It is not often I quote Nikita Khrushchev in any context, but Al Qaeda is quite correct that western civilization poses a clear and present danger to their cherished notions of a universal social life centred on submission to God. An economically successful western civilisation underpinned by severalty and free intellectual enquiry is caustic to a civilisation based on the submission to non-rational ideas which are propagated by force. To put it bluntly, we will enervate them and eventually destroy them by gradual assimilation.
The best and brightest muslims are already hard pressed to not see the glaring practical and intellectual flaws in their societies and want better for themselves, and as a result there is already a small but fairly well integrated middle class of secularized American and Euro-Muslims who can be observed in the markets, cinemas, offices, pubs and bars of the west. But far more dangerous to the broader Islamist project is the example not of western thought but of western affluence and the ease and secular self-direction it yields.
The sheer material wealth of the more advanced west is almost guaranteed to subvert the broad masses who come in contact with it. The current difficulties in assimilating the lower parts of the socio-economic western muslim population should not blind us to the fact that western culture’s corrosive effects on the Islamic world view really counts far more when they are felt in Peshawar, Ankara and Cairo than in Marseilles, London and Chicago. In that theatre of the war of civilisations our truly effective weapons are not the gunship helicopters, laser guided bombs and 5.56mm small arms being used in Iraq right now, but rather our cheap DVD players, Internet connections, music/porn/action videos and smorgasbord of good, accessible but inexpensive Tex-Mex, Thai, Italian and Lebanese foods that globalisation has brought us, etc. etc. I have made this point before but as we concentrate on the more local and violent issues being resolved in the streets of Iraq, it does not hurt to put it all in the broader context within which our enemies certainly see things.
It is the horror of this viral characteristic of western consumer culture which really lies at the heart of the antipathy of the Islamists to the west: as secular society and severalty is the true heart of our civilisation, by our very nature we cannot and will not just ‘leave them alone’. It is not a matter of what western governments want to do, because western businesses and cultural influences will go wherever there are receptive markets and audiences. It is not a western ‘conspiracy’ to subvert Islam, merely the very nature of western civilisation at work. Short of turning the entire Islamic world into a hermit empire like North Korea writ large, the mullahs and ayatollahs cannot avoid their flocks hearing our siren songs.
Our weapons are varied and effective
but Al Qaeda is quite correct that western civilization poses a clear and present danger to their cherished notions of a universal social life centred on submission to God.
It is also very important that, as we fight such forces in Iraq, we also fight them in our own midst. It is the Statists and collectivists in our own midst that continue to wear down on our individualism and prosperity in the name of their demigod(s). They hate the trappings of western culture just as much as the mullahs do, if not more so, since it springs up around them. We have to fight just as diligently or ‘gains’ in Iraq are meaningless if it just becomes a part of some flacid, international, UN-esque dominated, World Gov’t. It won’t mean much to win the battle away, and lost the war at home.
“Short of turning the entire Islamic world into a hermit empire like North Korea writ large, the mullahs and ayatollahs cannot avoid their flocks hearing our siren songs.”
I agree with this tenet up to a point, but it would be foolish to underestimate the hostility indoctrinated into the Islamic masses towards modernization and westernization. If the masses can be brainwashed into blind hatred for all things individual and free, the Mullahs need not cover their flocks’ ears to our “siren song”; their flocks will react to such noise with their own indignation and hatred.
It was more than a decade ago that some Iranian Mullah said that the most dangerous thing in the world was the satellite dish.
The amazing ingenuity that we saw in Afghanistan where the locals built dish’s out of bits of old soviet bits and pieces shows what humans are capable of when they get a chance.
Sadly al Jeezera has shown that this technology can also be used to inspire hate. In the long term baywatch may defeat the jihadis, but in the short term the pornography of death and misery may be winning. Remember Orwell’s line that people do not necessarily want a good life .They want sacrifice and loyalty marches and so on.
This is not going to be easy.
Seemingly tangenial, but I think connected in depth note aside on East-West relationship, or lack of it – on the example of the work-in-progress Uzbekistan high-circles divorce scandal(Link)
…She says he’s a religious fanatic, he says she’s a drunk party-girl who’s going to hell for wearing g-strings. He got mad, cancelled her credit cards. She used her bodyguards on him ..
Only in this case the muslim fanatic husband lives in New Jersey, and the “loose” wife – in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
Battle of civilizations, indeed
Hell, you can keep the bomb. Just drop Holly on me.
Perry,
Fair analysis. It doesn’t do any harm to stress, though, that A-Q can quote Nikita with equal confidence. The future belongs not to ideas but to our children. Muslims breed. We do not, much. Therefore the A-Q effort to radicalise Muslim opinion and, thereby, insulate it from the ungodly influence of the material West is the right one for them, providing it can hold the fort while Christendom and World Jewry pop the pill and make no more committment to future than recreational sex.
it would be foolish to underestimate the hostility indoctrinated into the Islamic masses towards modernization and westernization.
I also believe the pro-“clash of civilization” types are confusing the Middle Eastern desire for material wealth with “liberty” and “individual freedom”… The latter concepts may not be as universal as we think here in the secularized West (note that Christian fundamentalism ceased to be an important force in Western society only relatively recently after more than a thousand years of crusades, public executions of religious dissidents etc.). Immigrants from the Middle East by and large tend to resist assimilation into Western society.
Andrew Sullivan is posting a message from a U.S. military acquaintance of his. I think it matches my prejudices about Arabs in general:
I just don’t know how a society so divided along ethnic and tribal lines, with no democratic or liberal traditions and almost zero respect for the rule of law can build any kind of society accept and autocratic one. I’m not ashamed that the US came here with good intentions and noble sentiments about the universality of our values – democracy, liberty, the rule of law etc., but I think all our efforts might be eventually futile. In essence, we have given the Iraqis an enormous gift, but they don’t seem to be seizing the opportunity. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink…
To me, the biggest mistake we are making is trying to force things on them at gunpoint. Democracy tends to evolve from within and there are very few examples of major non-Western countries adopting democracy after losing a war and becoming occupied. Post WW II Japan is about the only relevant exception. I think the Middle East may be too religious, too poor, too stubborn, too mired in the past to embrace “Zionist / Yankee Imperialist values”.
The “We Will Bury You” message suggests an alternative strategy, though. Why not focus on economic reforms first?? E.g. laws to protect property rights and stem corruption, in return for financial/military support? You don’t need “freedom” or “human rights” to create a reasonably well fuctioning capitalist society, a la Augusto Pinochet’s Chile.
MARCU$
Marcus,
Excellent contribution, Marcus. Of course, the Japanese are not an equivalent case. As well as being a highly intelligent people and technically advanced long before WW2, they are fiercely monoracial and monocultural and seem to have had no fear of being weakened by or subsumed in Western culture. Nonetheless, their switch from a militarised and absolutist, autocratic model to a democratic system (albeit it with one permanently ruling party) is one of the greatest triumphs of the cause of freedom.
The Arab world is a more stubborn proposition, with or without A-Q. It is all too possible that the West is over-estimating the potential for political development, if not of the desire for prosperity – and doing so by overestimating or misreading human nature itself. Combines weight of fire may subdue the opposition and win the day for now. But post Iraq, one of the consequences could be a more cautious and even culturally deterministic view of mankind. Bien pensant and Boasian notions of essential human equality and interchangeableness are on trial in Fallujah and Najaf, and may be among the casualties there.
Perry,
The third weapon (the pubertarian one — yeah, when I was 16 mental years of age like yourself I used to find that kind of photo funny) is more likely to incentivise secularists to convert to Islam than the other way round. Haven’t you even tried to grasp the arguments that Guessedworker and myself (inter alius) have been trying to make? Namely that the Muslim homo progenitivus beats the secularist or Christian or Jewish homo contracipiens.
Is it that difficult to understand?
No Charles, it is very simple to understand, which is why it is so obvious that you are completely wrong. “homo contracipiens” has much better weapons.
Guessedworker seems a bit obsessed about breeding as an issue. What’s your point?
This line of thought is reminiscent of Asimov’s Foundation series. In it the small, technologically advanced Foundation plants the seeds of a new galactic empire by using independant traders to introduce technologically advanced gadgets to their more backward neighbors. As their technology was accepted the Foundation’s economic and cultural sphere of influence grew.
To be more precise, the Japanese probably had fewer preconceived notions because their contacts with the West had been fairly limited. In contrast, public perceptions in the Arab world are shaped by the Crusades, Israel, the Caliphate vs. Karl Martell … From their perspective, there is a long rivalry and probably a sense of humiliation too. The simplistic Samizdatista solution to the problem (=total military defeat and humiliation) will make it more likely that they resort to the only feasible form of resistance left: terrorism. The utter failure of their Islamist ideology might seem obvious to us, but it is not so clear to *them* since they are fighting for religious reasons — and they believe the sacrifices being made in this life (even death as a martyr) will be rewarded in the afterlife. How do you discourage angry fanatics like that? Iraq alone may well have millions of potential supporters, and they tend to be better organized than those who are inclined to support Western style reforms.
Fareed Zakaria has written a series of excellent columns on why it would be a folly to force our notions of democracy on the Arabs. He is not necessarily very fond of modern Western democracy, preferring instead the early (late 18th/early 19th century) variant which gradually emerged from economic freedom and prosperity.
I think we would encounter less resistance by focusing more on the Coca Cola side of the equation, and less on human rights … It is of course no easy thing to persuade (bribe?) the Muammar Ghaddafis and Pervez Musharrafs to implement pro-market reforms at home — but they (and the ayatollahs, imams and mullahs) have less to lose personally if they go along with that, as opposed to granting free elections, religious freedom etc.. Their hold on political power need not necessarily be undermined in the near term, if e.g. unemployment and poverty were less signficant problems in the “Arab street”. In fact, I am not convinced Libya is trying to break its international isolation primarily because of “Shrub’s” tough talk. Khaddafi has been looking for a way out of the international penalty box for ten years now; he knows he is going nowhere without investment and modernization. God knows it won’t be easy, but isn’t it quite likely that a Middle East “stealth” policy focused on trade, property rights, anti-corruption policies and economic reforms in general would encounter much less popular resistance than the current “war on terror”?
Note that the objectives outlined above are essentially the same as the end objective of the current Administration’s military policy in Iraq. However, the Americans are right now riding roughshod over Muslim sensibilities and consequently it will be increasingly difficult for sensible Arabs (well, Ahmed Chalabi et al) to promote much-needed reforms since they will be regarded as tainted by associating with the usual Western-Zionist suspects. This means Westerners in general and Americans in particular will have to devote much bigger financial resources and make bigger human sacrifices (=lives lost due to terrorism both here in the West as well as in the Middle East), because the current U.S. military policy increases popular resistance against Western ideas in general.
MARCU$
“homo contracipiens” has much better weapons.
Alas, that is almost entirely irrelevant. Our opponents can hijack aircraft or spend a few hundred dollars at most on homemade bombs to blow up 200 people in Madrid next week.
MARCU$
Perry, Johnathan
Amazing how somebody who can design a site as technically sophisticated as yours can’t think a little about the demographic problem. You write that Guessedworker is ‘obsessed’ with breeding. Unfortunately, societies that aren’t ‘obsessed’ with breeding tend to get replaced by those that are. Sorry to sound like a boring old fart but once again here’s a citation from Polybius which might interest you:
“The fact is that the people of Hellas had entered the false path of ostentation, avarice and laziness, and were therefore becoming unwilling to marry, or, if they did marry, to bring up the children born to them; the majority were only willing to bring up at most one or two, in order to leave them wealthy and to spoil them in their childhood; and in consequence of all this the evil had been spreading rapidly before it was observed. Where there are families of one or two children, of whom war claims one and disease the other for its victim, it is an evident and inevitable consequence that households should be left desolate and that states, precisely like beehives, should gradually lose their reserves and sink into impotence. On this subject there is no need whatsoever to inquire of the gods as to how we are to be saved from the cancer. The plain man will answer that, first and foremost, we must save ourselves, either by changing our obsession or alternatively by making it illegal not to bring up every child that is born.” (Polybius, 202-220 BC, Histories — quoted in Itzkoff, ‘The Decline of Intelligence in America’, page 197).
Add to the demographic problem the dysgenic one – the fact that it’s the cognitively disadvantaged who tend to reproduce rather than the smartasses like ourselves. Richard Dawkins and co. may have all the best arguments, but the women who are treated as fecund pack animals by the white lower orders and the Muslim immigrant community have the most offspring.
An how are we to use the weapons? Try a little bit of genocide?
Coming soon: Charles kindly introduces Samizdata to neo-Malthusianism.
Johnathan,
France offers the best current illustration of my point. The Muslim population is young. Indeed, of the entire French population under 30 years of age it forms maybe 33%. But it has a birth rate two or three times higher than the native rate, and some people claim higher than that.
So the issue for France quite soon becomes one of two, depending on your view of heredity:-
1) For Perry and you, will the West’s weapons of irresistible cultural subversion work quickly enough to defuse the cultural timebomb and render France a merely brown but culturally Western nation?
2) For Charles and myself, will a brown France be accepted in good grace by the dwindling natives even if it doesn’t flop down in the direction of Mecca five times a day – and if not, what will said natives determine to do about it?
The best possible solution to this riddle is for the issue not to be put to the test at all. But for that the liberal-left creed of Race Does Not Exist must be dislodged from its perch, along with the libertarian one of Race Does Not Matter. The outcome in Iraq might, perversely, strengthen this view while, at the same time, confirm the worth and exportability of some Western vales if not all of them
A half billion prosperous Westerners have little to fear from the 5 billion other inhabitants of the planet.
The goal should be to spread the prosperity, and when that happens population growth will slow.
Guessedworker, when I asked what your “point” was, I wanted to have some idea of how you would deal with the kind of population trends you claim are in force. So come on, don’t be shy. Spell out some policy ideas.
As for Charles’ comments ending with references to “pack animals” and so forth, I nearly dropped the coffee on the keyboard. You might want to look up “bigotry” in the dictionary.
Johnathan,
I see two directions in which events can go, only one of which is susceptible to policy interventions. But, frustrating though it may seem, we can’t just jump ahead to the end-game like that. It is all too obvious from your tone that you approach the issue more in a spirit of mischief than open enquiry. That’s a lion’s den into which I shall not walk!
It is necessary, Johnathan, to confront the possibility – however faint – that your own expectations for the future are based on deep if not wilfull misinterpretations of human nature and on much received wisdom. It is necessary to grant the possibility, if only in theory, that the fashionable, mix ‘n match, RDNM world where ideas unite those whom blood, history and culture divide is only social froth. It is necessary to grant the possibility that what is ageless in the hearts of the English remains as it always was, no less self-aware and vital than the corresponding instinct in Jews or Japanese.
You see, if you don’t grant the possibility that, in their racial being, the English and other western peoples can be the same as Jews or Japanese, then you make them entirely unique in the world. You make them the only peoples of whom it is thought right or inevitable that they should accept among themselves anyone from anywhere, and do so without any legitimate protest even to the point of enfeeblement, diaspora and extinction.
Most of those who think thus of the English, French, Dutch or Danes do so because their faith is Egalitarianism. It demands everything, even to the point of sacrifing their own people. It is an extremism of the left that, somehow, has latched onto the levers of state power (the “how” is Gramsci’s subtle strategy but that’s another story).
But you, like Perry, are a man of the right whose rationale of liberty – I won’t insult you further by calling it a religion – also demands the sacrifice of your own people. Who on earth convinced you that race does not matter, was outmoded or an obstruction to liberty? Did you, somewhere along the way, loose sight of the blunt and simple honesty of your brothers and uncles, and place above your obligations to them a single, theoretical concept? Do you seriously expect one day that that concept will benefit them beyond the costs of deracination and dispossession? Even if you love freedom so very much, you must know that there is none to be found there.
By now you will doubtless be even more aware than usual of the gulf between us. Forgive me for evading your request for policies. But we are a very long way from the sort of constructive dialogue in which such ideas can be exchanged profitably. Perhaps later.
Oh my, how predictable. The whole race is a complete canard. It is about as relevant to anything as phrenology. This should be obvious from a little dispassionate observation and rational theorising and requires little ‘convincing’. ‘Deracination’? Whatever. Why am I supposed to care? If a person is right to me to want to procreate with, what possible consern would I have about what colour they are? And I fail to see what that has to do with ‘dispossession’ of anyone. Dispossession of what, exactly? Second thoughts, don’t bother.
This is your house, Perry, and it is the height of bad manners to offend one’s host. So I am sorry to have offended you … again. Perhaps sometime you will indulge me in an explanation of this dispassionate observation that exposes the issue of race for the canard it apparently is. You may not convince me. But I can promise you my fascinated attention.
Johnathan writes:
“As for Charles’ comments ending with references to “pack animals” and so forth, I nearly dropped the coffee on the keyboard. You might want to look up “bigotry” in the dictionary. “
OK, I’ll confess I plagiarised the term ‘fecund pack animals’ from feminist Anna Quindlen, writing in Newsweek (‘Uncle Sam and Aunt Samantha,’ 10/05/01):
“It is possible in Afghanistan for women to be treated like little more than fecund pack animals precisely because gender fear and ignorance and hatred have been codified and permitted to hold sway. In this country, largely because of the concerted efforts of those allied with the women’s movement over a century of struggle, much of that bigotry has been beaten back, even buried.”
Sorry about your coffee, though.
“[…]if you don’t grant the possibility that, in their racial being, the English and other western peoples can be the same as Jews or Japanese, then you make them entirely unique in the world.”
I don’t think I’d try that argument on any English Jew you want to stay friends with, if I were you. You might have a higher strike-rate in Japan because of the prevalence of the nihonjin-ron cult.
Of course English culture is unique–just like every other regional culture. But peoples, in the sense of national or cultural groups, don’t have “racial being” at all, except in the romantic collectivist mythology of blood that is associated with various bloody political movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. If “race” has a real-world meaning, then it is a characteristic of individual people not of peoples. You’ll be telling us next about the English posture, shoe-size and haircut, and that there is such a thing as the national income to be divided among the people.
Charles, wherever you got the “pack animals” line from is immaterial. It was a lousy choice of words to describe people.
Perry, I guess you committed the ultimate sin – you dared to be optimistic. How dare you!
Johnathan,
I wasn’t describing people as ‘pack animals’ — neither was Anna Quindlen. The point I was making is that certain males (chiefly Islamists) DO treat women like ‘fecund pack animals’. Youre shooting the messenger again.
Perry writes in response to Guessedworker:
“The whole race is a complete canard. It is about as relevant to anything as phrenology. This should be obvious from a little dispassionate observation and rational theorising and requires little ‘convincing’. ‘Deracination’? Whatever. Why am I supposed to care? If a person is right to me to want to procreate with, what possible concern would I have about what colour they are? And I fail to see what that has to do with ‘dispossession’ of anyone.”
I think Perry fails to distinguish here between the empirical aspects and the judgmental elements of the ‘race’ issue. Of course, individuals should generally be legally free to choose whatever spouse they fancy, regardless of colour or creed. But I reckon they should also be free to practice private discrimination, or to discourage their children or friends from marrying persons of whom they disapprove, on whatever grounds. That’s the judgmental element. However, just because you (Perry) don’t care about which race you marry doesn’t necessarily mean that ‘there’s no such thing as race’. That’s in principle an empirical issue.
Now let me provide some citations to jog your mind. A German National Socialist wrote in 1936:
“Intermarriage robs us of our future. It callously dismisses as not worth preserving the 5,000 years of civilisation which have made Aryans an extraordinary people. Every marriage of an Aryan to a Non-Aryan erodes the foundations of who we are.”
Sorry, I err. It was a white nationalist who wrote in 1975:
“Intermarriage robs us of our future. It callously dismisses as not worth preserving the 5,000 years of civilisation which have made Whites an extraordinary people. Every marriage of a White to a non-White erodes the foundations of who we are.”
Sorry, I err again. The correct citation is:
“Intermarriage robs us of our future. It callously dismisses as not worth preserving the 5,000 years of scholarship, persecution, humour and optimism which have made Jews an extraordinary people. Every marriage of a Jew to a gentile erodes the foundations of who we are.”
That’s Vanessa Feltz, in a contribution to the 1996 Union of Jewish Students Haggadah on the topic “Why be Jewish?” (quoted from The Spectator of 30 August 2003 – offline, the primary source being Adam Thirlwell’s novel Politics’).
If Jews hadn’t thought and acted in that way, they would have become extinct several thousand years’ ago. Jews exist as an ethnic entity because they pressurised their offspring to marry within the Jewish ethnic community and discouraged proselytisation (Rabbis aren’t ‘People Who Knock At Your Door’). Guess who’s coming to dinner? Not a gentile, let’s hope.
Of course, whether one is interested in the survival of one’s own tribe, ethnic group or race is of course a ‘value judgment’. It’s a gut feeling that some have, others don’t. Groups that have it will probably survive, groups that don’t, won’t.
Food for thought: is it wrong for Vanessa Feltz, or ‘Aryan’ or white or British nationalists to hold beliefs like those cited above? If it is not wrong, are they entitled to encourage restrictions on the immigration of individuals who do not belong to their ethnic group or (if you like) what they imagine to be their ethnic group? Is it wrong for Israel to prohibit the immigration of non-Jews? Was it wrong for Enoch Powell to call for a halt to the immigration of coloured people? Is it right to permit the entry into Britain of white asylum-seekers from Zimbabwe, but to prohibit that of black asylum seekers?
Discuss.
In answer to your various questions, Charles, my answer would be to most of them: yes, it is wrong to discriminate against people on grounds of race.
Go on, now ask us a hard one.
Quite so Johnathan. However…
Of course it is the right of individuals to discriminate on whatever grounds they wish and enforced association is both tyrannous and intolerable.
[snip]
It is entirely wrong.
No they are not because it is enforced ethnic collectivism. The only ‘immigration’ anyone has any right to use force (law) to prevent is onto their property.
Perry writes:
“The only ‘immigration’ anyone has any right to use force (law) to prevent is onto their property.”
Libertarians are divided on this issue – but I think that Hans Hermann Hoppe (the guy who made Andy Duncan see the light) has argued convincingly on the moral and pragmatic grounds for restricting immigration in his seminal essay entitled “On free immigration and enforced immigration” – you’ll find it on line here. His core argument is that a utopian libertarian state is a kind of ‘gated community’. In idyllic and picture skew little Hoppistan (Duncanistan, Copelandistan):
“[a]ll land is privately owned, including all streets, rivers, airports, harbors, etc.. With respect to some pieces of land, the property title may be unrestricted; that is, the owner is permitted to do with his property whatever he pleases as long as he does not physically damage the property owned by others. With respect to other territories, the property title may be more or less severely restricted. As is currently the case in some housing developments, the owner may be bound by contractual limitations on what he can do with his property (voluntary zoning), which might include residential vs. commercial use, no buildings more than four stories high, no sale or rent to Jews, Germans, Catholics, homosexuals, Haitians, families with or without children, or smokers, for example.
Clearly, under this scenario there exists no such thing as freedom of immigration. Rather, there exists the freedom of many independent private property owners to admit or exclude others from their own property in accordance with their own unrestricted or restricted property titles. Admission to some territories might be easy, while to others it might be nearly impossible.”
Etc etc.
Ekshelly, although such utopias exist only in the minds of HHH and his devotees (such as me, with reservations), every nation state implicitly deems itself to be a ‘gated community’ of sorts – that’s what citizenship is about: excluding non-citizens, discriminating against non-citizens. Since – de facto – most non-citizens of European countries are non-white, it can also be called a form of benign racial discrimination – benign in that it does not interfere with the freedom of non-Whites, but simply does not allow them to trespass on the collectively owned private property of the British people or (if you’re a Europhile) of the European Community. After all, everybody knows that when we object to ‘immigration’ it is not to the immigration of people like ourselves – it is to people of colour, brown people, black people, and yellow people. Nobody says it, but everybody means it.
At any rate, if Perry’s argument is followed through to its logical conclusions, there would be no restriction whatsoever on immigration. Perry, are you seriously arguing that every human being is entitled to migrate to wherever she likes, provided she does not demand welfare rights? Should African villagers who are currently starving at home be free, if they have the opportunity, to travel to Britain and starve here instead in ‘public’ places? Doesn’t London ‘belong’ to you in the way that it doesn’t belong to a Hottentot, a Zulu or a Baluba? And cannot a ‘peaceful’ invasion of a country be just as disruptive as a military occupation?
Or do you find it repugnant that Israel (say) restricts immigration to members of its own ethnic group?
I don’t — for me, Israel is (at least when it comes to immigration reform) a light unto the nations.
Guy,
Well, no doubt Jewish sensitivities are always an issue. But the fact remains that Jews are among the most ethno-centric people in the world. Were it not so they could not survive so long in diaspora. Their ethno-centricity expresses itself in many ways – for example, in substantial opposition to the Palestinian right of return.
Likewise, the Japanese are famously resistant to immigration. Why? Because they correctly apprehend themselves to be a racial entity and wish to retain their integrity as such. And that is not the view of just the odd cult. All Japanese are of such a mind (an American idiotarian is currently trying, alone, to convince them of the delights of multiculturalism – no luck so far, though!).
Guy, no European Jew should tell a member of his host people that they do not exist as a race. It is perfectly fat-headed and appropriate only to the kind of chap who will argue for immigration into Japan … or the Palestinian r-o-r … or maybe put up a case that the economically burgeoning Chinese must accept Africa’s poor. I want my people to have the same natural right to protect their racial integrity that non-European peoples everywhere enjoy. What is so morally unacceptable in that?
Perry,
Funnily enough, private property has absolutely nothing to do with it. Six million immigrants don’t invade private property on the odd occasion, as it appeals to them. They act over time and across large districts, domino-style. This they do with the power of numbers, which is a power of coercion. That power is underwritten in our case by a liberal-left establishment that knowingly uses racial minorities against the hegemony of the natives.
Your libertarianism is inadequate to the task of defending our society today against an influx it never requested or wanted, and widely resents. You are proferring irrelevancies.
Guessed and Charles, so apparently you two have no way to distinguish between race on the one hand, and culture, religion, and society on the other? No wonder this discussion is going around in circles.
And Charles: I realize that Judaism isn’t particularly evangelistic, but nevertheless it does have some converts. I’ve read plenty of Jewish authors decrying intermarriage with Gentiles, but never the slightest hint that marrying a converted Jew would be a problem. No surprise here; it’s their religion that they’re concerned about, not their ethnicity.
Kirk,
The English are not a culture. Preserving our culture, even if that were possible, would not be enough.
I don’t know the intermarriage rate of Jews and gentiles here. But in America it is around 50%. There certainly are voices of concern raised. Most particularly, though, the power of the Jewish concern for ethnicity can be read in their restrictions on immigration to Israel. Gentiles need not apply. Palestinians, who are fighting to the death for their right to return to their former lands, will never be granted r-o-r precisely because it would be racial suicide for Israelis.
As far as Judaism is concerned, it is certainly not evangelical. You might check out come-and-hear.com which is a slightly off-th-wall sort of site but the only place on the web a gentile can study the Talmud.
As Guessed has said there is a wide variety of opinion regarding immigration in libertarian circles. Open boarders advocates are just one opinion, and while they have a perfect right to promote and defend their view, it is false to claim that those of us opposed to mass immigration are not “real” libertarians or are in anyway less committed to libertarian principles. Ilana Mercer is just one libertarian voice who has argued against mass immigraiton. There are many others.
I have to say though that I disagree with Charles and Guessed on the race issue. I just dont see it as relevant. I myself am a Cajun/Creole/Cherokee mix, and I think I’m as strong a defender of Western civilisation as you will find.