Keeping a Level Head

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The current pandemic has been greatly disruptive to every person, country, culture and relationship on Earth. It has also been transformative, in that governmental responses to it have brought out secret orientations and sympathies that would otherwise have remained hidden, even to those now possessed by them. Libertarianism, for example, has seen its stock rise dramatically, while whatever appetite there was for authoritarianism and law-worship has declined, or developed anew in others places and forms, with different affiliations.

I have seen friends of many years collapse into wacky thinking and conspiracy, panicked out of their once sturdy minds. Just the other day my mother regretfully informed me that one of her work colleagues has come to believe in the psychotic explanations of David Icke; that 5G produced the virus, directly and by design, as part of a grand plan to enslave and microchip the world. Here in Spain, I have witnessed several people – typically older women – argue with police officers when asked to wear a mask, or to pull them up to cover their noses. Elsewhere, I know people who overestimate the virus as being worse than the 1918 Spanish flu, with one friend, admittedly drunk, going so far as to suggest it will cull half the planet. I know still others who suspect that China let slip, accidentally or otherwise, the creation of a military research laboratory in Wuhan. And so on.

My own experiences have been trying. The first few weeks of the lockdown here were disturbingly un-European. I can easily recall members of the Policia Nacional, with their black guns and batons, shouting at people on the street without a reason to get back to their apartments – “Venga! Vamos!” On one occasion I was myself interrogated for being outside. My explanation – that I was unaware the supermarket had changed its hours that day – was treated with authoritarian contempt. “Es cerrado! Vamos! Vamos!”

Having lost my father at Christmas, the virus erupted before I could catch my breath and added to a sense of personal apocalypse. I couldn’t help but feel anxiety, as well as anger and indignation. And I wasn’t alone.

“We are becoming Chinese!” my girlfriend complained of the drastic security measures. “China is going to win. This is not Europe.”

Days into the lockdown the supermarkets were stripped bare. People jostled for bags of muesli and boxes of milk; phenomena very new to me, and which seemed unreal, movie-like, strangely exhilarating. I rather enjoyed the ‘prepping’ aspect of it all; the feeling that I had secured everything I needed was a rush, no doubt the legacy of an earlier and more eventful evolutionary stage; but this too would give way when the same frustration returned.

I felt then and continue to believe now that the lockdown was an overreach of governmental power. During those long, boring months I was immensely grateful for the telejournalism of Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, who were among very few mainstream figures willing to question the wisdom and desirability of the policy outright. Both of them endorsed things that were silly and untrue, of course, most notably several fringe studies overstating the potential of hydroxychloroquine, which went on to cause great public confusion; but their willingness to question the heel-clicking technocracy of other media was refreshing and allowed for some to retain their sanity.

It seemed commonsensical to me that lockdowns were best targeted at vulnerable populations, not at every man and his dog. Those most at risk should have been encouraged to stay at home, along with anyone who could not live independently of them. Others should have been given the compromise our governments now offer us – namely, that we can go about our business if we wear masks and wash our hands.

I am pleased to see most Spanish people going along with the new rules (the exceptions tend to be non-native). The virus is very real, after all, and despite frequent claims to the contrary, far deadlier than the seasonal flu.

Keeping a level head as the world melts down is a royal art; far more difficult than one would think in advance of the fact. The number of educated people I have seen lose their wits as a result of this pandemic is depressingly high. But our governments and media have also faltered, and let them not insist otherwise. Contradictory information has become so commonplace as to seem unremarkable (the advice regarding masks, etc). So we have all failed in our own ways.

When the vaccine arrives, it will meet with substantial protest and dissent, overlapping streams from wildly different Facebook subcultures, naturopathy through to QAnon.  But I believe a return to something like normality is nonetheless possible. It isn’t only health that matters here. Governments must be pushed back behind their proper limits. Ultimately, that may prove as difficult as extinguishing the virus itself.

It is certainly as important.

David

The Dark Enlightenment

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• First published on this blog in November, 2015

If you’re one of those people not yet not au fait with the internet phenomenon/subculture referred to as the ‘Dark Enlightenment’, perhaps the best way to describe it is with reference to its adherents favourite movie scene. This is the moment in The Matrix, when Neo is offered two pills – one blue, one red. The man offering the medicaments, Morpheus, informs Neo that the pills have different metaphysical powers. One of them, the blue one, will send him back to the artificial world of the Matrix (a computer simulation) that he is already familiar with, completely ignorant of the existence of the alternate (real) world. The other pill, the red one, will make it impossible for him to go back to the sleep of unreality. Upon taking it, he will tumble down the rabbit-hole of the truth, however ugly or traumatic he may find that truth to be. As you’re probably aware, Neo boldly chooses the red pill, and so begins the main action of the film. Well, Dark Enlightenment adherents view themselves as embarking upon a comparably journey to Neo’s, and will often refer to themselves as being ‘red-pilled’. But what truths exactly are they discovering? What reality have they entered that is hidden from the majority? The answer is complicated.

It is certainly accurate to say that the Dark Enlightenment is on the political right. Its followers have little sympathy for feminism or political correctness, and on matters of race and racial difference, their views tend to align with those advanced by the likes of Madison Grant and T.H Huxley. Furthermore, one of the labels embraced by the movement since their beginnings is ‘Neo-reactionary’; a pretty baggy definition, but one that clearly denotes a rightward bent.

Some press commentators have even suggested a fascist sentiment motivates the Dark Enlightenment subculture. Jamie Bartlett (writing for the Daily Telegraph), for example, describes the bloggers associated with the movement as ‘sophisticated neo-fascists’.

“Since 2012” he writes “…a sophisticated but bizarre online neo-fascist movement has been growing fast. It’s called “The Dark Enlightenment”… Supporters are dotted all over the world, connected via a handful of blogs and chat rooms. Its adherents are clever, angry white men patiently awaiting the collapse of civilisation, and a return to some kind of futuristic, ethno-centric feudalism… The philosophy, difficult to pin down exactly, is a loose collection of neo-reactionary ideas, meaning a rejection of most modern thinking: democracy, liberty, and equality… The neo-fascist bit lies in the view that races aren’t equal (they obsess over IQ testing and pseudoscience that they claim proves racial differences, like the Ku Klux Klan) and that women are primarily suited for domestic servitude. They call this “Human biodiversity” – a neat little euphemism. This links directly to their desire to be rid of democracy: because if people aren’t equal, why live in a society in which everyone is treated equally? Some races are naturally better to rule than others, hence their support for various forms of aristocracy and monarchy (and not in the symbolic sense but the very real divine-right-of-kings-sense).”

Is this a fair evaluation? I don’t think that matters. What does matter is why men (and presumably some women) find it necessary to hive off into subcultures in the first place. The Dark Enlightenment is clearly a reaction to the culture of extreme (and unnecessary) self-censorship by the academic and intellectual mainstream. We simply don’t talk about the important facts of the world for fear of alienating a single part of it. No, the races are not equal in average intelligence. Nor are the sexes equal. The first-born child is generally more intelligent than his/her younger siblings. The tall are more successful than the short. Women are physically weaker than men. Egalitarianism is a lie. And yes, even Democracy is a stupid idea when reduced to its fundamentals. For if the majority are wrong about something, then society is every bit as doomed with democracy as it would be with a wrong-headed dictator. Etc… Etc…

But creating subcultures around forbidden truths is a dangerous game. Whenever hives of thought arise, the trust generated by basic truth-telling grants the hive-leader authority over his/her followers. Having earned their trust with real (but publically denied) facts, he/she can then sprinkle any kind of abject stupidity on top. And if any mainstream condemnation of this stupidity comes about, it can be ascribed to ‘Leftism’ or the ‘blue pill’. “They told you the races were equal, so why listen to them when they say authoritarian monarchy is bad?”… “They told you affirmative action made sense, so why believe them when they say Jews aren’t in control of the government” Etc…

Denying self-evident truths risks handing intellectual authority to some very shady people indeed. The Dark Enlightenment must be replaced with a straightforward enlightenment. No ‘darkness’ is necessary.

D, LDN

Challenging the Islamic Mind-Trap

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• First published on this blog in February 2016 

In terms of its reputation among non-believers, the past 15 years must rank as some of Islam’s worst. Every since the planes of 9/11 carved into New York glass, the international media has barely missed a beat in making known the faults of Islamic theology, tradition and social policy. The UK Daily Mail, once the grumpy advocate of small government and Victorian morals, is now better defined as The Daily Islamophobe. The Telegraph, Sun, WSJ, NYT and Star have likewise reshuffled their priorities to place a greater and more critical eye on the Islamic World. The result of this is that every Muslim wrong-doing the world over is reported as international news. Every honour killing, beheading, murder-by-explosion, corrective rape or stoning (though all common enough before 9/11) is now given headline treatment. One can only wonder what this has done to the average Muslim mindset.

It is fair to say that most Muslims sincerely believe Islam is the best religion for mankind to universally adopt; that Islam is a better recipe for peace, progress and happiness than its rivals. Indeed, one cannot be an authentic believer unless one believes this. And yet nobody paying any attention to the contemporary situation can possibly come to this conclusion – or indeed sustain this conclusion – without unimaginable contortions of logic and tricks of the mind. The most visible of these tricks has been to blame the ills of Islam on other forces, whether economic, racial or political. ‘True, Saudi Arabia is a barbaric, undeveloped desert, but it would have been very different were it not for the Zionists’. ‘True, illiteracy and incest are Pakistani specialities, but this would not be the case were it not for the wicked Indians’. And so on.

This self-deception, though ludicrously fake, has held out remarkably well. Apostasy rates from Islam are no higher than in the 1990s. Minority faiths (LDS, Scientology etc…) excepted, Islam remains the fastest growing religion in the world. The impression given is that Islam is the perfectly designed mind-trap; that it has inbuilt defences against criticism and failure that cannot be overcome by reason or reality. But this is unduly pessimistic, I believe. Though strong on the outside, Islamic psychology is substantially weaker in its design that its current reputation might suggest. Inflexibility is being mistaken for strength, disorder for complexity.

The psychology of Islamic belief is best understood as a simple loop of deterrence, aversion and reward. When someone criticises Islam (its truth value, historicity or moral nature), a functioning Muslim will at first rationally process and understand the criticism, perhaps even to the point of agreeing with it. After this, in a state of profound unease, the Muslim will think of the Qur’anic verses drummed into his consciousness since infancy. He will think especially of those passages admonishing the ‘unbelievers’ – those who are bound for hellfire and who stray habitually from the ‘right path’. This then creates a feeling of terror and a desperation to obey Allah (who can perceive thoughts, reasoning, and even inclinations). To get rid of this discomfort, the believer admonishes the critic with harsh and even violent words. How dare he question the perfection of the Qur’an! He must have no soul! The aggression towards the critic is for the eyes of Allah and not the critic himself. The greater the aggression, the more relief will be felt by the believer. He is angry at you because you derailed his circular thoughts. You convinced him of something forbidden, something he tries with every fibre of his being not to think about. The force of aggression you unleash in him is proportionate to how convincing he (almost) found your argument; to how close you pushed him to the edge of reason.

Circular thinking is central to Islamic belief

This process also governs how Muslims integrate (or fail to integrate) the contemporary realities of the world. When viewing the chaos of Quranic rule in Syria, the loop described above prevents the processing of the stimuli into moral judgement and understanding. The believer is not ignorant. He knows everything we know. He just has a disorder of thought which allows him to dispose of un-Islamic stimuli as fast as he imbibes it.

How could one disrupt the loop? This is question best answered by those who have been raised in Islam only to discard it at a later stage. Since I am not from a Muslim background, I will have to go from the accounts of others.

As you’ll be aware, testimonies by ex-Muslims are notable among apostatatic statements by their emphasis on the aspect of ‘fear’; fear of Allah, of hellfire, of divine retribution awaiting them should they fail to live a morally perfect life. To understand why this is so characteristic of Islam, one must first appreciate the system by which human beings are said to be judged in Islamic theology.

According to Islamic tradition, a Muslim has two angels beside him at all times – one to the left, another to the right. One of these keeps a record of the good deeds and thoughts the believer performs and has during his earthly tenure, and the other keeps record of the bad. At the day of judgement, the two records are ‘weighed’ to see which is more reflective of the human in question, greatly influencing (but not deciding) whether he is to go to hell or paradise.

In a comparative sense, this is one of the more endearing and just-seeming of Islamic concepts. But a side effect of it is that the believer becomes subject to the divine equivalent of thought policing. As I say, the Kiraman Katibin do not only record your deeds, but your inner reflections. They make note of your intentions, temptations, lusts and transgressions, preserving all of them down to the finest detail. A bad deed is never forgotten or forgiven. There is no equivalent of Catholic confession in which one may wipe the slate clean. You sin and you are stained. Black marks last forever.

Try to imagine the effect this concept would have on your psychology were you to believe in it. You would be unable to enjoy a single private emotion without the fear of upsetting an omniscient authority. And since even temptations are recorded, you would be compelled to avoid any environment or stimuli which might lead you astray. This explains why Muslims are so seemingly afraid of female flesh. A girl in a mini-skirt prompts ‘impure’ thoughts in the believer, which in turn upsets Allah. The recorded acts of aggression against such women (Cologne, Rotherham etc…) are attempts to impress Allah, to make up with him for brief deficiencies of thought control. The believer might have been weak-minded for a moment, but he can still be a soldier of Islam by punishing the kafir in question.

You would also avoid un-Islamic knowledge as a matter of course. This explains why Muslims read little other than Islamic texts, and why they remain ignorant of scientific concepts like evolution and cosmology. The Muslims themselves might be intelligent and academically gifted, but their fear of wrong-thinking deters them from building on these gifts. One might posit this anxiety as the reason for the un-development of the Muslim world as a whole.

Islam, as a mindset, is a permanent state of anxiety, never-ending panic attack, perpetual psychosis. This must be understood by anyone who wishes to break through Islamic psychology to where the captive human is being held. One must treat a Muslim in the same way one would treat a victim of OCD or any comparable neurotic illness. Muslim fanaticism is based in fear. Muslim confidence is fake. Muslims do not like their God. They are afraid of him.

Convincing (or trying to convince) a Muslim that their religion is axiomatically false must necessarily be a perilous operation. If you do not succeed, he will kill you for trying. But it is not impossible. The best approach is not to impose conclusions on the believer, but rather to ask questions. The most developed, rich and powerful parts of the world are those in which Muslim believers are few. Are these enemies of God blessed by something else? Why are so many Muslims killed by other believers? Why are non-Muslim women happier and more secure from domestic violence and rape than Muslim women? Why are so many claims in the Quran provably false? Why do Muslims seem naturally drawn to non-Muslim societies over Muslim ones? Why do Muslim countries fail at science and technological development? Why are non-Muslims so petrified of Muslims in particular (and not, say, Hindus and Sikhs)? Why do Muslim armies fail to win battles against non-Islamic armies? Why are non-Muslims more plentiful than Muslims? And so on.

The more questions one leaves with a Muslim, the more effort he will have to put into diverting them from his rational mind. True, some believers are superhumanly stubborn, but these are far from typical. Many have never been presented with un-Islamic arguments before. A missile shower of reasonable doubts can severely degrade the conviction of a semi-committed believer.

While Islamic psychology cannot be broken in a society which prohibits un-Islamic concepts from being entertained, it can at least be attempted in the Western world, where no form of speech is (officially at least) off-limits. Muslims shouldn’t be written off as hopeless. It costs nothing to try and liberate their minds. You may be surprised by your success.

D, LDN

The Future and the Western World

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• First published on this blog in October, 2015

Whatever one’s political orientations are, and no matter what the individual context is, the sight of human suffering is always traumatic. As human beings, we are naturally upset when presented with photographs of starving African children, shrapnel-wounded Syrian schoolgirls, Burka’d Afghan women and brainwashed North Korean families. It is the way we were designed to be. Few things are more innate.

Given this predisposition, the arguments of ‘humanitarianism’ will usually find a public audience, and typically (from there) a political majority. For example, the view that it isn’t ‘fair’ for Americans to have ipads and super-sized milkshakes, while Malians have only bottle tops and sewer puddles is not one most people would feel comfortable disputing. Who would ever wish to be regarded as an elitist or social Darwinist? No-one, I would venture.

However, in the interest of truth, we must consider that at some point the privileged will have to draw a line around their advantages and prevent their being usurped. For if they fail to do so, the advantages will be watered down, or stolen outright, to be shared among the swelling masses until all have as much as each other, and very little alike.

It is a good time to reflect on this difficult issue. For if we think that the West enjoys obscene advantages at the moment, the developments of the near future will leave us bewildered.

We are living on the brink of a scientific revolution unlike any in history. The confluence of emerging competences in AI, robotics, nanotechnology, life-extension and genetic manipulation will make the gap between America and Mali today seem insignificant. Part of the world is about to accelerate through time into a dazzling future, and all other parts will be left languishing in a primitive angry, resentful past.

Most ordinary folk have no idea of what is about to be unleashed on the Western market. Misinformed by experience, they naively presume that technology will progress at the same rate as it did in the past. They do not realise that with every advance, technological development is speeding up.

To a 20 year old in 1980, military drones were science-fiction, as were iPhones, ipads, anti-satellite weapons and hypersonic vehicles. And yet all are now with us. It takes a healthy and imaginative mind to realise how much has been achieved in such a short period of time, and to appreciate that this kind of 35 year leap will soon take 5 years, then 4, then 3…

We would be fools to believe this scientific revolution will not have geopolitical consequences as large as its spectacle.

Right now, you can buy a PlayStation in Karachi, and perhaps even in Mali. This won’t be the case with the operating systems of the future. New technologies will be so overwhelming and expensive (and dependent on other technologies and infrastructures) that first-world lifestyles will fall entirely into their orbit, adapted to fit and absorb their possibilities. The first-world will begin to speak a language that the rest of the world cannot relate to, using concepts, humour, references and symbolism only applicable to the age the West (and the West alone) has arrived at. In time, technology will create a new cultural divide far greater than any created by religion or politics.

And as that divide grows, the West will have to make a choice. Let the rest of the world in on the future, and risk having our hard-won wealth and military advantages destroyed or turned against us by destructive and primitive beliefs; or else simply declare ourselves the winners of human history; the winners of the global lottery, and be happy and secure in our good fortune, willing to defend it from our competitors. Triumphalism, that is, and not humanitarianism.

While this sounds morally outrageous, recall that many of us indulge in this attitude already, even if only semi-consciously. When you’re out using your laptop in Starbucks, for example, you are doing so fully in the knowledge that you are part of the exclusive 20% of the world population who can afford to live so extravagantly. Though we might feel privately guilty about this, none of us make any great effort to change it. If a popular figure (Russell Brand, perhaps) called upon us to donate 90% of our wages each month so that the third and second worlds can lead a Western standard of life, we would all refuse. In fact, we would likely be indignant about it. Our civilisation has figured out the best way to live, to produce and to thrive. Theirs has not done so. Sub-Saharan Africa is among the most fertile regions in the world. The Islamic world is flush with resources. The reason for our success is our creativity; the things we have done with our hands and minds. Therefore, only we have a right to the fruits of our achievements. Perhaps this is the correct attitude…

‘Humanitarianism’ and its much vaunted idea of ‘international development’ certainly has a future. But I don’t believe its arguments are as future-proof as some believe. I’m interested in your views.

D, LDN

Perfectionland: Notes on Nihon

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I wasn’t in Japan for long – only five days – but it was enough to appreciate the essence of the place. The country, as I had expected to discover, is a marvel; remarkable, thrilling, inspiring and blessed with so many natural advantages that it leaves one feeling furiously envious. The people I met were beautiful and ultra-civilised – if also slightly robotic. The climate was milder than I expected (having previously visited unbearably humid South Korea). The natural environment (and especially the trees) I found dazzlingly attractive. And though I am not a ‘weeaboo’ by any stretch of the imagination, I did come away with a newfound appreciation for manga and J-Pop (especially the bizarre girl-group AKB48 – seriously look them up).

I have, of course, always understood the Western fetish for East Asia and for Japan in particular. The appeal of homogenous, orderly and affluent societies to those stranded in multiculturalised urban jungles is perfectly obvious. Japan is a dream of faultlessness; a magical perfectionland, where the girls are thin and pretty, the IQs are through the roof and crime and disorder are almost entirely absent. Who could fail to be attracted to that?

It is revealing that many of the leading luminaries of the Western far-right have had personal experience of Japan. The current leader of the white nationalist British National Party (BNP) Adam Walker, for example, spent many years  there teaching English to children. Jared Taylor, leader of the neo-segregationist website American Renaissance, also spent many years living in the country and speaks the language fluently. This makes a lot of sense to me.

A Western citizen exposed to Japan for a considerable period of time will inevitably come to resent the fact that his or her own country has gone down such a different, self-destructive path. Why can’t England be like Japan? Why can’t London be like Tokyo? Exposure to Japan can by itself turn a liberal into a reactionary.

Of course, there is no new shift in policy available to us that can make England into Japan or London into Tokyo, and any effort to bring such changes about will be a failure (and a bloody one at that). This is because Japan has dodged the bullet of decline for reasons that are inherently Japanese.

First, Japan has always been insular. Indeed, prior to the Meiji restoration, Japan maintained the strictest policy of cultural isolation in human history, even at times forbidding its citizenry the right to leave the archipelago on pain of death. Second, Japanese people are, on average, smarter than Europeans by two to three IQ points. This is not an insignificant difference and it has real-world consequences. Finally, Japanese men have lower levels of testosterone than Europeans, meaning that libertinism, crimes of aggression (and increasingly even reproduction) are much rarer there than in other parts of the world.

Given that Europeans cannot become Japanese simply by changing national policy, those who (like Jared Taylor and Adam Walker) dream of importing Japanese advantages into the West are sadly deluded. The best we can do is envy them quietly and try not to get too depressed.

D, LDN

Islam is Ruining Everything

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The past fortnight has seen Islamic (let’s stop calling it ‘Islamist’) violence in Nice, Turkey, Germany (twice) and the narrowest prevention of terrorism in Latin America. The breathing space between atrocities is progressively diminishing, leaving the public disorientated and confused, and politicians struggling to issue apologies and rationalisations at a matching speed.

The situation is now clear as day. In small towns and large cities alike, Westerners are no longer able to go about their everyday lives without the risk of horrific and merciless slaughter at the hands of people who shouldn’t even be in the same part of the world as them. Even if one still feels moved to deny this, one runs the risk of being interrupted mid-sentence by reports of a fresh atrocity. In the time it takes to say the sentence ‘Not all Muslims are like this’, the chances are some fresh batch of innocent humans have been dispatched to an early grave by Islamic hands. It is no wonder then that even the most doctrinaire leftists are pausing for as long as possible before offering excuses for their pet Rottweiler’s latest ‘aberration’.

Where is all this leading? Where can it possibly end? It is to me entirely infeasible to expect Europeans or Americans to put up with Islamic violence indefinitely. Even a castrated man still possesses adrenaline – the base material of anger and resistance; the same is true of a castrated population. It may take time, and I cannot say exactly when it will happen, but there will one day be a ferocious rebellion against the deteriorating condition of the Western World; a unified, grassroots drive to wind the clock back in order to wind it forwards. Who knows who will start it, or what event will provide the back-breaking straw. We can only be sure that it will happen.

And what will it look like when it does happen? Fascism? Concentration camps? Ultra-nationalist racism and anti-democratic thuggery? On current trends, I see no reason why not. Madame Le Pen, with her indoctrinated anti-German bigotry and anti-free-market fanaticism, is fast rising in France. The anti-Semitic far-right in Austria only narrowly lost out in the country’s last presidential election and look set to make it the next time around. And here in the UK, renegade Brexit supporters, buoyed by their unexpected triumph in June, are attacking foreigners en masse; not only third-world migrants, but also Poles, Bulgarians, Portuguese and Ukrainians.

Let there be no doubt about whose fault this is. It is the doing of Muslims and of Islam, a toxic degeneracy that, having long ago ruined the countries now oppressed under the star and crescent, is actively poisoning the world. Islam is ruining everything.

Before September 2001, the European Union was broadly regarded (by most Europeans) as a noble and constructive enterprise that promoted unity and peaceful cooperation; the dream of such patriotic visionaries as Winston Churchill and Charles De Gaulle. Now, after decades of Islamic violence and rape, the EU concept is seen as being decidedly anti-patriotic, even anti-European. This was never inevitable and it is something worth being angry about.

Before September, 2001, the far-right in both Europe and America was close to oblivion. No-one beyond a few tattooed skinheads took the likes of David Duke or Nick Griffin seriously. Now, after 15 years of global chaos, both men command a social media following of thousands; numbers which continue to grow rapidly by the hour.

Before 2001, race riots in the United Kingdom were small enough and rare enough to be ignored altogether by cultural historians. Though there were often local tensions over black muggers and Indian corner shops, these were minor, resolvable blips on an otherwise shining record of integration and social harmony. Now, with Muslims slitting throats faster than non-Muslim migrants can make positive contributions to society, that happy reality is all but disappearing. All migrants, of all faiths and traditions, are having their record of integration thrown into jeopardy by Islamic misbehaviour.

It matters little to a rage-infected, low-IQ skinhead whether a bearded man adheres to Sikhism or Islam. As long as he looks like Anjem Choudary, he is Anjem Choudary. Muslim evil has endangered all Asians equally, and who can say for sure this wasn’t intentional?

Even Jews, the most valuable allies the Western world possesses against the Islamist hordes, have been assaulted and victimised by numb-skulled hotheads intent on punishing Muslims. It would take a very imaginative mind to come up with a more appalling irony than that.

And the fallout continues to get even stranger. Though the details of the story are still developing, the massacre in Munich yesterday is thought to have been carried out by an 18-year-old Iranian migrant suffering (as many Iranians do) from a cultural identity crisis.

According to the Guardian – just before the killer turned the gun on himself, he is said to have engaged a member of the public in a vicious argument about his national status, screaming at one point “I am a German!” and cursing ‘Fucking Turks’ and ‘Dirty foreigners’. This makes a lot of sense to me.

Not only does Muslim misbehaviour poison attitudes among the natives of the West. It also distorts and deforms the thinking of those unfortunate enough to be caught somewhere between modernity and darkness. Think of it this way: If you were a young Moroccan, Turkish or Iranian migrant in Europe, in love with modernity and desirous of shedding your Islamic identity, you might well find yourself whipped up into an anxious frenzy by the growing backlash against people who look like you, and for whom you might naturally be mistaken in the whirlwind retributions to come. In order to make yourself safe from those future pogroms, you would have to strive to differentiate yourself from your own community, all the while risking the disapproval of your family and friends (some of whom might be inclined to punish your cultural apostasy with death). And even if you managed this, you would still have to find a way of marking yourself off physically or bureaucratically from the community you have left. And so on.

This is a very hard task, and many see no way of getting all the way through it. (*As I say, details are still emerging about Munich. Even if I am wrong about the intentions of the shooter, I will leave this part of the text as it is because I feel the point is worthy of being made).

When liberals, despite their doubtlessly manipulative intentions, claim that Muslims are the principal victims of radical Islam (or Islam – as it’s more accurately called), I tend to believe them. No-one is born a Muslim. No child believes in Allah before he or she has learnt to fear violence and hellfire. To reflect on what 1.6 billion people could have achieved were it not for Quranic indoctrination is one of the saddest thoughts one can entertain.

In so many countries and in so many ways, Islam is ruining everything.

D, LDN

There Are No Noble Savages

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If the reader is a user of facebook or any comparable website, he or she may be familiar with the following viral post:

“An anthropologist proposed a game to the kids in an African tribe. He put a basket of fruit near a tree and told the kids that who ever got there first won the sweet fruits. When he told them to run, they all took each others hands and ran together, then sat together enjoying their treats. When he asked them why they had run like that as one could have had all the treats for himself, they said: “Ubunto. How can one of us be happy if all the other ones are sad?”. ‘Ubunto’ in Xhosa culture means ‘I am because we are'”

Though the authenticity of the Ubunto story is uncertain, the word appears to be real and to have roughly the same meaning attributed to it. If this is the case, the concept is surely pleasant, even admirable. But is it really so original or sophisticated?

If the adoring Westerners cooing over this story could stop crying with happiness for one moment, they might recall the similar Western phrase ‘all for one, one for all’ – or indeed many hundreds of other equivalents around the world.

Human solidarity, yet another way of describing ‘Ubunto’, is an innate quality invested in the human condition by the legacy of biological evolution. It is not something one needs to give a name to. It just exists – ineradicably, albeit in differing endowments from person to person.

As many cynics have noted, the only reason Western audiences are so enamoured of the Ubunto story in particular is because it appears to align with a very old and sentimental fallacy; that of the ‘Noble savage’.

The Noble Savage has been part of Western art – particularly literature – for centuries. Put simply, the idea is that undeveloped cultures (especially African, Amerindian, Asian and Middle Eastern cultures), though on the surface less sophisticated and morally developed than those of Europe, nevertheless retain valuable ancient wisdom the West may profit by relearning.

You can see the cultural effects of this notion everywhere you look; from fridge magnets emblazoned with Confucian and Native American spiritual maxims, to the kind of the meme mentioned above. The West cannot seem to get enough of ancient non-European ‘wisdom’. It is substantially more popular even than Western philosophy, including the immortal works of Nietzsche, Kant and the ancient Greeks – (when was the last time you saw a Plato fridge magnet?).

Of course, being the cultural bigot that I am, I do not believe that Crazy Horse is the equal of Nietzsche. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I don’t think they even belong in the same category. Nietzsche was the greatest philosopher of the last 500 years. Crazy Horse, though undoubtedly noble in the military sense, made only commonsensical remarks about his own life and about a political struggle he ended up losing (to Europeans).

Historic Third World philosophers, like historic Third World mathematicians, physicists and inventors, are extremely thin on the ground. The vast majority of celebrated non-European thinkers are products of the past 100 years, a century marked by non-European adaptation to European domination and cultural hegemony.

This is not a coincidence. When European civilisation – now de-racialised as  ‘The West’ – made the first breakthrough from localism to worldliness, the broader world was still filled with savage darkness. And long after the enlightenment began, Asians (including those dwelling in the now impressive Japanese and Korean cultures), Africans and Amerindians continued to exist in a twilight condition of subsistence agriculture and mind-numbing ritual.

In India, now home to internet entrepreneurs and industrialist billionaires, widowed women hurled themselves onto burning funeral pyres to satisfy perverse notions of marital duty. In Japan, now the epicentre of global technological innovation, Samurai (normal people in strange clothes) cut their stomachs open to amend for ‘dishonourable’ failures in martial etiquette. There is evidence of cannibalism in Southern Africa as late as the Victorian era. And so on…

The European explosion – the multinational enlightenment – was the beginning of true civilisation. Though periods of greatness in North Africa, the Middle East, Mexico and China had been observed centuries before this point, it is only after this seismic event that civilisation in its contemporarily recognisable form began.

So why do Westerners, those to whom the most credit belongs,  now look back at pre-civilisation with such a powerful nostalgia? Why do Brits and Americans, looking at memes on Apple Mackintosh computers, interpret the word ‘umbunto’ as a proof of Third World superiority? And why are non-Europeans, Asians especially, increasingly more cognizant of Western superiority than Westerners?

Since these questions are interconnected, a single answer may suffice for all of them. The West, unlike the rest of the planet, is infected with a virus of civilizational exhaustion; a crisis of civilizational confidence. We Westerners have grown so used to the blessings of modernity that we have come to take them for granted. It takes real mental exertion for us to imagine (honestly and accurately) a world without the internet, refrigerators and Starbucks restaurants. And with a thick fog of relativism further obscuring our vision we are inevitably tempted by the idea that such a condition is more ‘wholesome’, ‘substantial’ or culturally complex than that in which we now live.

Westerners have become bored of affluence and modernity

But it isn’t more wholesome, of course, nor more substantial, complex, romantic… It is inferior by almost every measure. And if anyone needs evidence of this contention, one can experience pre-civilisation for a very paltry sum these days. One can fly over to Ghana, Chad, North Korea or Afghanistan and live cheaply for whole years at a time. The reason we don’t want to dwell in such places, would not even dream of doing so, is because anti-Western sentiment is based on lies, illusions and errors of logic.

The West (including the Western-inspired cultures of Japan and Korea) is the only true civilisation on Earth. The further you go away from it, the further you go away from all that is valuable, good and worth living for.

The Noble Savage myth is the first step down a very slippery slope. It is best not to take it, even if that means not sharing a heart-warming post on social media.

D, LDN.

The Consequences of White Decline

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A mournful yet grimly poetic comment on a newspaper article captured my attention last week. It was on the Guardian‘s Comment is Free webpage (of all places) and read as follows:

“Europe has been dying for decades with negative growth rates. There are not enough young people to turn the demographic process around. Young Muslim men are being imported to alter the nation. These are the saddest of our days.”

The last line deserves thinking about. One could argue, as I’m sure many other commentators on the article later did, that this kind of talk is hyperbole (and dangerous hyperbole at that). Europe has a very long and remarkably dramatic, often blood-soaked history. To suggest the present day is its saddest era is a statement in need of concrete, supporting information.

Regretfully, that evidence is easily found. As regular visitors to this blog will be aware, Europe is faced with an apocalyptic downward trend. Low birth rates, high Muslim birth rates, low workforce numbers, high immigration numbers. The perfect storm. The end of the European organism seems all but guaranteed.

It’s interesting to note that this was actually predicted a long time ago, including by the mainstream press. Back in the year 2000, the Observer printed an article which has subsequently been forgotten in the wake of events the following year. It was entitled (rather dramatically) ‘The Last Days of a White World’. Here is an extended quotation:

“The past millennium was more than anything the era of the whites. Just 500 years ago, few had ventured outside their European homeland. Then, with several acts of genocide clearing the way, they settled in North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, southern Africa…But now, around the world, whites are falling as a proportion of population. The United Nations collects and produces a vast array of statistics on population… the UN’s State of the World Population 1999 predicted that 98 per cent of the growth in the world’s population by 2025 will occur in lesser developed regions, principally Africa and Asia. The most significant reason for this is lower birth rates in rich countries: in 61 countries, mainly the rich ones, people are no longer having enough babies to replace themselves…In its World Population Profile 1998, the US Census Bureau predicted that by the second decade of this century all the net gain in world population will be in developing countries. ‘The future of human population growth has been determined, and is being determined, in the world’s poorer nations”

Fertility Rate by Country (enlarge to read)

The article then went on to muse on the social and economic consequences of this imbalance, with a special focus placed on the issue of immigration: “In Britain the number of ethnic minority citizens has risen from a few tens of thousands in the 1950s, to more than 3 million – or around 6 per cent of the total population. While the number of whites is virtually static, higher fertility and net immigration means the number from ethnic minorities is growing by 2 to 3 per cent a year…One demographer, who didn’t want to be named for fear of being called racist, said: ‘It’s a matter of pure arithmetic that, if nothing else happens, non-Euro peans will become a majority and whites a minority in the UK.”

Utopians like to argue that this doesn’t really matter, insisting that it is the character of a country, and not its biological content, that matters most. I can only partially agree with that. It is certainly true that were the newcomers culturally European, then a semblance of Englishness/Britishness could be maintained without an English/British majority. Alas, the newcomers are not culturally European. They are Pakistani, Afghan, Syrian, Indian, Sri Lankan, Korean and Bangladeshi.

Origin of UK Immigration

Does the passing of White peoples concern the world? I believe it should, whether it does at present or not. A post-white world – or a world in which White influence is suppressed – would be a much darker world in ways quite apart from pigmentation. As well as the Holocaust, slavery, colonialism, apartheid, communism, and fascism, the White race has invented (and largely still abides by) the most progressive racial attitude in world history.

One could prove this with an experiment. Put a White man, a Persian and an Arab in the same room. Whilst the White man is there, the Persian and Arab will pretend to be modern, evolved human beings, no longer concerned with race, tribe or ancient grievance. If the White man secretly sets a tape recorder and then leaves the room, however, he will record a remarkable and horrifying transformation. The Persian and Arab will tear into each other for reasons buried under centuries of time. A similar result will arise from using Japanese and Chinese, or Turkish and Kurdish subjects. 

The idea that modern people are not blamed for the behaviour of their ancestors is crucial to post-racial practice. It is the reason Russians do not wish to annihilate Germans. It is why Spanish people do not wish to annihilate the English. White people judge people of other races on an individual, case by case basis. Even if black people do commit more crimes than other races on average, post-racial whites give every black person they meet the benefit of the doubt, restraining judgement until evidence of criminality or malevolence is provided. After the White age ends, this pleasant sophistication will fade away, unleashing an age of primitive darkness. Racism, which has never faded as a concept in the hearts of non-White peoples, will rise to the surface, causing wars, genocides and general misery.

Religious moderation is another gift of the White peoples to the world. One of the reasons Hindu women are no longer tossing themselves on burning funeral pyres is because the English banned the insane practice outright. In the same spirit, Whites are the only race loudly protesting the use of FGM, breast-ironing and forced marriage. Without a global white standard for the third world to aspire to, the old errors and imbecilic traditions will regain prominence.

And none of this is to touch upon the moral question in all this; namely, should Whites – as much as any other tribe – have the right to resist their overcoming? The obvious answer is yes. Like any other, European (and Europe-derived) cultures are the product of thousands of years of evolution, innovation and struggle. To see the work of 3 thousand years vanish in the course of 100 is rightly perceived (by ordinary Whites) as a tragedy without precedent. It isn’t ‘genocide’, as some hot-headedly claim. But it is destruction. Something of value is being destroyed to be replaced by the excess of something that already exists. The Third World already houses and assures the continuation of Third World culture. Only Europe (and its offshoots) can incubate European culture. For the cultures of the Third World to build an annex on formerly European ground represents a loss of something. The world will be impoverished by it, not enriched.

European culture is the undergirding of modern popular culture and has been for centuries. Without European innovation there would never have been television or radio, let alone Hollywood, Disney or any of the other specific glories of the entertainment industry. The political, social and economic stability that results from a White majority supports even minority art-forms. If black people are naturally talented at hip-hop, why isn’t Africa the leading exporter of rap music? Surely the answer is that it is the combination of black talent with White culture and technological expertise that allows the creation of hip-hop, not to mention jazz, jungle, RnB, rock etc… Without it, such minorities might not be as able to express or enrich themselves.

White culture is defined more than anything by its stability. White people are boring. They pay taxes, raise families, rarely take illegal substances and by and large stay out of prison. It isn’t glamorous to be that way. But it is essential to everyone in the West that one part of society bothers to take care of these things; that one part continues to provide the straightened backbone supporting the whole. If Whites no longer worked or paid taxes, the boasted-about riches of rappers, drug dealers and street hustlers would vanish, as would the welfare, healthcare provisions and commercial life of urban minorities.

White civilisation is the only civilisation to share its territory (voluntarily) with imported foreign peoples. There are no black areas in Japan. There are no Pakistani enclaves in China. Multi-racialism (which must always be distinguished from multiculturalism) is a White virtue, exclusively and originally. Whilst we might unimaginatively consider the presence of Afghans in Canada to be in tune with the music of the universe, it is actually absurd. It is absurd for the mountain villagers of Kandahar to nest on the native soil of the Inuit. And had the Inuit retained sovereign dominion over their continental home, we can justly assume that Afghans would never have been invited to settle as they have. It is entirely because of the attitudes of the White colonisers of North America that such people have been integrated into the Western hemisphere.

White majority societies also provide by a considerable distance the world’s most tolerant environments for minority sexualities and lifestyles. Gay villages – areas in which gay men and women can openly and freely congregate – are a fixture in most European capital cities, but remain rare to non-existent in the Third World, where anti-homosexual sentiment is close to universal. In non-White communities within the West itself, anti-gay violence remains a constant feature of life, and has led many gay minority men to flee to the safety of White areas. When Whites are no longer the dominant cultural player in these countries, a renaissance in anti-gay politics seems almost certain to occur.

Whose fault is the decline of Whites? According to the internet, the blame lies squarely upon the Jewish people; specifically, on the liberalising effect of their instinctive political and social bias. Such people argue that Jews, being a minority, are naturally inclined to be suspicious  if not hostile to White ethno-centrism (which almost always excludes and/or seeks to persecute them). In this spirit, they have been at the forefront of liberal politics in the Western world for over a century. But this theory (The MacDonald Thesis) is pocked all over with gushing holes. Why would Jews want to fill Europe, currently filled with post-racial Christians and atheists, with race- and Islam-obsessed foreigners? That makes no sense to a reasonable person, and for this reason MacDonald’s ideas remain decidedly fringe.

Other candidates for blame include socialism, the Frankfurt School and the European Union. But in reality the mass import of non-Europeans into European domains is just another unpredicted by-product of international business and free trade. Globalisation, the shrinking of the world and the harmonisation of its peoples, is an irresistible force. Money rules everything. Our governments answer to it, crave it, and attend to its requirements far more readily than to yours or mine.

Even if cannot be resisted, my purpose here has been to show that the end of the White age is not a cause for celebration. No-one is enriched by it. The further the colonisation of Europe progresses, the more desperate and un-civilised the Europeans will become. To defend the ancient lines of their homelands, Europeans will come to resemble (morally and politically) the third world. They will fight with the brutality of Muslims, erect governments alike the authoritarianisms of Asia, and so on. It seems that whatever happens, the unique and invaluable European personality will be deformed, setting the world back centuries.

D, LDN

The Neo-Conservative Tragedy

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I used to consider myself something of a neo-conservative (pejoratively abbreviated ‘neo-con’ by the left, often with an anti-Semitic edge to it). I was genuinely enlivened by the prospect of the West enforcing its moral and political standards on the rest of the world, believing for some time that the project was a simple yet complete fix for the problems of our time; most importantly, the problems of terrorism and Islamic anti-development.

Like many, I now know better. Neo-conservatism has failed, and failed badly, in practice. The use of the doctrine to liberate and improve the condition of Iraq has barely succeeded. While the country is now technically democratic, it remains crippled by religious tradition, unable and unwilling to develop beyond the limitations of that tradition. This should really have been predicted from the get-go. The fact that it wasn’t exposes the fundamental naivety at the heart of the neo-conservative experiment.

Put at its most basic, neo-conservatism pushes the idea that democracy has a positive value. Neo-cons (if there still are neo-cons) believe that democracies are less likely to go to war, less likely to collapse into chaos, tolerate corruption and extremism or shelter terrorists than are dictatorships and autocracies. On the surface this sounds reasonable enough. The Western democracies of today are certainly more averse to these evils than the third world; as are the remodelled nations of the far-east. Why wouldn’t the same be true for the rest of the world?

The answer in the case of the middle east is Islam. As political equations go, Islam plus democracy equals regression is one of the most reliable. The evidence for this can be found in modern ‘liberated’ Afghanistan – a country which has gone from a tribal theocracy controlled by the Taliban, to a democratic theocracy policed by the Taliban. One can also point to ‘liberated’ Iraq, which itself has gone from a secular Baathist dictatorship to a democratic Shia theocracy. Looked at from this vantage point, was either project worth thousands of free Western lives lost in the course their completion?

I was a fool to have ever thought so.

As well as Iraq and Afghanistan, neo-conservatism has also destroyed the nation of Libya, a country that previously had the highest Human Development Index ranking in the world. Post-liberation, the country is a sharia-ridden desert, robbed of its infrastructure, foreign investment and political coherence. As to whether Syria falls to the neo-con wave remains to be decided. One can justifiably presume that if democracy does strike the country, it will swiftly go the same way as Iraq and Afghanistan have.

If neo-conservatism was – as its detractors have always maintained – merely an ideological cover for destroying the Muslim world, then it has been remarkably successful. But I don’t believe in that conspiracy. Neo-conservatism – I think – was simply an embarrassing misfire of the Western intellect. We will be living with the consequences for a very long time.

D, LDN

Islam and Petroleum: An Old Alliance and its Future

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The collapse of the price of oil over the past few months has sent shockwaves through an already vulnerable global economy, slowing the ascent of China, threatening the recovery of America, and causing stock markets from London to Shenzhen to wobble precariously on their foundations. But surely no part of the world is more affected by fluctuations in the oil market than the Muslim Middle East, specifically the nations of Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates of the Persian Gulf.

If the downward trajectory in oil prices continues for just a few more years, the economies of these countries will be plunged into crisis, their social order, military upkeep and political power undermined and potentially destroyed. And there is something else to consider in all this. Seeing as oil and Islam have been locked in a very profitable alliance for the past 50 years, what will this decline mean for the civilizational balance of power? Can Islam’s political and military ascendance survive the shock of a post-oil era?

Optimists imagine that without oil, states like Saudi and the UAE would be without influence in the world. Since their economies are based entirely on energy revenues, they reason, such countries would – in the case of an oil collapse – be reduced to the diplomatic grade of Burkina Faso or Zimbabwe. This is not entirely accurate. While it is certainly true that without oil the nations of the gulf will see a massive decline in standards of living, this will not necessarily mean the end of their mischief-making in world affairs. Saudi Arabia, to take a prominent case, has invested much of its gargantuan wealth in blue-chip Western companies – companies which will continue to reap the Saudi state considerable profit for as long as they are trading. The Saudis have also purchased an astonishing array and quantity of modern weaponry, including – according to some – nuclear missiles from Pakistan. This military power will in the short term (or with nuclear weapons, in the very long term) guarantee the country a louder voice than it deserves.

As for Iran, Saudi’s arch-enemy, the outlook is rosier in some respects, and murkier in others. Since the revolution of 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has faced the boycott of its energy industry by much of the developed world. This has meant that Iran’s state finances have remained in poor shape, and also that they haven’t managed to buy up stocks in Western companies to the extent that Saudi has. On the other hand, this long period of boycott has forced Iranians to build an economy unreliant on the energy sector – a post-oil economy, if you will – and this will give the country a very important head start in the rush to regional economic diversification. The same is also true of Iraq, which has until very recently functioned without a petroleum economy.

Taken overall, the Islamic world will only face a sub-regional decline in diplomatic power from the collapse of oil. Outside of the oil-producing area itself, many Islamic countries have high economic growth rates even without energy reserves – these include the nations of Turkey, Egypt and Indonesia, all of which also possess considerable military strength to increase their bargaining power. Thus, the collapse of oil will sink Islamic power in the short-term, only for the power lost to be replenished later in different places. Given that these places will be less extreme than Saudi and Iran, the prospect for a general moderation of Islam is very real, if hardly as curative as liberal commentators would have us believe.

Here in the modern world, the end of oil politics is surely something to celebrate. A nasty and corrupt stench is about to be cleared from the air. The Islam-Oil alliance, even in so brief a period as it has existed, wrought real damage on the world at large. It is directly responsible for the 9/11 attacks in America, as well as for the crippling of Western economies in the 1970s. It has perverted American and British politics, enriched soulless monarchs and dictators, and radicalised much of the Islamic world against its will.

Good riddance.

D, LDN