century goat herder (and not just herder…) religion, so in practice neither looks very good. But Christianity is my heritage, so I will naturally tend to find more beauty and familiar moral teachings in it than in Islam, which seems quite alien to me. I would probably have problems living under a strict Catholic regime, but I have to admit I admire the little I read of Catholic theology, especially traditionalist theology.
I don’t know enough to form a judgment on Islam’s potential (what if Europeans converted in the 7th century?), but I’m not interested enough to care. The Muslims that are coming to Europe are not needed, whether they are so bad because of Islam, because of a bad interpretation of Islam, because of their race, because of the nonreligious aspects of their race, or some other reason – who cares?
I agree that people throwing around selected Koran verses or hadiths on the net is stupid, most of us lack the skills to come to an independent judgment about these matters anyway.
But honestly, why should I care about this? All I need to know is that Islam has been in violent conflict with Christendom and pretty much every other civilization it has come into contact with ever since its beginning in the 7th century. It has arguably ruined the Near East and obliterated entire cultures, without any compensating moral or intellectual advance imo. And wherever it is ascendant, it has a negative impact on the lives of non-Muslim minorities (let alone seculars like me).
A complex discussion of what is or isn’t in Islam’s scriptures just isn’t needed. It’s enough to look at the results of the PEW survey Karlin once posted here which make it clear that a large percentage of Muslims are quite simply intolerant fanatics. Since I can’t see any conceivable benefit these people might bring to the West, their immigration is obviously highly undesirable.
Hey ED,
Likewise, there are parts of the Middle East that is very safe and crime free and also places like Singapore. Having brutally harsh punishments works in certain contexts.
Peace.
Hey G_R,
100% correct – but that was not the question at hand. The question was did the church recognize the legitimacy of concubinage with slaves and it certainly did in certain contexts and limitations – for instance monogamy had to be observed. In Islam, limited polygamy has always been allowed and there is no limit to the number of concubines – this is well documented. Of course, only the elite could reasonably afford such luxuries.
The way we view it (others can disagree), Islam is a universal religion that allows flexibility for various times and places. In polygamous societies, it has rules. In monogamous societies it has rules. In slave holding societies it has rules. In all-free societies it has rules. In tribal societies, in non-tribal societies, etc.
Europeans left polygamy and tribalism a long time ago – they tend not to understand the relationship between tribal societies and polygamy (which is really the same thing between having one concubine or many). And the fact that the majority of the world’s cultures are occasionally or frequently polygamous (strictly monogamous cultures are around 15%) section ’9: Marital Composition’:
http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/worldcul/Codebook4EthnoAtlas.pdf
Why should a universal religion cater to the tastes of the minority?
Peace.
By that reasoning I could also ask why you adoption of Islamic dress should be necessary in Western countries as a precaution against rape.
But then I suppose Islamic flexibility is limited in its scope.
I think one has to be a little careful here. Its impact on the significant number of European Jews who were expelled from Spain and then Portugal (and also south Italy and Sicily, I believe) and invited by Sultan Bayezid II to settle in the Ottoman Empire, was certainly not negative. (“You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler,” he said to his courtiers, “he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine”, Jewish sources have him saying).
My primary objection to Europe being overwhelmed by African and Asian immigrants is precisely that, regardless of religious issues, although I agree that a largely incompatible religion makes the case even stronger. But even if it were a “superior race”, with a less objectionable religion, that was doing the invading (Japanese, Chinese, Korean) I would feel pretty much the same. European civilisation and culture, for better or for worse, should be preserved in situ, just as any other culture should be.
That’s admittedly true, prior to the mid-20th century Islamic rule was probably better for Jews on the whole than living in Christian societies (though there were incidents like the pogrom of Cordoba in 1066, and later many Jews actually fled into the Christian realms from the Almohads). It’s also true imo that Christianity for most of its existence was an exceptionally intolerant religion (that is compared to East Asia, and also to the Islamic world during the Middle ages).
I agree with you about the rest.
From a guidebook to Syria (2010):
In a moral sense, it could unfortunately be argued that what is happening in Europe today is moral payback for what the West has done to Syria, Iraq and Libya, and elsewhere.
Granada, I believe, though I take the point.
“The West” in that case means basically the US, Britain and France.
And let’s not kid ourselves, even without those interventions there still would be serious migratory pressure from the Near East and Africa.
Griffin and some friends and comrades are moving/have moved to Hungary – – –
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nick-griffin-bnp-emigrate-hungary-next-six-months-british-national-party-a7638131.html
I use “white” as shorthand for European Identitarian. I know about Jobbik and the Turanian movement in Hungary. They are sympathetic to Europeans and it is believed that once the real collapse begins in western Europe they would accept white refugees who were willing to assimilate. The Hungarians aren’t particularly blond-haired and blue-eyed, but neither am I. The racially aware don’t see themselves as being Indo-European since their language is part of the Finno-Ugric group, however, I believe I’d be welcomed there BEFORE you and your Indian mate, since you say neither of you is “white”, and I am.
I hope you and your Indian mate find somewhere nice to retire to. I hope it isn’t anywhere in Europe. No offence.
You’re absolutely right about the population pressure, particularly from Africa. The figures are really striking (based on latest UN population projections):
Thus, in two centuries Europe would have gone from outnumbering Africa 3 to 1 to being outnumbered by nearly 7 to 1, a relative change by a factor of 20.
In the absence of strong counter-measures, which are probably unlikely, Europe seems fated to be submerged into Eurafrica.
I’m afraid that’s true, and I find it incredibly frustrating since imo preventing this is a question of will and mentality. Even now nothing would be inevitable if more people woke up and acted accordingly.
Don’t be so mean to Hector, he’s stated that he wants Europeans to survive culturally and racially, and he’s got sensible views about Islam. I disagree with him about many issues (e.g. I don’t quite get his enthusiasm for socialist planned economics – I hope that isn’t a misrepresentation of his views), but over the years I’ve found his comments here and on the American conservative often worthy of consideration. There’s no need to get antagonistic towards people who at least try to understand our position.
I wonder if this is really true.
Accurate data are obviously not available, but genetic testing evidence cited by Steve Sailer in “Le Grand Remplacement” (Taki, February 2017) suggests that the percentage of “Global South” newborns in France is nearly 40%, and I have seen similar figures for “Dutch” schoolchildren. Even in Ireland (where, when I was naturalised in 1995 it was a bit of a joke that no one wanted to immigrate there because of the weather), there is now a significant (and growing) non-European presence.
Even if immigration were to stop today, given the marked differences in reproduction rates I’m not sure it’s not already too late. And both of us know that immigration is not going to be stopped any time in the foreseeable future.
Maybe you’re right. Differential birthrates are a huge problem of course, but possibly something could be done even about that by restructuring welfare payouts (anyway necessary imo to prevent dysgenic fertility). But yes, it’s hard to see that coming, those things should have been honestly discussed 30 years ago.
I mean, the situation is problematic enough that we don’t need to exaggerate it.
An informative example here would be ethnic groups on the fringe of, say, China (since the Han Chinese pretty much outweigh everyone else in the world demographically speaking). Have those ethnic groups lost their distinct genetic and cultural identity? Some of them certainly have (I’m sure there are lots of groups that have gone extinct as distinct groups). Some of them are in the process of disappearing (the Tibetans are in an early stage of this process and the Manchus in a much more advanced stage). Some of them survived by leaving China (the Lao and Thai people used to live in China and migrated to Southeast Asia about a thousand years ago, IIRC, to avoid being swallowed up by the Chinese, and the Hmong repeated the process a few centuries ago). The Mongolians saw their homeland divided: they’ve become a minority in half of their homeland and are an overwhelming majority in the other half. I’m not sure what history has in store for the Uighurs. And of course, the Vietnamese, Koreans, Japanese etc. have hung on to their independence in spite of massively being outnumbered by Chinese, because (for example) Japan doesn’t allow massive Chinese immigration. The situation seems quite complex: some groups have weathered the storm ok, others haven’t.
I think the future holds a lot of dangers, and I’m not much happier about the ridiculously high fertility rates in Africa than you are. I worked as a Peace Corps volunteer for three years in an African country and did my best to convince people of the virtues of birth control; and I was at least somewhat happy to see that the TFR has dropped by about one child per woman in the thirteen years since I first got off that plane (from about 5 to about 4). I would bear a few things in mind though: there was a time in which Africans were even more dominant as a proportion of world population than they are today, fertility rates have a way of changing quite rapidly (the aforementioned Mongolia went from 7.3 children per woman to 2.1 in about 35 years, and Mexico has come close to repeating the feat), Africa is not proving to be immune to the demographic transition (see the southern tier countries for an example), and look, in the last analysis, if God wants distinct peoples to survive (and He does), then they will.
When? At some point in remote prehistory? If projections turn out to be correct and Africans are 40% of humanity at some point this century, isn’t that totally unprecedented in historical times?
I don’t know, it’s not like the Tasmanians or the Taino are still around.
Derrick,
I’m not offended by your comments as I see where you’re coming from, but I also don’t take them that seriously. I think it unlikely at best that you are going to hold elective office in any Eastern European nation sometime in the foreseeable future. (Although in my free time from my day job as a biologist, I’m working on a fantasy novel about a disgruntled American biologist who flees to Belarus with his discoveries and becomes a close advisor to their future equivalent of Bat’ka).
The point about my family friend is this, and I think it’s an interesting one: the Hungarian people that he found so incredibly welcoming and friendly, were the same nation that had taken tough measures against the Roma in the 1700s and again in the late 20th century, the same one that took tough measures against Jews both during the interwar period and again just a decade before he arrived, and the same one that’s taking probably the toughest measures against muslim immigrants in Europe today. The Hungarians may be the most ethnocentric nation in Europe, as I’ve heard them described, but that doesn’t boil down to hating brown people: it can boil down to being incredibly nice to brown people (or Jews for that matter) as long as they aren’t perceived as a demographic threat. I have no doubt that if my friend (or me for that matter) were one of millions of ethnic Indians trying to move to central Europe (he wasn’t moving there permanently, but let that pass) we would be perceived as a threat. But we weren’t / aren’t, so I’m sure we wouldn’t be. People of an ethnocentric / ethnic tribalist mindset (and I’m not using those as terms as criticism) are often perfectly kind at the person to person level. Their problem isn’t with the relations between individual persons, it’s with the relations between peoples as a whole.
And this sort of gets to a deeper point: the problem with mass migration isn’t the “migration” part, it’s the “mass” part. Immigration and for that matter intermarriage and intermixing is great and a good and positive thing as long as it’s at a fairly low level. The challenge of the future is not how to get rid of these things entirely, it’s how to keep them at low level.
If all Europeans absorbed HBD and other Dark Enlightenment or alt-right viewpoints, and started to act accordingly (not the astonishing stupidity of many: like the majority of Swedes now wants to halt immigration, yet refuse to vote for the only party which promises exactly that…), then these differential fertility rates would be small problems. The big problem is that it’s impossible to publicly subscribe to such viewpoints, and so there is absolutely no discussion of this. You cannot publicly say that you want less African genes, nor can you say why. So no solution could be found, because you can only find solutions for difficult problems if you’re actively searching for them. By making it practically illegal to even talk about the problem, our elites have blocked the possibility of any solution.
so what does that have to do with anything?
I means Islam needs to stop sanctioning slavery and sex with slaves.
Where do you live?
Are you a hermit?
How could you have missed all of these one-eyed Christians running around?
It’s not just the threat of legal action though. Conformism and self-censorship due to fear of being socially ostracized plays a huge part in this too. A lot of people don’t let out their true opinions about immigration, multiculturalism etc. unless they’re sure they’re talking to someone who’s sympathetic to those views. Nobody wants to suffer social death for being an “extremist”. I don’t know how to counteract this unfortunately, it’s a real problem…discussing these issues on the net is all well and good, but you need to reach out to people in real life as well.
Hey G_R,
All civilizations were in violent conflict with each other – that was the norm until fairly recently. Before Islam came on the scene, Byzantium and Persia were in conflict and Rome and Egypt before that, etc. And Islam did not attack Christendom per se. If that was the case, it would have overtaken Abyssinia, which it didn’t because the Prophet (pbuh) specifically told the Muslims not to:
“A hadith has Muhammad saying. ‘Leave the Abyssinans alone as long as they leave you alone’. While the authenticity of this statement might be disputed, it nevertheless represents the primary Muslim position in the classical period. As a result, Abysinna was not considered to be a part of either the ‘Realm of Islam’ or the ‘Realm of War’. Rather, Muslims considered Abyssinia to be in the Realm of Neutrality and did not conquer it during the early spread of Islam. Instead, over several centuries Islam entered the Horn of Africa by peaceful means, through trade, intermarriage and settlement.”
The Afrcian Christian and Islam
Byzantium was another matter. If one reads the history, their vassals killed an emissary of the Prophet (pbuh) – spilling first blood:
“Muhammad met a hostile reception on the part of Syria. Fifteen scouts were taken unawares and killed by Ghassanid soldiers, and the courier with Muhammad’s letter to the Greek comandant of Bostra was stopped on the road and beheaded..”
Enemies From the East?
You don’t do something stupid like that and not try to make up for it – it can cost you your empire. The ruler of Khwarezm did that to the Mongol envoys, pissed off the Khan, and kick started their bloody invasion of the East.
The Persians…once their governor of the Yemen province converted and changed allegiance to Madina – the game was set. Persia was not about to lose her choke point on the Red Sea – either she or the Rashidun were going down.
As far as any other kingdom or empire Muslims came across there was no reason to or not to expand into them in the pre-modern world. That’s what everybody did, some simply did it better than others. Once Muslims were kicked out of Christian Spain – Christian Empires expanded into the Muslim world wherever they could – and how! That’s life.
As far as the other stuff – everyone is entitled to their opinions on what they feel is worthy or unworthy. And as far as mass immigration into the West from Muslim countries – I can easily see the reasons for curbing that.
I have zero problems with people criticizing Islam (if one doesn’t like that it doesn’t allow prayer to be in other than Arabic, it allows polygamy or cousin marriage for whatever cultures want to, etc. – no problem) – I simply ask it be done with a factual basis.
Peace.
Hey iffen,
The top scholars of the world wrote a letter to Baghdadi, telling him it is impermissible to revive slavery:
“The re-introduction of slavery is forbidden in Islam. It was abolished by universal consensus.”
http://www.lettertobaghdadi.com/14/english-v14.pdf
So I’m not sure what else non-Muslims want from us? To rewrite our history?
The only thing I’ve read by anything that comes close to a “re-introduction” was a writing by the previous Grand Mufti of Pakistan stating that the international protocols on prohibition of slavery were a virtuous thing and should be upheld as long as other nations also abide by them. If non-Muslims break with these treaties and start enslaving Muslims, then we are not obligated to, but can decide to do likewise – this is a very reasonable position.
Peace.
Hey Hector,
100% agree. The question is, given the same environmental opportunity, would it be more or less likely for the criminal to attack the woman based on if she is dressed modestly or has everything hanging out. The same thing with the robbing scenario that I mentioned; a man is vulnerable walking through a tough, isolated part of downtown – is he less likely to be robbed if he is counting his money in full view or less. You tell me.
That’s not the argument from the Muslim side though, Muslims obviously wear it as a religious mandate. I was talking about why Europe may want to introduce modesty back into society for its benefits.
Look, there are entire aboriginal societies were women walk around wearing nothing but some beads or some straw skirts, etc. and I’m sure they don’t get raped left and right. There are a whole lot of factors that are involved in this subject – partially cultural, as you mentioned.
I get along quite well with traditional Christians in many viewpoints – we see eye to eye on a lot of things. Generally, the divergence happens once ME politics is brought up or Israel – topics I try to avoid with them.
Peace.
I meant to include this in the meaning of “made it practically illegal”.
Actually, the social death part is way worse. In Hungary we have hate speech laws, yet because social ostracism of HBD is much lower, people are freer to talk about it. Even public discourse is better, though far from total freedom, and we need a quite right wing prime minister. He was elected because of the total bankruptcy the country found itself after eight years of mismanagement by the previous leftist government, which was elected three times since 1990 by the same population.
Thanks Talha, I have come to depend upon you to inform me about the “true blue Muslims.” I am not so sure of your authority concerning “true blue Jews.”
Hey G_R,
It’s totally not necessary – there are other ways to deal with the problem too; like harsh sentencing, cameras everywhere, etc. Like I said to Hector – there are aboriginal societies all around the world with women letting everything hang out and no correlating high rates of rape.
Keep in mind, you are the one who brought up rape when I mentioned “societal consequences” for public immodesty. Rape is probably the least of the concerns. Destruction of the family as a cornerstone of the society is the bigger threat.
There is a quote attributed to Saladin (ra):
“If you want to destroy any nation without war, make fornication/adultery or nudity common in the young generation.”
Peace.
Hey iffen,
Nope – no authority am I on Jews – did you know Karaite Jews believe the Prophet (pbuh) and the
Son of Mary (pbuh) were actual divinely sent emissaries? I learned that recently.
As far that article – it was written by a Jewish guy in a Jewish publication – take any editorial concerns with them – those are not my words. And I highly doubt many of the synagogue-attending Orthodox Jews in the community I live in would like to include those guys in their community.
Peace.
Hey Hector,
I think you have a lot of fans for what you stated. And I definitely agree. These countries aren’t racist – for instance, I doubt Hungary wants a mass influx of Spaniards or Finns into their land either – so it’s not about white or brown people – they simply do not want their culture to be inundated (especially when they are demographically vulnerable).
It’s a very understandable position.
The flip side of it is; the West should stay the hell out of the ME and not help cause the collapse of stable nations such that there are millions of refugees.
Peace.
Byzantium was another matter. If one reads the history, their vassals killed an emissary of the Prophet (pbuh) – spilling first blood:
“Muhammad met a hostile reception on the part of Syria. Fifteen scouts were taken unawares and killed by Ghassanid soldiers, and the courier with Muhammad’s letter to the Greek comandant of Bostra was stopped on the road and beheaded..”
Enemies From the East?
You don’t do something stupid like that and not try to make up for it – it can cost you your empire. The ruler of Khwarezm did that to the Mongol envoys, pissed off the Khan, and kick started their bloody invasion of the East.
Actually, that story reminds me a lot of the Spanish conquest of the Incas. The Incas, for what it’s worth, are probably one of the pre-modern civilizations I admire most, though I have admiration also for many tribal societies, and I think it’s a great tragedy of history they were destroyed. Pizarro presented a letter along with a Bible to Atahualpa exhorting him to convert, Atahualpa threw the letter on the ground to indicate his disgust, and the Spanish immediately launched their attack.
The difference is, no one here (certainly not me) is arguing that the Mongols or the Spanish were great heroes to be celebrated, much less exemplars of the perfect man to be emulated. I’d freely acknowledge that the Spanish conquest of the Americas was horrifically cruel and immoral, that wiped out one of the world’s most interesting civilizations, and that the kind of Christianity that was in force at the time (early modern Roman Catholicism) has a great deal to answer for.
Hey Hector,
Read academic/historic accounts of the conquests by the Rashidun. Muslims have nothing to apologize for.
The Rashidun are the only ones that Muslims take our praxis from in terms of what is permitted or not in warfare. They were the Companions of the Prophet (pbuh) and their consensus on a matter is considered definitive proof in our jurisprudence. All other after them; Abbassids, Mamluks, Ottomans, Moughals are judged by their standard.
I will state the record exactly as I posted in previous threads:
Peace.
Also – if you want to read about one of the great recent leaders of our martial tradition (our warrior-saints), here is a good read on Shaykh Emir Abdul-Qadir (ra) of Algeria; a Muslim scholar, Sufi guide and leader of the resistance against French colonialism who eventually earned his enemy nation’s highest award. I live half a day’s drive from a town in America that is named after him.
Shaikh Abdul Qadir (may God illuminate his grave), of Algeria, was a learned Maliki scholar and Qadiri spiritual guide. When the French invaded his land, he fought them for almost 30 years. These same French betrayed the terms of his surrender by hauling him off to Paris instead of allowed him to go into exile in Damascus (25 of his family members died in these jails). When they finally did release him, he played a well documented role in the communal riots that occurred against Maronite Christians by Muslims and Druze. He gathered forty of his ex-mujahideen and opened up his estate to fleeing Christians – including the members of the French embassy – and had his men train their guns on the attacking Muslim and Druze to hold them off. He told his men that this was as much a jihad as the one they fought in the deserts of Algeria – he was credited by saving around ten thousand. Due to this, the same French who had fought him for three decades awarded him their highest honor.
http://www.abdelkaderproject.org/about-emir-abdelkader/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emir_Abdelkader
If you have read how the French fought against him then you will know how magnanimous he was in protecting their citizens and consul in the riots:
“Abd al-qadir did not anticipate, however, the extraordinary violence that the French would unleash on the Algerian people. General Bugeaud pursued a scorched-earth policy in the Algerian interior, designed to undermins popular support for Abd al-Qadir’s resistance – burning villages, driving away cattle, destroying harvests, and uprooting orchards. Men, women and children were killed, and officers were told to take no prisoners…Tribes and villages began to turn against Abd al-Qadir to avoid suffering the fate of his supporters…The French attack on the zimala had the desired effect. By Abd al-Qadir’s own estimate, the French killed one-tenth of the populaton of the mobile encampment. The loss of their elders, wives and children dealt a sever blow to his troops’ morale.”
The Arabs: A History
“After brief service in Algeria in 1830, he [General Pellissier] returned there in 1839 to take part in the campaign against the patriot emir of Mascara, Abdelkader. It was during this period that he gained notoriety for killing an entire local population by gassing them in caves, a tactic of irregular warfare employed by the French on several occasions during the Algerian campaign.”
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aimable-Jean-Jacques-Pelissier-duc-de-Malakoff#ref989400
That was a true mujahid.
“Good” people don’t think like us. I can’t discuss these issues openly with my family, who are by no means SJW warriors (on the contrary, in fact). The little I have let my (very filtered) views be known is more than sufficient for them to think I’ve gone around the bend. It’s very discouraging, but then again they (at least my sons) are the ones who are going to have to live with the increasingly more-evident consequences.
I assume the only sources for that are Islamic. Conquerors always come up with some justification for their deeds, that’s just human nature. When Germany invaded Poland, Hitler claimed the Poles had provoked it and now, finally, their patience having been exhausted, Germans were simply returning fire. The existence of those justifications doesn’t mean I have to take them seriously.
And you see that’s just another reason why dialogue between Westerners and Muslims probably is doomed to failure. I’ve never heard or read of a single pious Muslim stating that maybe, just maybe Muslims weren’t always in the right and that maybe Islamic expansion was bad for the peoples affected. No, you’re totally fine with imperialism, as long as it’s your kind doing it. And that’s why I find Muslim complaints about Western misdeeds in the Near East always somewhat dubious (even though I’m very much against those interventions). If Muslims had the kind of power the modern West has, I’m pretty certain they’d use it for aggressive purposes.
EDIT: Besides the Ghassanids mentioned in your citation weren’t even Byzantines proper iirc, but Byzantine clients. It’s not like emperor Heraclius or a Byzantine governor ordered that (if it actually happened). Pretty lame as a justification for invasion imo.
Yes, it’s discouraging, sometimes one starts to question oneself (is the problem with me? Is my perception of reality just wrong if educated, intelligent people around me see things so differently?). I did find though that some “normal” people were at least partially in agreement with me once the initial ice had been broken, but mostly one tends to avoid those issues in conversation.
Have to admit, I’m really having trouble understanding the thought processes of “good” people. In really severe cases it seems like nothing could change their world view. E.g. I’ve read quite a few people stating that the mass assaults in Cologne in 2015/16 just didn’t happen, even though they clearly did. Now I probably do filter out facts that don’t fit my basic assumptions as well…but I hope, not to that degree.
Some of my (Hungarian) friends a few months later shared a few apparently widely read articles on Hungarian opposition websites which claimed the attacks were never covered up in the German media, that was supposed to be just the invention of Orbán’s propaganda machine for Hungarian internal consumption, which only stupid Hungarians believe who don’t speak foreign languages. They cited how it was reported in the local media, and also in ZDF and other large national outlets. They didn’t find anything remarkable about the fact that the national media outlets only reported it a couple days later, or that ZDF officially apologized for having failed to report that in a timely manner… Stupid, stupid Orbán!
However, time passes, and the past changes. Now most of my leftist friends insist that nothing remarkable happened at all in Cologne.
I think Orwell didn’t really get the original communist regimes, his description of Ingsoc is a bit off. It’s a pretty good description of the present liberal mindset, though.
Yes, it’s either “didn’t happen at all” or “European men do just the same with their rape culture, stop using it as a pretext for your racism” (according to leftie journalists in Germany exactly the same happens regularly at Oktoberfest). I have to say I didn’t expect something quite like this and it still shocks me. It’s quite astonishing how supposedly educated people can deny reality like that.
And btw there was definitely an attempted cover-up in Cologne, even the official police report the day after claimed the night had been peaceful…obviously a lie.
I forgot to mention that they blame Putin’s fake news media for spreading this disinformation. Only the Orbán/Putin propaganda machine can spread such nonsense that Muslim refugees will be “difficult to integrate”. No serious leader in the West takes it seriously.
Btw some otherwise street-smart people also swallow this line of reasoning because there is a widespread cynical notion that all decisions are based on hard interests, while people also know that Western (especially German) leaders are less corrupt than Hungarian ones. So the German refugee policy would be incomprehensible to them unless they assumed that it was somehow good for Germany. So, it must all be a Putin/Orbán lie…
Yes, either the first or the second, or sometimes both are believed simultaneously…
That’s also something that seriously irritates (and actually scares) me…how completely many mainstream liberals and conservatives buy into the “Russia is our enemy” line. I’m not the greatest fan of Putin and deeply regret what’s happening in Ukraine, with the loss of life on both sides. But there’s now a demonization of Russia and Putin that’s completely irrational imo. It’s like Putin’s the scapegoat for everything that’s going wrong in Europe…as if the EU, multiculturalism and mass immigration would work just fine, if there just wouldn’t be that evil imperialist in the Kremlin who persecutes gays, bombs children in Aleppo and bankrolls all those nasty nationalist parties like FN or AfD. There also seems to be little awareness how dangerous conflict with Russia potentially is.
Have to say I find it a bit depressing if such views are widespread in Hungary as well…but then I suppose those dissatified with Orban (for whatever reason) might just uncritically accept received wisdom from the supposedly enlightened West.
The “good” people I know really are good people. I’ve thought a lot about this, it seems to me that the basic problem is that “multiculturalism” can indeed be seen as working at a certain level, among intelligent and educated people. The “good” people have very little contact with the “unwashed masses” who make up the vast majority of immigrants, just as in the US they have very little contact with “ordinary” black people.
The “blank slate” idea is also very hard to dispel. One of my sons has a PhD in a hard (probably the hardest) science from a top university and is convinced that anyone else could have done the same.
And of course the fact that many “race realists” are neo-Nazis (or at least can be presented as such) makes it an all but impossible task to convince the “good” people of the long-term disaster that now seems all but inevitable.
All in all I find it very discouraging. I assume you saw the review today in the American Conservative of the new book by Douglas Murray entitled “The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity Islam” (which I have just ordered)?
Hey G_R,
If you’ve got Byzantine accounts – I’m game. I cited an academic university source. If you want to be cynical about our history, that’s your prerogative.
To compare Hitler’s invasion of Poland (both members of the League of Nations) to the Rashidun expansion into Byzantium is honestly laughable.
This is what I said about British and Crusader expansion into Muslim lands:
“I don’t blame the Brits for wanting to rule 1/3 of the world – that was their prerogative – they built a navy for it…I don’t even blame Christians for the Crudsades; their conduct maybe, but not the impetus.”
http://www.unz.com/gnxp/there-is-no-exception-in-islam/#comment-1447160
In the age of empires – that was the game that was played. Expand or be expanded upon. I only mentioned the death of the emissary to point out that history records they drew first blood – not that the Rashidun needed a justification.
And if you know that; a) the Byzantines were persecuting non-Chalcedonian Christians in their realm and 2) the earliest contact with Byzantium records their people considered Muslims to be a Christian heresy – then you can appreciate that it was absolutely brilliant of the Rashidun to smash Byzantium hard and square in the face while it was still recovering from its wars with Sassanid Persia.
I don’t care whether some dynasty or empire gets taken over – I’m only concerned with how the people on the ground are treated. In that case also, the Rashidun treated people well and generally left them to their own devices as long as they paid taxes, didn’t revolt and didn’t insult Islam. If you want to read direct translations of historical accounts, I suggest this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Islam-Others-Saw-Zoroastrian/dp/0878501258
And this by the same author:
http://www.historytoday.com/reviews/arab-conquests-and-creation-islamic-empire
The later rulers like the Abbassids, Ottomans had more spotty records. But again, we don’t take our legal code from them.
So the Byzantines lost their empire – tough luck – you want to keep an empire, learn to defend it. This is not even taking into account their idiotic policies in pissing off various people in Anatolia which practically guaranteed their eventual loss of it to the Turks. This is life when you play the game of thrones. The Moorish King Boabdil’s mother reprimanded him when he wept at signing away Granada to the Christian forces of the Reconquista:
“You weep like a woman for what you failed to defend like a man.”
As far as today’s world – we are in a time when nations are signatories to international treaties of conduct and protocols of non-aggression – they should all be judged by those standards.
More speculation. Again, if you want to be cynical that is your business – I have not heard a single Muslim scholar of worth suggesting we scrap the international framework that Muslims are signatory to.
Keep your home boys in check – that’s how world wars are started – sorry, no dice.
Peace.
Then why would you push that here?
Your expertise can be in true blue or in can be in Islam.
I can see that your expertise is not in true blue with regards to the Jews.
Should I question your expertise with regards to Islam?
If you can’t recognize true blue in Jews how can I know that you can recognize true blue in Muslims?
You’re probably right…but wouldn’t really intelligent people be able to realize that the educated, assimilated immigrants they come into contact with are only a segment of migrants, not necessarily representative? I mean, it’s not that difficult a concept to understand. And even mainstream media bring at least a few reports about Rotherham or other incidents that are too big to be just covered up.
Yes, saw the review (didn’t realize it was a whole book though). Murray is a bit of a neocon if I understand correctly, but one of the saner ones. I mostly liked his pieces in the Spectator (back when they were free to read, I think now they’ve got some stupid paywall), often pointed out quite well the ridiculous media spin like presenting non-typical Ahmadyya who are persecuted as heretics as proof for Islam’s peaceful nature.
Why “even”?
And is “Crudsades” a typo or a bizarre pun?
There probably aren’t any, contemporary sources for Islam’s early conquests are notoriously scarce and problematic after all iirc. But that’s my point: you cite some late Islamic tradition (probably written down at some point in the 8th century I suppose, long after the events) – that is a tradition of the victors, not some neutral observers – as if this were adequate proof that the Islamic conquests were justified. Leaving aside that there’s a rather ridiculous mismatch between the supposed slight (some envoys killed by Arab clients of the Byzantines…who even by your own admission weren’t even under the Byzantines’ direct control) and the reaction (conquering most of the Byzantine empire and trying to extinguish its independent existence), why should I even accept this tradition as reliable? It distinctly smells like the made-up pretexts of untold conquerors since the dawn of time.
There simply is no way Islam’s expansion up into southern France and central Asia within a century of Mohammed’s death can be described as just a series of reactions to external attacks or insults. Quite simply those were unprovoked wars of conquest. Now by itself that wouldn’t matter much, after all such things have been common throughout history. But the fact that Muslims a) deny this obvious reality, and b) often seem to regard the process as exemplary and admirable (and maybe even repeatable, if the conditions just were right?), cannot but raise the suspicions of non-Muslims.
Talha,
I have the utmost respect for your scholarship and character, from the description you’ve given on this blog. But with due respect, that wasn’t really an answer to my question.
I have no doubt that Sheikh Abdel Qadir was a great man fighting a justified war of liberation, and that he fought said war with virtue and with respect for the rights of his enemies and of noncombatants. We’d all be better off if more people- Muslim, Christian, secular and others- were like him, and I completely agree that French imperialism in Africa was morally wrong. That isn’t really related to my remark that the Muslim conquest of the Byzantine lands represented imperial aggression and was a bad thing for the people concerned. As you’ll note, I agreed with your statement that the conduct of early Muslim warriors during the conquest wasn’t unique to Islam: in fact I gave an example of Christians doing exactly the same thing nine centuries later. I think it was abhorrent when the Spanish Christians did so, but you don’t agree it was abhorrent on the part of the Arabs.
This is what I said about British and Crusader expansion into Muslim lands:
“I don’t blame the Brits for wanting to rule 1/3 of the world – that was their prerogative – they built a navy for it…I don’t even blame Christians for the Crudsades; their conduct maybe, but not the impetus.”
Yes well I do blame the British for wanting to rule 1/3 of the world. As I blame Americans, Spanish, Mongols and so forth. I don’t get the obsession with bigness and dominance. As far as I’m concerned, small is beautiful, peoples should remain content to be themselves and to live peaceably in their homelands, and imperialism is in general a bad thing.
The bottom line is that most people, no matter how intelligent they are, don’t spend much time thinking about what is going on in the world, and what the long-term implications might be. For better or for worse (probably the latter, I suspect) the participants in this blog are the exception.
My two sons and ex-wife have have spent the last 7-10 years in the UK, and when I asked them about Rotherham they had no idea of what I was talking about.
I also think that an important element is the manner in which people have been “socialized” to reject unacceptable thoughts — through schools, the media, etc. It is simply verboten to have thoughts that might in any way be similar to those of the FN or other such parties.
Now by itself that wouldn’t matter much, after all such things have been common throughout history. But the fact that Muslims a) deny this obvious reality, and b) often seem to regard the process as exemplary and admirable (and maybe even repeatable, if the conditions just were right?), cannot but raise the suspicions of non-Muslims.
Talha is a realist except for the devout Muslim part. He wouldn’t try to make an exception for the Arab conquests.
Stop smoking whatever it is you are smoking and get back to reality.
Why? Just because a lot of people get off on power, national greatness etc., that doesn’t mean one has to condone it.
That’s actually something that irritates me about a lot of flag-waving US nationalists as well. I’ll never understand how people can get a feeling of personal satisfaction and joy (“We’re back! Number 1 one again! No one messes with us!”) from some country which they probably couldn’t even find on a map being bombed, as if that made their personal lives any better. That sort of naked power worship is pretty repellent.
Get back on track. This comment is not in line with your other comments,
Hola Senor,
I’m a Muslim -the emphasis makes sense.
Typo – but LOL!!!
Peace.
Hey Hector,
“…history is nothing more than the bloody record of the migration of tribes.” – Gore Vidal
In your statements, you are asking me to accept two principles that do not stand up to scrutiny.
1) You are trying to play the victim card on behalf of various empires; Byzantine, Sassanid, Incan, etc.
I do not accept the above premise. The above empires were built on the bones of human beings as all empires were. You are asking me to accept the assumption that an empire had more of a right to exist than another based on what exactly – chronology? As I said, all empires were built on blood – they only differed on the amount of bones and the kinds of bones (armed men or innocents or both).
2) You are stating that all conquests were qualitatively the same and bring out extremely destructive Mongol and Spanish conquests as an example.
I do not accept this premise either. As a Pakistani, I thank God that we were colonized by the British and not the Spanish or Portuguese – the British record for respect of the local culture is far superior than the records of others. The governor of Bengal commissioned a translation of the same book of Hanafi law I am currently studying with my teacher. Compare that to how the Spanish almost completely destroyed the Mayan language.
“Diego de Landa was a Spanish priest who was given the task of converting the Mayan people to Catholicism, and in the process almost singlehandedly destroyed the Mayan language…De Landa accomplished this through burning books and religious idols that would have helped to give insight to the language and other aspects of Mayan life.”
http://anthropology.msu.edu/anp264-ss13/2013/04/25/diego-de-landa/
I have presented evidence by recognized scholars in the field of studies of Late Antiquity and early Medieval. People like Crone, Penn, Nicolle, Boyland have studied primary texts (Muslim and – more importantly non-Muslim [Armenian, Jewish, Zoraostrian, Syriac, etc. – the records are indeed there) and the archaeological evidence. The Arab conquests were violent for sure, and known for their “magnificent brutality” as stated by one scholar I cited. But that was primarily kept to the field of battle. In fact, the previous exchanges between the Byzantines and Persians were far more destructive. I will again quote Crone, “If all Donner means to affirm is that the Muslim conquests were relatively swift and surgical operations that left urban life, religious communities, and complex organization intact, then he is simply affirming the conventional view…The Muslims did not engage in systematic destruction of towns or religious buildings, regardless of whether they were monotheist, Zoroastrian, or (in Harran) pagan.”
And that was from an article she wrote to refute the idea that the Muslim conquests were not violent.
Look, this is all fine in our current world of a relatively stable international framework that was built on the back of one of the most destructive wars human beings have ever witnessed. We collectively said – enough! Now, to sit on our moral high horse and judge all the peoples going back in history by out standards is, in my mind, immature. We cannot impose our idea of normalcy on them because that is to imagine a world that never existed.
Small got swallowed by big in that world – and might made right. And an intelligent ruler assumed that a rival power was hostile unless the was an explicit non-aggression treaty. Even brothers could not be fully trusted.
That was the norm – but the conquests carried out by the Companions (ra) distinguished themselves in minimizing loss of innocent life and keeping the violence to its proper place – the battlefield.
I’m not asking people to believe that they were people favored by God or beloved by Him – but neither you nor I get to rewrite history – that must be discussed with the factual evidence we have.
Peace.
Hey iffen,
You’re taking it way too seriously. This was a jibe at Greasy – me and him have a history going back. I don’t think he took it as more than that.
Peace.
Hey G_R,
There are plenty – see my note to Hector – and I am citing evidence by the experts on them.
Look, I already said – that wouldn’t change a single thing. That era was like one of those wrestlemania fests where you have like 20 guys in the ring and it’s last man standing. Do you seriously think the Byzantines or Sassanids had not expanded into Arabian proper because they valued Semitic-Bedouin autonomy? I made it clear, there was no need to justify an invasion – but, that provocation happens to be what we have on historical record. If you want to deny it, then bring some counter evidence. We are not discussing belief here, we are discussing historical facts.
And yes, there was no reason to invade Visigothic Spain other than; Muslims had a navy and made use of it. By the way – the initial naval assaults by Muslims were almost entirely done by non-Muslim crews – the Arabs had no idea what to do. Though the Jews were kind of happy; they were getting a bit tired of having to deal with forced baptisms and other nonsense:
“Even that last vestige of toleration of Judaism evaporated in 638 CE when the Sixth Council of Toledo reaffirmed the policy of forcibly baptizing all Iberian Jews. In fact, Toledo VI went far beyond Sisbut’s policy, not only advocating mandatory baptism, but declaring that the king’s right to rule was dependent on his working to eradicate Judaism…”
https://www.pdx.edu/honors/sites/www.pdx.edu.honors/files/11.%20Phillips%20Essay.pdf
Watch this video – this gives you a good picture of reality:
https://youtu.be/-6Wu0Q7x5D0?t=12m30s
Watch that green fly in about 10 seconds!
Peace.
I’m of course not an expert on this, but my understanding is that strictly contemporary sources for the Arab conquests in the 630s and after are quite few. That’s actually the main reason why revisionists like Patricia Crone could come up with such a radically different reconstruction of Islam’s origins that at least wasn’t totally implausible. The Islamic traditions about the companions of the prophet you mention were, as far as I know, written down much later (in the 8th century?). I realize that from your religious perspective these texts must be true, but from a historian’s perspective these sources are somewhat problematic. But that’s merely a detail and not that relevant to the larger point.
Look, I’m not trying to box you into a corner or something of the sort (unlike others on this thread I don’t believe you’re intentionally lying, I trust you are quite sincere in what you write). I’m trying to get you to understand why many Westerners, including me, feel such deep distrust towards Islam and its adherents. There’s a history of violent conflict between Islam and (former) Christendom, during which for a long time Muslims were the aggressors, and which has left a deep impression in Europeans’ conscience. Now one can take different approaches to that history. One is that this is no longer relevant and today different standards apply (you seem to at least lean somewhat in this direction). But a lot of Muslims still seem to regard Islam’s conquests as an inspiration. It’s not difficult to come up with examples for a rhetoric of violent conquest, and not just among extreme cults like IS, but among much more mainstream movements like Erdogan’s AKP (who after all has quite openly stated that he’d like to islamicize Europe by demographic warfare). Mosques here in Germany are often named after Ottoman conquerors (can you imagine some church being opened in any Muslim country in which the crusaders are celebrated? I don’t think so). Unless Muslims deal in an honest way with the violent aspects of their heritage and make unequivocally clear that this imperialist tradition is a thing of the past, there really is no basis for dialogue, let alone trust (and no, you don’t need to remind me that Muslims today at least have some very legitimate grievances against the West, I’m not in favour of Western interventions in the Mideast, quite the opposite).
Before I end this comment, I have to state that frankly I’ve been quite bothered by some of your comments on this thread, e.g. your rejoicing about Europeans converting in circumstances that might imply that this is due to social pressure, or your linking “immodest” dress with an incresed rate of rape. It disturbs me that even a moderate like you apparently doesn’t understand (or care) that this is severely at odds with what most Westerners today would find acceptable. Now you’re of course free to reject our norms, and I can hardly expect you to just give up beliefs linked to your religious identity. I do however believe that this stance bodes ill for the prospects of peaceful coexistence if Islam’s presence in the West continues to increase. No offense intended against you as a person (and I do have to admit that you’re admirably patient in posting on a blog where your religion is mostly viewed negatively), but unless there isn’t at least some amount of “reform” (if that’s possible) and self-criticism of a non-cosmetic kind within Muslim communities in the West, there will be an awful lot of conflict.
This comment was marked as spam for some reason or other the first time I tried to post it:
You’re quite right that of most of the peoples of history the British were probably somewhere close to the best to be conquered by, always assuming you’re not Irish.
However, you have fallen victim to the so-called “Black Legend” of unique Spanish destructiveness.
There is no single “Mayan language”; there is a Mayan language group of which many are still spoken. What threatens the Mayan languages, to the slim extent they are threatened at all, is the economic utility and pan-Central-American cultural dominance of Spanish.
This is partly true; the autos-de-fe concerned, however, the converted Maya who were suspected of still practicing magical rites such as human sacrifice, of which for some bizarre reason the intolerant Spaniards took a dim view.
translated:
See also here (Spanish) for more details. I’ll just translate this bit: “During the same period [the 16th century] many children between the ages of five and six were stolen or bought, to be subsequently sacrificed.”
It remains unknown what black motives the Spanish authorities could have had for trying to stop this sort of thing.
As for our friend Fr. de Landa, it was widely recognized that he had exceeded his authority in his (admittedly brutal and autocratic) proceedings; he was tried in Spain and acquitted, though Bishop Toral of the Yucatan, presumably more familiar with the situation, refused to readmit him until his death, whereupon de Landa was himself made bishop of the province, after which he apparently did nothing of importance as far as I can tell.
It also strikes me as bizarre to suggest that the 27 codices burned by Fr. de Landa in the (not particularly important) town of Mani contained approximately 90% of Mayan writings, but then I’m not an expert on the topic and have no desire to invest the time necessary to become one. Oddly enough we also owe much of what we know about the contemporary Mayan culture to Fr. de Landa, who was an avid ethnographer.
For an in-depth discussion of the Black Legend, more in-depth perhaps than anyone has any desire to go, see Tree of Hate, by Philip Wayne Powell.
Do you have any cause to complain of the government of Ceuta or Melilla?
As for desecrations, massacres, and wanton acts of destruction committed in the name of Islam, by Arabs, Turks, Ghaznavids (maybe this is redundant- were they Turks?), Afghans, etc. etc. I am sure you can rattle off a list as well as I can, so I will leave it at that.
Muslims approach morality, as other things, from a fundamentally different perspective than Christians, as both do with respect to secular liberalism.
However, the three can often agree on the proper way for an individual to behave in society, particularly modern Western society, at least much of the time.
Hola Senor,
I don’t believe this was unique to the Spanish. I am also not an expert, which is why I cited an academic source, which also mentions his regrets over his previous actions and attempts to make up for them:
“After realizing the error of his ways, de Landa decided to write a book on Mayan history, called Relación de las cosas de Yucatán in 1566. After destroying much of the Mayan language and culture, de Landa’s choice of chronicling the civilization is odd. It can be noted that de Landa actually felt remorse later for the way he treated the Mayan people while he was investigating their outlawed religious practices, and felt this was a way to correct his errors.”
And I agree, often Spanish ecclesiastical authorities would try to curb the brutality of the Spanish colonists. This sometimes even led to revolts by the settlers – like the one by Pizarro (Gonzalo, not Francisco) against their local governors who tried to curb the abuse of the natives.
Of course – one needs not go further than the name Tamerlane to prove the point. Which goes back to my point; not all conquests are qualitatively the same.
And my other point; our praxis is built upon the foundations laid down by the Companions (ra) and not the later authorities. Their practice and sayings are the best interpretation we have of the Qur’an and the life of the Prophet (pbuh) – for instance, the Hanafi school I follow is recognized as mostly the interpretation handed down from Ibn Mas’ud (ra) – and their consensus on a matter is a key source of law. No Muslim scholar in the world says; well, the Seljuks or Mamluks or Timurids did A so we can also do A.
Peace.
Some commenters have shared the objects of their hatred; I would have trouble finding a more worthy example of mine than the following:
I don’t put much trust in a source, academic* or otherwise, that can deliver such an obvious howler as “Diego de Landa was a Spanish priest who was given the task of converting the Mayan people to Catholicism, and in the process almost singlehandedly destroyed the Mayan language”, and is disingenuous enough to describe human sacrifice of kidnapped children (see above) as “still performing religious ceremonies”, and I would take anything else stated by such a source with at least a metric ton of salt.
Of course not; just pointing out, as you have agreed, that the Spanish were not uniquely brutal, or even particularly brutal, historically speaking.
*Note that given the context, “academic” does not here mean “peer-reviewed”.
Hey G_R,
Last comment on this thread.
From Arabic, there are practically none. From other languages, there are quite a few. And they are from non-Muslim sources – which is what makes Crone’s conclusions that much more valid.
And I appreciate this honestly – because I came to UNZ to converse with people to learn their viewpoints and share mine – which is why I disengage when the ad hominem flies.
True – for the first 1000 years or so, the Muslims had the Christians on the run (with certain notable exceptions). But boy, did they turn that franchise around. They’ve been kicking our butts for the last what – 300 years or so? What’s the last battle a Muslim field army won? Gallipoli?
My opinion is irrelevant actually. What I have been trying to get people to understand is that you have to leave aside the random opinions of joe-shmoe Muslims. What are the qualified Muslim scholars saying? And that voice is unanimous as far as I’ve read. There is no Muslim scholar of note that I can think of that wants to overturn the current international non-aggression framework. Random preachers are random preachers – you get nonsense like this in US:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iun-0gmdioI
I agree – that is completely irresponsible – they are playing with fire. If they know the history of Europe with minorities, he should be very careful with incendiary comments like this.
I believe the scholars have been clear on this. Our extremists are refusing to heed the memo. The only way I could see it being revived is a return to pre-modern norms – in which case it will again be par for the course.
there is no way one can objectively read any of my comments on that as being “rejoicing”. I did recognize that this is a real phenomenon for practically any context. My son does his hair a certain way because a bunch of kids in school do. If one really has no religious convictions to start with, then one will likely just go with the flow. The Muslim community is losing quite a few people to atheism do to social pressure – that is way different than coercion.
I explained myself enough on this. If you insist on this being the only point to take away – I can’t spend any more time making things clear.
There is a major problem here – you and others have recognized that Westerners are currently in a bind because of what is considered “acceptable” in their society. Along with immigration, the West needs to have a serious discussion about; hyper-materialism, hyper-individualsm, hyper-immodesty and the rest. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. You can kick us all out – and honestly, traditionally minded Muslims like myself know we are guests in the West according to our sacred law so it wouldn’t surprise me. Especially, again, knowing European history. But I do hope the best for the people of the West (as I have been taught by my teachers) whether I’m allowed to live there or not – but those are discussions your folk need to have – things are malfunctioning at a fundamental core level if strong families aren’t thriving. And it’s happening in places with negligible immigration like Iceland and Eastern Europe also.
You’re seeing it right now. We are undergoing a reformist attempt. People think that reform only goes one way; gay rights, miniskirts, etc. Breaking with 1400 years of tradition opens up the flood gates; what is good for the lesbian goose is good for the suicide-truck-ramming gander.
This I agree with 100% – too many Muslims are acting like ethnic invaders and showing some of the worst behavior that would not even be tolerated in Muslim lands. And too many are listening to extremist voices instead of our traditional scholars. If they don’t knock it off, then, for sure – conflict in on the horizon. If Muslims aren’t in the West to sincerely help their societies become better and uplift the people they live among and want the best for them – then we will be kicked out…and we will be quite deserving of it.
Peace.
Good point. I’ll note that for next time I reference a source on this subject.
Peace.
You can kick us all out – and honestly, traditionally minded Muslims like myself know we are guests in the West according to our sacred law so it wouldn’t surprise me. Especially, again, knowing European history. But I do hope the best for the people of the West (as I have been taught by my teachers) whether I’m allowed to live there or not – but those are discussions your folk need to have – things are malfunctioning at a fundamental core level if strong families aren’t thriving. And it’s happening in places with negligible immigration like Iceland and Eastern Europe also.
To be clear, I hope you’re continued to allow to live in America permanently. I don’t much like this country, but for better or worse, it’s a unique country. One of the things that makes it unique is that we are not an ethnic homeland. And if I ever moved to Europe I’d see myself as a guest there as much as you do: for ethnic reasons, not religious ones. Being a guest can be a very nice thing.
In response to your remark, “things are malfunctioning at a fundamental core level if strong families aren’t thriving”, my response would be, why? There’s nothing magical or special about a fertility rate of 2.1, or for that matter of 3 or 4, and there’s nothing magical about the family that makes it the best way to raise children or to arrange sexuality.
Western Europe’s problems exist because of the nexus of three issues: 1) sub replacement fertility in western Europe, 2) much above fertility in their main source of immigrants (Africa and to a less extent the Muslim world), and 3) openness to immigration. If either 2) or 3) were ended, 1) alone would not be a problem. In spite of their very low fertility rates, Japan and Eastern Europe are not in any danger of losing their demographic identity in the foreseeable future, because they are largely closed societies that don’t allow immigration. If Hungary went from 10 million to 3 million people, and Poland went from 38 million to 10, but everyone there was still ethnic Poles and Hungarians, why would this be a problem?
In fact in some situations, from the point of view of demographic/ethnic concerns, the sexual revolution has been a good thing. I’m not concerned about America maintaining it’s majority white ethnic makeup personally, but it’s chances of doing so are higher now than they were before the 1960s sexual revolution, because the sexual revolution had a greater impact on Mexican fertility than American. In 1957, the fertility gap between Mexico and the US was 87% (7.1 vs. 3.8), whereas today it’s a modest 25% (2.25 vs. 1.8, at least if you believe the CIA Factbook numbers; I don’t, per se, but they are probably not that far off, and in any case Mexico ‘s TFR is continued to decline).
Low TFR in a society is only intrinsically a problem if they’re open to migration or invasion from much more fertile neighbours. There is no reason that Europe needs intrinsically to be open in this way. (It’s also a problem if you think the world is underpopulated, but I think the evidence there is to the contrary).
As far as our views of history go, I think we just have a different framework for looking at premodern imperialism. (And to be clear, my distrust of bigness also does extent to Russia, not just to the United States: as much as I like many things about Anatoly, I don’t understand why he wants Russia to swallow up Belarus and the Ukraine, or even to hang on to the North Caucasus, and I never did get a good answer from him. What’s wrong with being a content being a small country?) In any case though our frameworks are both relatively consistent, so we’ll have to leave it at that.
And
Yes, the Spanish were often horrible to the natives, but as you correctly note the Church and the monarchy did make significant efforts to curb the worst excesses “on the ground”. The Church for all its evils did at least recognize the native peoples as fellow human beings in need of protection, and the monarchy recognized that treating them too brutally would jeopardize the future of the colonial labour force. One of the things that struck me reading Latin American history was how in many regards the situation of indigenous peoples became worse over the centuries (as Spain moved from feudalism to capitalism, as the colonies became independent republics, etc..). For example, as late as the early 1960s in Peru, indigenous farming communities were still engaging in conflicts with landowners to reclaim the land rights that had been granted to them by the crown in 1600 or thereabouts.
Unlike German Reader I would extend a bit more credibility to the early Islamic accounts of their own history. This is not to say that I think Muslim historians weren’t biased, or that relying on them is great, but in the absence of alternative accounts from Persian or Byzantine sources, relying on the Muslim historians is better than just throwing up your hands and pleading ignorance. One can also often infer a lot about history by reading through the lines, as they say.
and there’s nothing magical about the family that makes it the best way to raise children or to arrange sexuality.
Are you sure about this? If we look at outcomes for children in the US, do we not find that the outcomes for children from intact families are far superior to those from families that are not traditional?
Iffen,
As Razib has noted in the past, I’m skeptical of these conclusion, because most sociological studies don’t adequately control for the strong heritability of most cognitive and behavioural traits.
Children with absent fathers are likely to have poorer outcomes than children with fathers present, but you can plausibly account for a large degree of this by saying that the negative personality traits that make a man an unattractive husband / long term partner are likely to be inherited by his children and make them have negative life outcomes as well.
In any case, I’ll grant that having two parents is probably better than having one, but that doesn’t mean the family is the best possible environment one could conceive of. (Some degree of collective childrearing might be even better).
negative personality traits
From Discoverthenetworks.org:
Did the % of negative personality traits change in two or three generations?
Why are traditional marriages the norm for the cognitive elite?
Hey Hector,
Well, I guess that wasn’t my last post after all. You bring up some very good points and I agree that mass immigration is the problem. Without that, population decrease would not lead to ethnic replacement – this is basic mathematics. One thing though, it will change the playing field in another way; the religious and traditional will replace their secular and liberal counterparts as they are doing in Turkey.
No problem. If you want to state that all imperial conquests were bad – this is fine, this is a principled statement.
However, I simply don’t see how certain empires get a pass. I mean look at how foolish the Byzantines were in Anatolia – absolute nonsense, they deserved to lose it (I mean, when your policies are such that Armenians are sometimes willing to take up arms with the Muslims against you and some Christians* support ‘Muslim overlords’ – game frickin’ over):
“Instead Nestorians found sanctuary under Islamic rule where their doctrines were closer to those of the Muslims…the persecution of more extreme heresies continued. They included the Paulician sect, which was brutally suppressed by the Byzantine authorities…At the start of the 11th century a related sect called the T’ondrakeci was still recorded, many of its surviving remnants fleeing to Islamic territory where some of its followers, the supposedly ‘sun worshipping’ Areworik fought for Damascus during the 12th century…Armenians were, of course central to the story of the battle of Manzikert. Early medieval Armenian society was not urbanized and the existing towns were Greek foundations, which, after being used as Roman garrison centers, had flourished under the early Islamic rule…During this prolonged period of Islamic domination, Armenians had sometimes fought in support of their Muslim overlords, or in support of the Byzantine Empire, or in attempts to regain Armenian independence…In most places, however, Muslims were outnumbered by local Christian communities though the latter, mostly being adherents of non-Orthodox, non-Greek churches, tended to support their Mulsim overlords or at least to remain neutral in the Muslim struggles against the Byzantine Empire. By and large the Muslims of these conquered regions could remain only if they converted to Christianity. More often substantial communities were expelled as refugees, eager for revenge. The inhabitants of several lost frontier towns cliamed descent from the ghazis, the religiously motivated frontier warriors of the early years of Islamic Rule. Sometimes migrating only a short distance to a nearby Mslim frontier town, they remained a militarized and jihad-oriented presence in the volatile region. For Byzantium, over-extended ambition soon resulted in significant defeats, notably in Syria and Egypt.”
Manzikert 1071: The breaking of Byzantium
Professor David Nicolle is an absolute expert on Medieval and Late Antiquity battles and warfare tactics:
https://www.amazon.com/David-Nicolle/e/B001H6KYP2/
And you know what the irony is? Alp Arslan (ra) actually let the Byzantine Emperor live, treated him honorably, and let him be ransomed after the defeat of Manzikert. When the emperor returned, factions of his own people blinded and imprisoned him.
You guys seem to be missing my point. I’m citing academic experts of these alternative accounts. The texts are there from Jewish, Syriac, Coptic, Amrenian, Persian, etc. sources – there are even accounts from religious pilgrims from Europe visiting Jeruslame and such. Here are a couple of books based on these accounts:
“The second part gives a detailed survey of sources and an analysis of some 120 non-Muslim texts, all of which provide information about the first century and a half of Islam (roughly A.D. 620-780)…Because this work views Islamic history with the aid of non-Muslim texts and assesses the latter in the light of Muslim writings, it will be essential reading for historians of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or Zoroastrianism–indeed, for all those with an interest in cultures of the eastern Mediterranean in its traditional phase from Late Antiquity to medieval times.”
https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Islam-Others-Saw-Zoroastrian/dp/0878501258
“The first Christians to meet Muslims were not Latin-speaking Christians from the western Mediterranean or Greek-speaking Christians from Constantinople but rather Christians from northern Mesopotamia who spoke the Aramaic dialect of Syriac. Living under Muslim rule from the seventh century to the present, Syriac Christians wrote the first and most extensive accounts of Islam, describing a complicated set of religious and cultural exchanges not reducible to the solely antagonistic.”
https://www.amazon.com/When-Christians-First-Met-Muslims/dp/0520284941/
I know enough about anthropology to know there is rarely a one size fits all for human beings; there are some societies that have strong families, raise kids and have no problems swapping wives. Will any radically different model work with Europe who have been working with a nuclear monogamous one for centuries (one that took Christianity a while to get everybody to get on the same page with – see my earlier mention of the Vikings)? I have my doubts.
Peace.
*They were considered heretical by the Byzantines – how do you think you would have fared under them?
Strangely enough, the Byzantine government was itself heretical at this time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monothelitism) and actually martyred the contemporary Pope! (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Martin_I) .
I mean he did make him kiss the floor – but other than that he was treated well.
Hola Senor,
It is reported, by Coptic sources, that the Byzantines exiled the Coptic Pope – Benjamin – and that Amr ibn al-As (ra) allowed him back and restored him to his authority:
“When Amr Ebn-Elas knew about the disappearance of Pope Benjamin, he sent a circular to all the cities of Egypt, giving orders that the Pope’s hiding place be safe and secure. He asked the Pope to come back to his people and to take charge of the church. Pope Benjamin came back after he had been in hiding for 13 years. Amr Ebn-Elas was courteous toward him and honored him. He returned the churches and all their properties back to him.”
http://st-takla.org/books/en/church/synaxarium/05-topah/08-toba-benjamin.html
Peace.
Somewhat off-topic, but does anyone else notice that occasionally the last 5 or so comments disappear?
Well, yes, but it is also important to remember that this was as much a political matter as much as anything else; there would have been two claimants to the See of Alexandria, a Greek candidate and an Egyptian candidate; naturally the Egyptian was presumably more popular in Egypt, and so by making him in addition the Arab candidate the Arabs successfully divided their opponents. A fairish analogy off the top of my head would be El Cid championing the Valencian and other Moors against the Almoravids.
Hola Senor,
No – they took advantage of a divide that existed before their conquest.
“The Copts have been persecuted by almost every ruler of Egypt. Their Clergymen have been tortured and exiled even by their Christian brothers after the schism of Chalcedon in 451 A.D. and until the Arab’s conquest of Egypt in 641 A.D.”
http://www.coptic.net/EncyclopediaCoptica/
Honestly though, this is getting schismatic, if you don’t like what the Copts are writing, you’ll have to take it up with them.
Even with other Christian sects, the term Melkite (of the king) was used as a pejorative for the Greek ruling class.
Peace.
You are doing what you have accused many commenters above of doing with respect to yourself, and reading too much into my words. Had the Arabs been indifferent with respect to the government of the Egyptian Church, there would have been as much reason for the Jacobites to oppose them as for the Melchites, hence I say that the Arabs successfully divided their enemies by sponsoring one party, as the Americans in Iraq successfully divided their enemies by sponsoring the Kurdish party, or as the Crusaders divided their enemies by (generally) supporting the Assassins and the Burid Damascenes. I don’t see why you would object to my analogy with El Cid Campeador.
Edit:
It’s a little more complicated than that, see http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10157b.htm .
Hola Senor,
I think we are at a semantic impasse here which is really not worth splitting hairs over. I 100% agree that the Arabs took advantage of the religious division that was present in the Christian population. Again, I’ll leave it to you to discuss/debate with your Coptic brothers who had more right to authority – it’s not my religion.
I agree, but again, it doesn’t necessarily change things much (from your source):
“The name is easily explained philologically. It is a Semitic (presumably Syriac) root with a Greek ending, meaning imperialist.”
“It was originally a pejorative term for all Middle-Eastern Christians who accepted the teachings of the Council of Calcedon (A.D. 451) and the Byzantine Emperor. Over time it was retained only by Eastern Catholics. Eastern Orthodox do not use the term. ”
http://saintpaulmelkite.org/melkite-greek-catholic-church/
Obviously, a division existed – and, again, the Muslims took advantage of it.
I don’t object to your analogy, just the idea that the conquering Arabs created the religious divide. If you didn’t mean that (and I am for letting people speak for themselves – so I apologize for putting words in your mouth) – then no problem – I agree 100%.
Peace.
I don’t see that we’re at a semantic impasse particularly; as I see it you agree entirely with comment #316, now that the meaning has been clarified and the impasse resolved, which (clarification and distinction) is to my mind one of the more important uses of discussion in general, so I don’t think this particular discussion has been at all wasted.
I’ve had such problems for a long time, only on Karlin’s blog…but strangely not that much in recent weeks.