Societies under stress tend to regress in predictable and dangerous ways. I have written about this regression, essentially a retreat form more civilized to less civilized behavior, in several posts, especially Terror and Societal Regression, Terror and Societal Regression Revisited, and Societal Regression and Splitting. At the moment the regressive tendencies are most apparent on the fringes, but the danger of demagogues exploiting anxieties, and the regressive tendencies that arise from the anxiety, increases when governments and elites abdicate their responsibilities to articulate societal values and do not address the sources of the anxiety directly. Government and elite media diffidence enables the most regressive and dangerous events and trends to germinate out of the disinfecting light of day.
LGF links to a post at Gates of Vienna that illustrates how rationality can become perverted in service to regressive tendencies.
Surrender, Genocide… or What?
by El InglésIntroduction
A few months ago, I wrote “The Danish Civil War”, a fictional scenario which served to structure a consideration of various issues relating to the rise of Islam in Europe and the likely consequences thereof. The essay finished with the conclusion that Islam constituted an existential threat to the survival of European civilization, and that Islam’s influence on Europe therefore needed to be eliminated. It further concluded that, logically speaking, the various ways of achieving this goal could be broadly subdivided into three categories:
1) inducing Muslims to leave of their own free will,
2) mass deportations, and
3) genocide.
Charles Johnson's reaction is understandable and appropriate:
Gates of Vienna Toys with Genocide
At Gates of Vienna, an author referred to as “thoughtful” has a piece that lovingly describes the coming genocide of Muslims in Europe: Gates of Vienna: Surrender, Genocide ... or What?
He backs away at the last minute, after imagining it in great detail, and says he’s not advocating genocide. So what does he advocate?
A totalitarian police state that will institute policies of concentration camps and mass deportation, and criminalize being a Muslim in Europe.
Oh, yeah. That’s a lot better.
Charles Johnson and Gates of Vienna have had significant differences in the past and I once before commented on their conflicted views of the conflict in Europe between the Islamists and the native Europeans. In addition, I have had comments on my blog that have suggested that the only effective way to deal with radical Islam is to "bomb them all and let Allah sort it out." Since my policy is to allow all comments (with one exception several years ago of a commenter I banned for anti-Semitic language and threats) I have not deleted such comments. Genocide is the final resting place of societal regression and signs of such thinking and feeling must be attended to with the seriousness that they deserve.
The author of the GoV piece exhibits all the signs of a regressive response to anxiety. He posits Islam as an existential threat to Europe and from that first assumption, several other assumptions and their attendant conclusions follow. A second assumption is that Europe has specific cultural and ethnic attributes that must be preserved at all costs. He then assumes Europe has no ability to defend itself culturally or demographically. From there, he assumes that only by removing the alien from within its midst can Europe be saved. Every step can be defended (though I do not think even the first step is certain by any means) and those who follow the logic will be left with no alternatives to genocide. This should frighten all who care about Europe, or the world, for that matter. We have already seen repeatedly since the middle of the last century that such thinking can and has led to disaster for millions.
Genocide offers an imagined simple solution for often intractable problems. If only all the Jews could be cleansed from Europe in the 1940s, or Palestine today, the indigenous population could happily continue to follow their own true path to nirvana. If only the old guard could be cleansed in Cambodia, the new, communist man could arise and create a worker's paradise. If only the troublesome Kurds could be erased, Saddam Hussein's Iraq could have been the wonderful, peaceful place imagined by Michael Moore. Genocide may have "worked" at one time in human history, but just as trepaning and bleeding with leeches is no longer considered state of the art medical treatment, genocide is no longer considered an acceptable solution to the problems it purports to address.
Europe is deeply troubled by the tensions between the native, now cosmopolitan pan-Europeans, and the unassimilated and angry Muslims within their midst. Yet if we have learned nothing from the war in Iraq, we should have at least been able to recognize that Islamism does not represent the future of Islam. Everywhere that the Islamists have been able to temporarily gain control, they have quickly become hated and their religious views repudiated. This is as true in Iran under the Mullahs as in Fallujah under the tender ministrations of the butchers of al Qaeda in Iraq.
[The exceptions occur where the tribal structures cohere with the religious strictures, such as among the tribes that support the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even in these cases, the religious fundamentalists can only prevail from the barrel of a gun.]
Many Muslims around the world may cheer when Israeli, American, or European infidels are murdered in the name of Islam but the vast majority have no interest in entering an existential fight they know they would lose. Further, whenever Muslims have been offered a choice between the rigors of inflexible Islamist orthodoxy, of whatever variant, versus more personal freedom, those who have experienced freedom are loathe to give it up.
[Do the thought experiment: Imagine the Mutawa, the religous police, trying to take away everyone's cell phone in Saudi Arabia or Iran. The revolution would start tomorrow.]
One of the reasons I have spent so much time writing about the Arab Mind is precisely to help understand how best to attack the rigidity of fundamentalist Islam without having to resort to fantasies of genocide. Fundamentalist Islam's rigidity means that it is fragile. It does not stand up well to exposure to ridicule. Many Muslims applauded the rioting that followed the cartoon Jihad, but many more were embarrassed by their co-religionists excesses. It is not a coincidence that once exposed to the scrutiny of the international community, apostates are now routinely being spared the death penalty Islam has traditionally demanded, women who have been raped are not being stoned to death, and FGM (female genital mutilation) is being increasingly criticized from within Islam itself. Further, there is an immense fifth column living within the heart of Muslim populations that, once engaged and exploited, will destabilize Islam as never before.
A Muslim population that begins to be forced to accept women's rights is a Muslim population that has already begin to repudiate Islamism. Women in Islam know that they are the primary victims of the madness of Islamism; it is one of the reasons that such an Islam is incompatible with the modern world.
Islam will adjust to modernity or marginalize itself. Europe will recover its history and culture, begin to reproduce, or go the way of other failed civilizations. Europe may yet commit cultural suicide, but genocide as a defense is indefensible.
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