Wednesday 18 November 2015

And, into that vacuum stepped Islam …

 

Shadow

Let’s talk about Islam, and its evil. (Beause as we know, the only reason we’re even talking about the religion is because it is evil.)

We should be under no illusions about the evil of Islam, but neither should we grant it any more power than it has: as Ayn Rand used to say, evil on its own is impotent. Evil can only achieve its values through the actions of others—by that which we let evil-doers extort from us.

Never has this underlying impotence been more true of any ideology than Islam:

  • whose allegedly heroic beginnings in historic “conquest” were less the bold display of any great martial ability than the result of occupying the vacuum that emerged after the collapse of the Roman and Persian empires—after which these illiterate marauding heroes cobbled together a religion from the mostly heretical cultural remnants of the desert towns and places they occupied. (Read Tom Holland’s ground-breaking history In the Shadow of the Sword.)
  • whose historic golden age was wholly the result of borrowing from Greek thinkers, contained remarkably few original additions-- and was stopped overnight by the philosopher, Al-Ghazali, more responsible than most for turning Islam into the thing that pulled the pin on Paris (Read my own post ‘The Greatest Story (Hardly) Ever Told’ and Andy Clarkson’s ‘Yes, You Can Blame This Guy For Paris’)
  • whose modern violence has been indirectly financed by the oil purchases of the west, largely armed from the stockpiles of left-behind western military materiel, and whose belligerent limits are imposed only by the acquiescence and appeasement of of western political and intellectual leaders.  (Read the relevant chapters of Daniel Yergin’s classic The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power and Elan Journo’s Winning the Unwinnable War.)
  • whose very tactic of terrorism relies not on conquest–it is never going to establish a caliphate in Paris—“but through scaring us into panicking, overreacting, and changing our behaviour.” (Read, for example, a former IS hostage’s article: ‘I know Islamic State. What they fear more than bombs is unity,’ and reflect on why western cartoonists and writers—Danish cartoonists, Salman Rushdie, Charlie Hebdo--ended up in the front lines of this battle)
  • whose very western recruits are frequently just idiots with empty lives seeking something seemingly meaningful to fill them. (Reflect, for example, on the comment on the would-be Garland terrorist: “He had been going down a bad path and then he found Islam.")

Face it, the only reason we are even talking about the double-damned religion is because from a population of 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide a few dozen terrorists and just a few thousand ISIS fighters, financed by states long known to finance terrorism but for which the west has little appetite to say so, are allowed because of that appeasement to put whole continents on the alert. (Read the report’s and mis-reports overnight, for example, of panic in the streets around European soccer stadiums.)

It truly is the mouse that roars militarily.

Because these fuckers can’t even send their own fighters to do their job! Astonishingly, little has been written on this highly telling fact, but reflect on this: that with only trivial exceptions all those carrying out the horrors in Europe, from London to Glasgow to Madrid to Paris, have not been fighters sent on a mission from far away but have been educated, prosperous and homegrown. (Read for instance my 2014 post Home-grown horror, and Adam Taylor’s piece yesterday The Islamic State wants you to hate refugees: And the plan may be working.)

The real failure is not that the evil is strong—it neither has been nor can be—but that the good has been weak. While western hipsters download zombie films, we have allowed ourselves to be attacked by literal self-made zombies—zombies who are self-admitted death worshippers. As a commentator said yesterday: ”Can a civilisation cowed by campus millennials summon the resolve to defeat Islamic terrorists?” Even more important question in stopping psychopaths and disaffected youngsters find value in these anti-life zombies—if these awkward kids see the west’s intellectual and political leaders so brazenly apologetic about the values of their own culture, especially when the contrast between life and anti-life is so stark, then why in hell (those few who are seduced must wonder) should anyone at all take these values at all seriously?

Why wouldn’t they wonder if there isn’t something in a fundamentalism from the stone age?

Why wouldn’t they embrace meaning where they do find it—in barbarism?

“The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser’s intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture’s dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.”
~ Ayn Rand (from ‘Altruism as Appeasement,’ The Objectivist, Jan. 1966)

By espousing the moral clarity eschewed by those they hear in the west, young homegrown jihadis find something they hadn’t realised existed—and once again Islam steps into a vacuum of others’ creation. The primary problem here of course being that the powerful cultural force they should be hearing from westerners who are sure of their values have instead been silent in defence of the values and moral certainty that make the west great, while pretending that a stone-age culture is in any way equal. As Daniel Pipes asks, how is that “a majority population accepts the customs and even the criminality of a poorer and weaker community? It is the result of a conquest ideology taking the measure of a civilisation that no longer values its heritage, no longer regards itself as worthy of defence.”

Sure,

some of these [homegrown killers] will simply be psychologically susceptible to the nastiness of a violent religion. But what else are they hearing? Where are the voices proclaiming the virtues of reason, individualism and liberty?  Where today will they hear these values proclaimed proudly and unashamedly? Where will they learn of the superiority of reason over religion, of freedom over tyranny?
When Britain was exporting liberty to much of the known world, these values were unapologetically front and centre. These were the values that built western civilisation. These were values absorbed by immigrants and locally-born alike. People  moved to Britain and the west because of these values.
What happened?
In a word: multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism taught that the values of civilisation and those of barbarism were equal.
It taught that liberty and slavery were simply different choices.
It taught that if any culture should be shamed it should be western culture. That the west is responsible for all the world’s horrors, and the rest of the world simply a victim. This is the perversion now taught and promulgated in schools, in universities and in learned commentaries peddled by perfumed academics for the consumption of the self-anointed.
So for all the decades that we’ve been told that Islamic terror is the result of ignorance and poverty, leading westerners have been silent about the superiority of  western health, wealth and freedom over a stone-age theocracy in which beheadings, clitorectomies, slavery and crucifixions still play a part.

So let’s fight for the enlightenment—for Reason, Science, Modernity, and Civilisation--and fill the vacuum.

The Enlightenment is a long-term strategy.
In fact, many westerners would have to discover the enlightenment. The Enlightenment encourages us to be reflective. But to reflect on whether we are doing the right thing, isn’t an invitation to stop doing the right thing. As a civilisation we have become paralysed by self-doubt when we should have become energised by self-reflection. As we have discovered (or as many knew all along) is that a moral and ideological vacuum will be filled by others – as it turns out savages and barbarians.

UPDATE:

Yes, as an emailer suggested to me, there’s a parallel between the impotence of Islam and the impotence of another evil ideology: communism—in that like all anti-life evils they are necessarily parasitic on the good. (Evil is an absence and a negation; evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us.)

Observe, for example, that both Marx and Lenin understood that a country could only go communist after it had a period of capitalism—because only then would there be something decent to loot. (Read Marx’s Capital, if you can, and Lenin’s ‘What Must Be Done.’)

Observe that in a country where chess is a spectator sport, stealing wealth and technology was a necessary feature of the Soviet Union, without which neither production nor progress was possible. (Read Werner Keller’s fabulous history on this, whose very title explains the relationship: East Minus West Equals Zero.)

Observe too that while conservatives focussed their anti-communism on arresting the alleged strength of the evil empire, thinkers like Ayn Rand and Ludwig Von Mises who understood that impotent ideology knew that totalitarianism is not a system that ever produces wealth, and that the Soviet Union faced inevitable economic collapse. (Read Mises’s Socialism and Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. And compare, for example, the technology-stangant dystopia in Ayn Rand’s Anthem to the technology available in either Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984—or even the films of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games.)

.

7 comments:

Richard Wiig said...

On the contrary, that they don't have to send soldiers isn't a sign of weakness. It shows that they already have fighters where they want them and they have a long reach. In the space of a couple of weeks they have downed a Russian airliner. Pulled off the attack in Paris, and murdered 44 in a bombing in Lebanon. And they do this at the same time that Obama has the gall to claim they are "contained". They have hundreds of thousands of supporters within Europe, from which they gain their recruits, and millions of muslims are still pouring in. France now, apparently, has 10,000 terror suspects on its watch list. And still Muslims are pouring in. This isn't a position of weakness. It's a position of strength. The ongoing evasion of Islam as the problem is going to ensure that they ( Islamic Supremacists everywhere, violent and non-violent alike) will continue to gain strength. They are inside the gates (because, as someone put it, there are no gates) and flourishing.

Anonymous said...

One thing not being mentioned is the religious right in USA that is opposed to Enlightenment values. David Niose covers this in his 2012 book Non-Believer Nation (referring to the rise of secular Americans) ~ [These are critically important signals to conservative Christians] who interpret virtually all events biblically. This would be less troubling if biblical prophecy called for co-operation, peace, justice and other desirable ends, but fundamentalist Christianity is apocalyptic, seeing mass destruction and all-out warfare between good and evil as enevitable. In fact 41% of Americans (and 58% white evangelical Protestants) in a 2011 survey believe Jesus Christ will return by 2050, ushering in end times".
"A civilised society in the modern world, especially led by evangelicals who truly believe that the apocalypse might happen in their life-time. Yet this is precisely what we've got - a military that proudly embraces fervent religiosity as a desirable element."
Niose lays bare the whole dismal history of how the religious right hijacked America - per Richard Dawkins. Such that Republican nominees have to tailor there message to the religious to have any hope of success. The judiciary and military also hijacked.
And from National Center for Science Education - Americans science knowledge, 2010, that the world is only 8000 years old is agreed by 45%; that man is directly descended from Adam and Eve, agreed by 60%
On Religious Right
A further marked difference between the fundamentalist Christians and others is that most people are motivated by the desire to find happiness. Those who adhere to Christian fundamentalism do not regard the pursuit of happiness to be a valid motivation, but instead consider "doing the will of God by submitting utterly to the Lordship of His Son Jesus Christ" to be the only acceptable reason for living.""
So the voices of proclaiming the virtues of reason, individualism and liberty are rather muffled.
The material about Islam coming out of USA often has a Christian propaganda about it - is distorted. {Yes it is not peaceful; frequently evil}
I wish USA all the best and I retain its ideals and glories
Peter

Richard Wiig said...

Which material are you referring to Peter, that distorts Islam? I'd be interested in seeing a couple of examples.

Anonymous said...

The American conservative Christians is a broad lump but that they are theologically mixed up is no secret. The fascination with Israel and all sorts of other political squabbles along with a young earth has no theological basis and is a recent error (20th century really) that detracts from the Gospel. On that basis its bloody annoying to orthodox Christians because its bollocks.

It seems a pretty good way to live in doing what Christ would want - good stuff, being generous, no stealing, ripping people off, screwing around etc...

The bible is notably and appears deliberately quiet on when the end will arrive but it makes it clear that a lot of us will be into our second beer when it does because no one will see it coming. The idea is that we be mindful of the possibility of doing good stuff all the time. Its typical of world events over history - same shit, different day although it appears that the world will be pretty keen to be rid of Christianity toward the end. The Muslims are leading so you atheists need to up your game.

3:16

Anonymous said...

Make no mistake, Cresswell is and has been pushing for OPN BORDERS for decades, CRESSWELL is a TRAITOR.
http://mediaarchives.gsradio.net/dduke/111715.mp3
multiculturalism is codeword for WHITE GENOCIDE

MarkT said...

Excellent post, thank you. I needed reminding of that

Anonymous said...

how easily some forget,that in the battle of 'good 'versus' evil',the West has not only God on its side,but also...Batman,Superman....and...!