Reflections

Tags

Blog, Defend the modern world, Islamism, politics, race, writing

I spent a large part of the weekend revisiting this old project of mine, the first time I have logged in for several years, re-reading what I used to call – with some pretension – my ‘articles’; quickly written opinion pieces about civilisation, Islam, race, politics and the like. It has been a weird, moving experience, as it was always sure to be. I have cringed, smiled, recoiled, occasionally glowed with pride. 

Such is the effect of time, I disagree with a lot of what I wrote then. My priorities are different. Some bad things have become good to me, some good things have become bad; many issues, once critically important, now seem greatly diminished.

I suppose the greatest mea culpa to perform involves the central theme of this blog. I wrote for close to three years in a mood of hot panic over Islamism, believing it was playing a slow, clever game and would, if ignored for too long, eventually triumph over the sleeping cultures of Europe. I wrote in a negative style of negative things, ideas around which a whole blogging subculture had crystallised, such was the uniformity and agreement.

But Islamism, happily, will not conquer Europe, only cause horrible and unnecessary trouble for it. Just the other week, an Islamist nobody went on a stabbing spree in the commuter town of Reading, Berkshire; such is what they have been reduced to – amateurish, Victorian violence; local vandals, neighbourhood nuisances. 

Needless to say, I oppose anyway the subjugation of man, anything that diminishes him, puts shackles on his imagination, forces him to live in a way contrary to his nature. And the stupid and nasty project of Islamism does this professionally enough. But there were then – and surely are now – equally grand and urgent and depressing questions to consider. Isolating Islamism from other processes was a mistake. It would be out-of-date to continue to make it.

We are short-sighted if we pitch the crisis of our age, like the slippery polemicist Christopher Hitchens once did, as a neo-Enlightenment battle between theocracy and reason. Islamic immigration and violence represent only one part of a far bigger issue, rooted as much in the West as the East. Not seeing this clearly enough was my great failing, the parent of all the others.

The religion of peace is crowded out in my thoughts these days. Here in Spain, I have encountered only a few believers in several years. New immigrants from exotic shores are in no short supply; but they do not bring caliphates, just complications. They have night-black skin and wear tribal shawls from the pre-ideological serenity of Africa. There are also little crowds, slowly swelling, of Peruvians, Chinese, Koreans and Vietnamese.

The future of the West will be dominated by questions of race, gender, economy and generation. Islamism, though it will play a destructive role, will not be the predominant theme. This is the reality as I now see it.

The big things are happening outside of the 9/11 universe, the narrow, dimly-lit mind-space in which too many, for too long, were trapped and accordingly limited.

***

My dear father, who passed away at Christmas, was a gentle, conservative man; a rector for many decades in the Church of England. One of his living and dying wishes was for me to embrace the faith that guided him, and which provided him with such amazing courage during those final months of illness. Since then, over a mad period of global unrest,  I have been duly reflecting on what I actually believe in. Re-opening this project is part of that self-interrogation.

Looking back at my blogging here, I find not a slight aspect of performance. I wrote material I believed added to what I had already written, that built upon the same theme and promised to reconfirm the same ideas. I wrote to be consistent, in short, not to explore in earnest issues of real importance. 

Performance politics is the curse of our age; in England, America and doubtless elsewhere, people are arguing and marching and fighting for things they do not, in their heart of hearts, take to be true. I see this more on the left than on the right – which is natural enough – but there are performance artists across the spectrum, as harmful at one point of it as at any other.

On anonymous forums intelligent debate mixes freely with nonsense. Users embrace ludicrous fetishes and equally ludicrous figures to fill the office of interpretation left vacant by a dishonest and corrupted media.

What do people really believe? What would we say if we were forced to speak without thinking, free of care and cant, unconcerned with the pursuit of glamour or acceptance into some intellectual culture or another? The chances are we would not fall neatly into any group or hive but would outrage them all equally. There is great honour in that.

I am not so blindly arrogant to believe I have retained an audience after this much time. People move on, as they should. I am grateful to have had my work considered worthy or readable by anyone at all.

David

Advertisement

Perfectionland: Notes on Nihon

Tags

2016, 4chan, America, American Liberty, Asian, BBC, Civilisation, Coffee, Defend the modern world, Facebook, Internet, Japan, Japanese people, japanese perfect, Jared Taylor, Multiculturalism, nihon, nippon, nippon or nihon, No to Turkey in the EU, perfect, perfection, politics, race, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, society, travel, travel report, trip report, Twitter, United States, weeaboo, weeaboo culture

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

Why the Alt-Right is Too Alt for Me

Tags

2016, 4chan, alt-right, America, American Liberty, anime, anti-Semitism, BBC, Blog, blog blog blog, Christopher Caldwell, Civilisation, Coffee, dark enlightenment, Defend the modern world, Demographics of Europe, DTMW, dtmw dtmw, Facebook, frog, Internet, internet internet, Japan, milo, modern world, Multiculturalism, Music, Muslim, Muslims, No to Turkey in the EU, pepe, pepe the frog, political, politics, race, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, subcultures, Twitter

Internet subcultures are so often exaggerated in scale and importance by the mainstream – offline – media that most reasonable folk tend instinctively to dismiss reports of their influence as hyperbole. Such was the case when Hillary Clinton devoted almost an entire speech to warning America of the insidious agenda of the ‘alt-right’, an internet coalition of racists, misogynists and Islamophobes allegedly in cahoots with the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump.

Strangely, and unlike so many cyber phenomena reported in the media, the tribe to which Ms Clinton referred is notable for being very real, or at least very widespread. Though there is no single agenda or set of principles agreed upon by the alt-right, there is certainly a general Weltanschauung strong and clear enough to gravitate like-minded people towards it. This worldview is well-described in the following YouTube comment taken from under a video of the Clinton speech: “We (the alt-right) are anti neo-libs. That is the only reason we are alternative. Neo-libs/cons have been the conservative mainstream since 9/11. We are a backlash against that. Neo-cons are not real right.”

By ‘neo-libs’ and ‘neo-cons’ (Neoliberals and Neoconservatives) the commenter is likely referring to a consensus known elsewhere as the ‘New World Order’, the 1%, or (vaguely) as ‘Zionism’.

Rumours of a ‘New World Order’ have gained currency on the right-wing fringe in recent years

These labels, although having little to do with each other in fact, are used as synonyms for the force that is actively shrinking the world into a liberal, multi-racial, multi-cultural free-trade zone, in yet another word – the force and ideology of globalisation.

The idea that conservatives should be pro-globalisation is actually a very recent one. Traditionally, as the alt-right notes, right-wing political thinkers have been strongly nativist and culturally protectionist. The shift in conservative thought, beginning during the Reagan-Thatcher era, to laissez faire globalism is attributed retrospectively to the influence of non-native forces, often (predictably) to that of the Jews (sometimes referred to in euphemism as ‘capitalists’/’big business’/’bankers’/’the banks’).

The alt-right wishes to return the conservative movement to where it was before that transition; before economics became more important as a right-wing principle than blood, soil and culture; that is, before paleo became neo.

The alt-right has no single birthplace, but there are nevertheless a few websites and forums indelibly associated with it. Prime among these sites is the Japanese-cultural forum 4chan and in particular the /pol/ (politically incorrect) messageboard. Here, a right-wing political consensus has become entrenched, often (but not always) expressed with dark humour, that has subsequently bled out into the wider internet universe, evidenced by the broad use of memes like Pepe the Frog as well as words and phrases like ‘degenerate’ and ‘dindu-nuffin’ (the latter invention being used to refer sarcastically to African-American criminality).

The English-language messageboard 4chan is commonly associated with the alt-right

The alt-right is connected to, but distinct from, the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ phenomenon I have written about previously. Unlike the latter, the alt-right is more realistic and less philosophical. While the Dark Enlightenment recommends absurd initiatives like the abolition of democracy and the return of divinely-appointed’ Kings, the alt-right prefers to concern itself with more achievable and substantial ideas, such as the abolition of third-world (non-white) immigration, building an opposition to political Islam and degrading the influence of certain varieties of feminism. This down-to-earth-ness is a large part of the reason the alt-right, unlike the Dark Enlightenment, has become a force to be reckoned with.

I have no idea whether this site would or should be considered part of the alt-right blogosphere. I only know that it has never been so described – and certainly not by me. I am, in my estimation, far too moderate, too much of a bleeding heart, to integrate smoothly into that crowd.

Though I recognise that races exist, I have never been a racist or a racial nationalist. Though I accept that certain varieties of feminism have inflicted great damage upon Western civilisation, I am not opposed to the idea of sexual equality, nor dismissive of the disadvantages women still face around the world on account of their being female. Though I recognise that he has joined the right side of the Syrian civil war and made constructive and wise comments about the bombing of Libya, I do not support or make excuses for the authoritarian, anti-democratic administration of Vladimir Putin. And so on…  The alt-right is simply too alt for me.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is beloved by many on the alt-right

Is the movement as dangerous as Hillary Clinton is making out? The answer depends almost entirely on who is asking the question. If you’re a white, Christian, heterosexual male resident in the Western World, then the risk this movement presents to you is minimal. If, however, you are Jewish, homosexual, black, south Asian or atheist, I would be very cautious about taking the movement to heart.

There are decidedly ugly currents within the alt-right that are not adequately represented by its spokespeople. Milo Yiannopoulos, a Jewish-Greek homosexual, may well be regarded as the crown prince of the movement at present, but it does not follow that the general masses huddled under its banner agree with his lifestyle or look kindly upon his ethnicity. On the contrary, more often than not, the alt-right foot-soldier is loudly hostile to both Jews and homosexuality. If you require evidence of that, just spend an hour or two browsing the /pol/ board on 4chan yourself.

Anti-Semitism in particular runs through the alt-right like colours run through a stick of seaside rock. It is both below and behind it, providing a vital support to the worldview espoused by its adherents. The West is being taken over by foreign elements, they agree, because a hostile elite is conspiring against the natives. One need not refer to the hostile elite explicitly. Innuendo will do. Innuendo did the job in the thirties, too (sorry, Godwin).

A variant of the anti-Semitic ‘happy merchant’ meme

I do admit that the alt-right is correct on some very important issues. On Islam, for example, the movement is reliably clear-headed and refreshingly consistent. On the virtues of a Trump administration, too, the movement is providing a much-needed counter-force to the almost universally anti-Trump mainstream media. The problem is the movement doesn’t seem to possess any kind of intellectual brake. It swerves habitually all over the place, sometimes finding itself on a main road and sometimes blindly ploughing through a field. This youthful unpredictability might make hopping on-board an attractive prospect for political thrill-seekers, but not for anyone else.

I suppose, if we must manufacture labels for ourselves, I am more of an alt-liberal than an alt-rightist. And I am not alone in that. There must be millions of people like me, scattered around the political spectrum, living unhappily in temporary ideological accommodation. It is high time we had a real home to go to.

D, LDN

On the Events in Dallas

Tags

America, America 911, america the beautiful, America UK, American Liberty, Barack Obama, BBC, beyonce, Bin Laden, Black Lives Matter, black power, blue lives matter, Christianity and Islam, dallas, dallas shootings, dallas shootings analysis, Defend the modern world, DTMW, Facebook, ISIS, Islam, issues, micah johnson, Multiculturalism, Obama, police abuse, police and excess, police in america, politics, politics us, poll, race, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Race riots, race war, racism, sterling killing, Twitter, United States, US, USA, Violence

Anyone who lives in America, loves America, or places hope in its example and leadership will have lost a considerable amount of sleep these past few days. The  ghastly news from Dallas, Texas that five police officers have been shot and killed, apparently in revenge for the deaths of two African-American police suspects in Minnesota and Louisiana, has shocked the nation to its core.

“Suddenly,” NYT correspondents Timothy Williams and Michael Wines observe, “the panoply of fears and resentments that have made this a foreboding summer (have) been brought into sharp relief… Police officers and sociologists alike say that racial tension is approaching a point last seen during the street riots that swept urban America in the late 1960s when disturbances erupted in places like the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts and Detroit and Newark, during summers of deep discontent.”

I won’t detail the specific incidents in Louisiana and Minnesota here. They have already been exhaustively covered by the press. Instead, I will ask the general question: Why is this still happening in America? Why is an ethnic rivalry that should have disappeared decades ago persisting in defiance of the current of political progress? 

The answer, I believe, is incitement.

For as long as I care to remember, the insinuations of American news personalities, cynical politicians and radical ‘community leaders’ have issued without qualification or fact-checking from every form of US media. As a direct result of this, a whole generation of Black Americans has been exposed to an unremitting deep-tissue massage of poisonous miseducation and political conditioning, the fruits of which are now ripening into a terrible, violent greenness on the streets of American cities.

The narrative pushed by these crooks, it would seem successfully, is that American law enforcement (and by logical extension – the US Government itself) is institutionally racist, if not nakedly White supremacist, and dedicated to the perpetual oppression of all US minority groups. If you think I’m exaggerating these exaggerations, I would refer you to any of the hundreds of blogs written in support of the criminal network ‘Black Lives Matter’, all of which have advanced this nonsense consistently ever since the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012.

The ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement has been active across America this past week

It would appear to matter nothing to the preachers of this false gospel that the available evidence suggests no such campaign has existed in America for several decades; that the police, far from being dedicated to offending or harming the African-American community, are increasingly required to be particularly cautious in their dealings with them, perhaps even more cautious and light-handed than with any other racial group. Truth, however, has never been a concern of propagandists. It only gets in the way.

As I wrote in an earlier article on this blog regarding racial tensions in America, there is actually a very simple explanation for the frequency (which can sometimes seem remarkable) of police abuses against Black citizens:

“Black people (on average) commit more crime in America than any other racial group. This is why there is more police action against Black people than against members of other races. This is also why there is more police brutality against Black people than against other races. Since there will always be bad apples in a national police force, and given the greater priority that force is compelled to give to one race, it is statistically more likely the bad apples will fall on them.”

Alton Sterling was killed by police officers after resisting arrest in Louisiana, prompting national outrage

Now, and of course, no-one with a heart and mind would dispute that the shooting of unarmed Americans is morally unacceptable. It is. Nor would any right-minded person dispute that the American police – in some cases, not in all – have taken to behaving more like an occupying military than a protective social service. Just type in ‘militarisation of the police in America’ into Google images and you will be treated to universally unappealing photographs of SWAT teams riding down democratic streets in infantry-fighting vehicles and modified tanks.

American police

This isn’t natural, nor necessary, nor proportionate. America is the greatest country on Earth, with a spirit and philosophy of freedom envied the whole world over. It would be a world-historic tragedy were such a beacon of hope to be snuffed out under the leather boot of authoritarian statism.

But again we must strive to make clear that there is no institutional crusade against Black people ongoing in the US. The excesses of the police affect all races in proportion. Indeed, just a few weeks before the death of Mr Sterling, a 17 year-old White youth in Missouri was left with permanent brain damage after being repeatedly tasered for failing to exit his vehicle after a traffic stop. There are many other examples one could furnish, but the point is already made. America has a problem with police overreach, not Black America.

I truly hope that the prophecies being made of a coming ‘race war’ in the United States are as daffy as they sound, but I cannot be sure at this point. The tensions revealed over the past few days in online forums and on social media have been shockingly, burningly hot. Many young Blacks, though they should rightly be ashamed of what has been done in their name, have instead taken to actively glorifying Micah Xavier Johnson online, referring to the killer variously as a ’hero’ and a ‘resistance fighter’, as well as setting up facebook tribute pages in his honour.

Micah Xavier Johnson – one of the confirmed perpetrators of the massacre in Dallas, Texas

And many Whites have been busily striving to equal this bigotry, with some calling for a violent civil conflict to re-establish a segregated America; others proposing the wholesale murder of all non-Whites, and still others blaming the entire problem on the Hebrews,

This is the Middle Eastern style of politics. It is, or should be, beneath the West, especially America; but the poison is now in the bloodstream. The Leftist crooks and inciters have achieved their desired outcome. The United States population is fragmenting as we speak into warring tribes, each of them armed to the teeth and readied for a fresh era of endless, pointless combat. There is no way of putting the toothpaste back into the tube now. I hope the media are happy. The Muslims certainly are.

That’s right – ever since the killings in Dallas were first reported, Muslims (or people with Muslim names) have been openly gloating on social media and in the YouTube comment section.

“America is like third world! Hahahahaha!” One illiterate message read. – “You say you are civilised and we are backward. You are worse!” Another jeered. – “America is doomed!” – “Time for you to suffer like the Syrians.” – And so on, and so on.

It is of course obvious why Muslims are so enraptured by America’s latest troubles. In an age when the Islamic world is collapsing into fiery embers, the stability and affluence of Allah’s arch enemy (the US) has long seemed a taunting and persuasive reminder of Islam’s fundamental cultural inferiority. As Syria and Iraq, once gold-plated centres of Islamic power and cultural dynamism, burn unceremoniously down to the ground, Americans watch football, drink cold beer and laugh at sitcoms. This hurts the Muslims. It gnaws away at them, making them think critically (and you know how much they hate doing that). American popular culture is a constant (and free) propaganda loop, effective because it advertises a peaceful, functioning society its enemies can never hope to replicate or compete with.

It was with this bitterness in mind that Osama Bin Laden once suggested weakening America by forming a destructive alliance with its radical minority populations, especially with disenfranchised Blacks. Being a man of some intellect (though not culture), the terrorist leader saw all too keenly how fragile America’s infuriating success could be made with the right amount of cynicism and professional manipulation.

I hope devoutly that his vulgar ambitions are not about to be realised.

D, LDN

Islam and Black Americans

Tags

10 points, African Americans, african-american Muslims, America, America 911, American Liberty, anti-Semitism, Barack Obama, BBC, Christianity, Christianity and Islam, Civilisation, Coffee, Defend the modern world, Islam, Islam in America, Islamic, Islamism, Muhammad Ali dead, Muhammad Ali Muslim, Multiculturalism, Muslim program, nation of Islam, No to Turkey in the EU, noi, noi noi, race, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, race politics, racism, Radical Islam, reverse racism, United States

A common perspective holds that America is a haven of non-Islam, of kafirdom and cultural infidelity, and that while Europe is destined to become ever more Middle Eastern and North African in the future, America shall long remain a shining city on a hill; proudly old-fashioned in its Christian, patriotic Anglo-Saxonism.

This is not entirely inaccurate. Compared to Western Europe, America has certainly retained an enviable cultural-religious clarity. It is still uncontroversial to postulate that America is a ‘Judeo-Christian’ country, either in the media or from the political podium. The only protest aroused by such a claim tends to be from spectacle wearing atheists, and who on Earth could find them intimidating? By contrast, if one made the same claim about Europe, the backlash would be of an immeasurably more serious kind. People would die. Windows would be smashed. Heads might possibly be removed. America is simply more confident and self-assured than Europe – more willing to stand its ground and preserve its original identity.

But this is not to say that America doesn’t have a problem with Islam. On the contrary, the nation may have more of a problem with Islam than Europe, depending entirely on how ‘Islam’ is defined.

African-American Muslims are today the most powerful Muslim community in the United States and in the West more broadly. Unlike the Arab and Persian Muslim communities, African-American believers are socially and culturally integrated, acceptable, part of the national fabric. Many African-American icons are or were Muslims: from Malcolm X (AKA el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz), to the late Cassius Clay (AKA Muhammad Ali), to Shahrazad Ali, to Louis Farrakhan. These figures are not like marginalised Arab-American activists or obscure Pakistani-American Imams. They are nationally recognised faces, with enduring influence on the mainstream media and the mainstream political conversation.

Louis Farrakhan

They are also protected against the kind of contempt one might safely direct against Arabs and Pakistanis by the firewall of political correctness. You cannot speak as liberally about Black people as you can against Middle-Easterners. Given the horrors of the African-American past, Black leaders are typically treated gently and apologetically by White political analysts. Their comments, however ridiculous, are rarely dismissed, but debated and scrutinised. Therein lies political power.

Of all the African-American Muslim movements in operation today, none is more famous, or infamous, than the so-called ‘Nation of Islam’. Conceived in Detroit in 1930, the Nation of Islam (or NOI) now commands the allegiance of up to 50,000 American citizens; a membership that has in the past included such figures as Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X.

The NOI ‘brand’ is recognised across the United States. Few people have never heard of the organisation. And this notoriety is well earned. NOI members are routinely condemned for their homophobic, anti-Semitic and anti-White demonstrations, some of which have proven very difficult and expensive to police. NOI chapters on university campuses are also noted for their combativeness and hostility to rival groups and demographics, including more moderate or secular African-American fraternities.

Women of the NOI

So what do they want? It’s difficult to say. The NOI website currently features a list of ten ‘demands’, entitled ‘The Muslim Program’. It functions as a kind of manifesto, and has been little changed for several years. I won’t paste the entire thing, since many of the demands are vacuous and jingoistic. But here are three of the most interesting:

“3. We want equality of opportunity. We want equal membership in society with the best in civilized society.

4. We want our people in America whose parents or grandparents were descendants from slaves, to be allowed to establish a separate state or territory of their own – either on this continent or elsewhere. We believe that our former slave masters are obligated to provide such land and that the area must be fertile and minerally rich. We believe that our former slave masters are obligated to maintain and supply our needs in this separate territory for the next 20 to 25 years–until we are able to produce and supply our own needs…..

10. We believe that intermarriage or race mixing should be prohibited. We want the religion of Islam taught without hindrance or suppression.” – Source: https://www.noi.org/muslim-program/

The Nation of Islam was founded in 1930

Eagle-eyed readers will notice at once that all three of these demands are in contradiction with each other. How can there be equality of opportunity (presumably they mean between different races) in a Black-only state? Why also would race-mixing need to prohibited in that state? And so on…

But while one can nit-pick this manifesto for hours on end, that is not the point of this article. What we are trying to scrutinise is the nature of Black Islam and what its followers are aiming to achieve in the United States of America. Judging by the text quoted (as well as other texts available on the Nation of Islam website), Black Islam appears to be a movement dedicated to racial separatism; that is, to the permanent separation of Whites and Blacks, ostensibly for the benefit of both.

Whether you find this a good suggestion or not is not the issue to focus on; rather, we should ask: What has this to do with the Islamic religion authored by the Arabs in the 7th century? Indeed, is this Islam at all? Does the Nation of Islam actually care about Islam, or are they merely using it as a façade, as a cosmetic and/or political cover?

Few questions are more important for the future of America. Given how many African-American ‘Muslims’ there are in the country, and given how mainstream some of them have become in the Black community, the answers to these questions may reveal whether Islam, in the truest sense of the word, has any future in America at all.

‘Conventional’ American Muslims

It is revealing (and comforting) to note that Black Islam has yet to be formally recognised by any conventional Islamic authority, either in America or around the world. The Sunni and Shia religious establishments have only limited ties with the NOI. Even al-Qaeda, an organisation usually welcoming to Western supporters, has greeted Black Islam with a mistrustfully slow handclap.

We hardly need wonder why this is the case. The Nation of Islam has a very, very liberal attitude to Islamic dogma. Not only do NOI clerics preach the infallibility of the Qur’an; they also provide a generous heap of new-age, Afrocentric Apocrypha to go with it. In NOI theology, for example, White people (understood as those of pure Northern – but not Southern – European descent) are a breed of scoundrels and devils, inferior to the pure and ancient Black African race (the race, allegedly, of the Egyptians, Moors, Ancient Arabs, Hebrews, Romans and Greeks). NOI theorists explain White misbehaviour as being congenital to – and ineradicable from – White psychology. Slavery was not, then, a terrible aberration by an otherwise civilised people, but merely the natural expression of White human nature, of White evil.

As much as they might find this kind of analysis appealing, given the contemporary antagonism between East and West, no orthodox Muslim would recognise these ideas as Islamic. They are not based in the Qur’an, and nor do they have any root in the sayings or teachings of the Prophet. For those reasons, Orthodox Muslims will reject a great portion of Black Islamic thought outright. Then there are the UFOs to consider…

The NOI has a lot to say about spacecraft, especially a peculiar UFO called the ‘Mother Wheel’. Minister Farrakhan is quoted on Wikipedia as having said the following: “That Mother Wheel is a dreadful-looking thing. White folks are making movies now to make these planes look like fiction, but it is based on something real. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad (Note: NOI leader from 1934-75) said that the Mother Plane is so powerful that with sound reverberating in the atmosphere, just with a sound, she can crumble buildings.”

Ufology is integral to the NOI worldview

I think that’s probably enough to prove the point. These frankly daffy beliefs are not compatible with any major school or tradition of Islam. On the matter of theology, Black Islam is out on its own.

What about politics? What about the aims of Islamism? Well, happily enough, I have yet to hear of a single case where a Black Muslim (of the NOI style) has travelled to join either al-Qaeda or ISIS, or has carried out, or been apprehended in the process of carrying out, a major terrorist attack. This is most probably because there is a major disconnect between the goals of the NOI Muslims and those of the conventional Islamists. Radical Islamists of the conventional style wish to create a global, multiracial caliphate under the rule of Sharia law. NOI Muslims, by contrast, wish only to create a Black homeland in America or in Africa where they can be free from non-Black oppression. Would NOI Muslims be happy living in an Arab or Pakistani-controlled caliphate? No, of course not. The NOI only exists because Black Americans became tired of being treated as secondary human beings. In a caliphate, the White devils would quickly be replaced in NOI grudge-theology by Arab devils.

For these and various other reasons, I find it quite unlikely that Black Islam will ever threaten American culture in the same way that real Islam threatens Europe. Black Islam is just too silly, too fake, and too cobbled-together to ever mount an effective opposition to modern civilization.

D, LDN

Black Lives Matter: A Study in Fanaticism

Tags

America, America 911, American Liberty, Barack Obama, BBC, Black Lives Matter, black lives matter movement, black matters, blm, Civilisation, Coffee, Defend the modern world, Facebook, Glenn Beck, Multiculturalism, Obama, politics, race, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, race issues, racism, trayvon, Trayvon Martin

Black lives matter. It’s not a sentence easily disagreed with. Indeed, when it first went viral (after a spate of controversial police shootings) I found it rather articulate. The only improvement perhaps would have been the addition of ‘too’ at the end. But that didn’t really matter. The message was still simple and direct: Black lives are not inherently less valuable than white or Hispanic lives, and so the police shouldn’t feel more entitled to fire at black criminals than criminals of any other background. Fair enough.

The best part of a year on from its inception, however, and Black Lives Matter has become something far less reasonable. Despite any noble beginnings, BLM is now a barely-organised cult of anger, of random society-bashing and raging self-pity. Its proponents are motivated more by hatred of white people than by sympathy for vulnerable blacks. Some on the political right have gone so far as to designate it ‘racist’ and a ‘hate group’; the mirror image of the KKK. I am not compelled to disagree with them.

Whether on college campuses, at political rallies, or in the street, BLM activists have been causing a riotous disruption to American intellectual life, and for no reason greater than the exercise and development of an industry of phoney grievance and community self-denial.

In the words of Wall Street Journal columnist Jason L Riley “(BLM) is not about the fate of blacks per se but about scapegoating the police in particular, and white America in general, for antisocial ghetto behavior. It’s about holding whites to a higher standard than the young black men in these neighborhoods hold each other to. Ultimately, it’s a political movement, the inevitable extension of a racial and ethnic spoils system that helps Democrats get elected. The Black Lives Matter narrative may be demonstrably false, but it’s also politically expedient…It’s the black poor—the primary victims of violent crimes and thus the people most in need of effective policing—who must live with the effects of these falsehoods.”

Mr Riley’s comment about black victims of violent (black) crime deserves extended analysis. It is still acceptable in liberal academia to blame the failings of African Americans on the existence of ‘institutionalised’ or ‘structural’ racism. A more honest and pro-black narrative would highlight the pitifully high rates of black-on-black crime in the neighbourhoods in which the acts of police ‘brutality’ are alleged to have occurred. Could it be that the police are merely trying hard to save black lives? Could it be that police excess in these neighbourhoods is the unfortunate overspill of a desire to protect black people?

No. It couldn’t be that. Well, not according to BLM anyway. Crackers, they reason, are just being crackers. White people love the sight of a puddle of black blood expanding on a pavement. It’s what got them to enrol in the first place.

Falsehoods cannot persist indefinitely. Sooner or later even the most doctrinaire bien pensant will end up reading forbidden arguments, or hearing unapproved statistics. Given enough time, and enough rope, the BLM cult will burst like a bubble.

And American Blacks will be all the better off for it.

D, LDN

Is Ethno-Masochism Real?

Tags

4chan, America, America 911, American Liberty, Amren, analysis, BBC, Britain First, canal plus, cartoon, channel, Channel 4, Civilisation, Defend the modern world, ethnomasochism, face, Facebook, Internet, jesse jackson, jesse south park, Multiculturalism, race, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, racism, retro, stan, Twitter, United States

Ethno-masochism seems to be the word of the moment on the political right. On sites like Vdare, Amren, 4chan and various independent blogs, the charge is being deployed against virtually everyone in the political mainstream (or at least as far as they relate to questions of Islam and immigration).

Etymologically it requires little explanation. Simply put, ethno-masochism describes the masochism of one race in its dealings with another race. In America, the relationship in question is almost always that between White Europeans and Black Africans, whereas in Europe, it more often concerns that between Whites and the jumble of Islamic boat people who have graced our shores in recent decades.

The unifying component is the White race; specifically, the idea that White people are uniquely and unnaturally submissive to other racial groups.

While the slur is often deployed as a pure insult, unaccompanied by any proof or detail, some have attempted to provide the label with a scientific context. Jared Taylor, for example, the gentlemanly leader of American Renaissance – both the largest and most respected White nationalist organisation in the United States – has alleged that White Europeans are possessed by what he calls a ‘pathological altruism’ – an evolutionary disposition that compels the sufferer to root for the underdog, seek out justice and fairness wherever it may be said to be lacking.

According to Taylor, and many of his fellows at Amren, this disposition originally developed because it was useful to traditional European societies – but now, with those societies increasingly multi-culturalised, the compulsion represents a classic case of evolutionary misfiring. What developed as a means of ensuring European prosperity, now directs itself blindly at non-Europeans.

How accurate is this? I’m not sure. But I must say that – in frank contrast with the prevailing sociological orthodoxies – I have always found minority groups to be more racist, tribal and anti-egalitarian than White people. Despite all the talk of ‘White devils’ and White bigotry/privilege’, no other racial group has progressed so far in the direction of post-racialism than White Europeans.

Put a Kurd in the same room as a Turk; put a Persian in the same room as an Arab; put a Dominican in the same room as a Haitian; put a Kenyan in the same room as a Somalian; put a Japanese in the same room as a Korean, and you will witness the most ugly, primitive, frothing hatred that can be imagined. If you put an average White in a room with any of the aforementioned races, little will occur beyond awkwardness.

Rather than being masochistic, Whites are simply more advanced than other races on the issue of racial difference. After the second world war, having grown tired of biological conflict, White countries chose to disarm themselves of racial notions, fully expecting other races to do the same. But they didn’t. They still haven’t. Thus the perceived disparity.

Theories of racial ‘masochism’ (or sadism) are unnecessary, I believe. White people should simply insist that their universalism be replicated in kind. By this simple demand, the racial grievance industry would be made ideologically and intellectually bankrupt.

D, LDN

The Strange Case of Rachel Dolezal.

Tags

America, American Liberty, Barack Obama, BBC, Black White, Civilisation, Coulter, Defend the modern world, Facebook, Multiracialism, NAACP, NAACP Spokane, race, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Rachel Dolezal, Racialism, racism, transracialism, Twitter

It was reported this week that a woman named Rachel Dolezal, leader of the Spokane NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People), has been lying about her ethnicity for over a decade. Her motivation, according to most observers, has been to facilitate a career in America’s burgeoning racial grievance industry, of which the NAACP is but a bit player.

And if she was motivated by personal ambition, then it certainly says a lot about the power of the grievance industry that she was prepared to go to such extreme lengths. But what if wasn’t personal ambition? I don’t think it should be dismissed prematurely that Ms Dolezal actually believes she is black.

Joking comparisons to Bruce Jenner aside, Ms Dolezal has reacted to her outing with defiance, and at the time of writing, is sticking by her self-identification.

‘Trans-racialism’ was the word used by a black friend of mine to refer to this phenomenon, and it’s a phenomenon he claims isn’t wholly new. Just as people struggle over their gender, he explained, so do people with their racial identity. Just as a man can feel he is born in a woman’s body (impossible, of course), so can a White woman feel she was born in a black woman’s body (equally so).

Strange times.

D, LDN.

Knowledge and Ignorance.

Tags

Boris Johnson, Defend the modern world, Emma West, English Defence League, Islamophobia, Knowledge and Ignorance, london, Orwell, Oyster card, Pakistanis, race, racism, Subway, TFL, Trains, Transport for London, Tube, Underground

I witnessed a slight altercation at the weekend. A brief argument in a tube station between a drunk female native and a believer led to the native stating that he (the believer) ‘shouldn’t even be here’ (‘here’ being a larger area than he perhaps appreciated). Although I generally disapprove of loutish behaviour in public, I must say I quietly approved of this case.

After all, the believer wasn’t alone and the girl was. He backed down and she didn’t. What’s more, he seemed genuinely offended, as if her comment (more of a bark really) challenged something very important in his self-concept. He was also undoubtedly the guilty party, having barged in front of her as she queued at the oyster machine.

Afterwards, the Muslims topped up their cards at a separate machine and then departed, waiting until they were at the turnstiles before having a go back. Their chosen rejoinder was ‘ignorant bitch’ and it fell largely on disinterested ears.

Still, as weak as it was, let’s address the comment here and identify its error.

Nothing in modern life is more infuriating to the logical mind than the misuse (and misunderstanding) of the word ‘ignorance’. We are constantly told (by the press and by minorities) that an offensive opinion is always based on it and that racism in particular is motored by this misdeed alone.

You think intelligence has a genetic cause? Then you’re ignorant. You think Black people commit more violent crime than Whites? You’re ignorant. You think that Muslim terrorists are basing their actions on the Qur’an? You’re ignorant.

The irony here is obvious. Knowledge is now Ignorance (just as Orwell prophesised it would be in a totalitarian state) and Ignorance is now knowledge.

There is a lot to object to in racism, but it is rarely, if ever, caused by the practitioner not knowing something. There is no magical fact that can turn a racist into an egalitarian. It’s crazy even to consider it.

And as concerns Islam, ignorance (of the real kind) is the only reason they are still allowed to live here.

D, LDN.

How He Became Islamophobic.

Tags

Defend the modern world, Demographics, Email, England Islam, EU, Islam and Racism, Islam is not a race, Islamisation, Islamisation of Norway, Islamisation of Sweden, Islamophobia, Islamophobia is not racism, Misogyny, politics, race, Sweden, Team America, Welcome to Sweden of Today

Last week, I received an email from a visitor to this blog that I think is too interesting to remain private. I have asked the sender (who wishes to remain anonymous) for his permission and so have reprinted the message below. The similarities between our journeys to cognisance on the Islamic issue are striking and his insights are well worth reading. To avoid the charge of narcissism, I’ve excised the portions of the text which talk kindly of my own writing.

“I’m roughly the same age as you and for the past few years I’ve been living in Scandinavia but I was born and raised in a Lancashire mill town with a high Muslim population. Like you and many of your readers, I grew up harbouring a prejudice about Islam that was, if anything, positive. I absorbed the multicultural relativism dished out in school RE lessons and sanctimoniously corrected my octogenarian grandma for saying “paki” instead of “asian” and generally assumed that Muslims were not in any significant way different from Jews or Sikhs or Catholics such as myself.

“But even then, if I’d been a little bit more self aware I might’ve noticed that my tolerant ideas were overriding an opposing instinct. Because I always hated going through the Muslim areas of town, I found the – to borrow your phrase – thoroughly de-gentrified character of those areas thoroughly depressing, I was repelled by the sight of women walking around in tents with eye slits, and I dreaded being stuck on a bus with Pakistani school or college kids and having to listen to their soul-crushing prattle. To the extent that I acknowledged these feelings of acute aversion – which was hardly at all – I attributed it to some deep, shameful racism within me that I could eventually suppress to death.

“It wasn’t until I was college age and started to work weekend jobs with Pakistani and Bangladeshi colleagues who would lecture me on how the Jews did 9/11 and how Osama bin Laden was really a swell guy unfairly maligned by the western media – as well as listening to their endless, hypocritical bragging about their brothers and cousins who were big time gangsters and prostitute users and had white girls here, there and everywhere – that I began to realise my instincts were right, that these people were just awful, and if that made me racist or Islamophobic or whatever, then so be it.

“As you’ve touched upon in some of your posts, I think you get a double whammy of awfulness nowadays with young Muslims in western countries, because without any sense of shame they combine the psychotic intolerance and hair-trigger ideological rage of their faith with the hardcore, swaggering, labels-and-gadgets materialism of “gangsta” culture. It’s about as bleak and anti-human a combination as possible and it trains, to paraphrase another of your excellent formulations, a gunsight on everything worth living for.

“The depressing thing for me is that when I met a Swedish girl, got married, and decided we would move to her country, for a brief moment I thought “Great, that’s the last I’ll have to worry about the influence of Islam for a while…” How wrong can you be. I think this country is second only to France in Muslims as a percentage of population. Incredibly, Sweden takes the highest number of asylum seekers annually in the EU, not just as a percentage of population, but in real terms. This year they’re expecting 89,000 asylum seekers plus about 50,000 “family reunions” – primarily from Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan and Eritrea. In other words, a hit list of the world’s most horrendous hell holes. Of course, if these people were genuine refugees seeking shelter the heart would soften, but less than 5% of them are found to have genuine refugee status and most of them are lying about their age and country of origin.

“Anyway, I admire your straight talking on the subject. Once upon a time, I considered writing about it too. Partly out of subconscious fear of repercussions, but also because I was still genuinely moderate and ambiguous on the subject, I thought that the correct way to write about it was in very measured, careful, painstakingly qualified terms – you know, the euphemistic journalese favoured by the “respectable” broadsheets? “Increased immigration from non-western cultures poses challenges to integration…” and all that kind of thing. But now, after a certain amount of close up experience with these people both back home and here in Sweden, my heart is hardened and I’m convinced only a Steyn or Condell type frankness about the issue can really capture the true nature of it.

“Equivocal, nuanced, careful discourse is a virtue when discussing a lot of things, especially complex technical subjects like state finance, but on certain issues it’s just a kind of obfuscation and cowardice. In the west’s confrontation with Islam, I think the only clear moral position is to state robustly and directly that Islam is a system of thought and belief that, to borrow the succinct language of Team America, just wants to shit all over everything.”

D, LDN.