Thank You & Goodbye

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I began this blog in January, 2013, largely on a whim. I can still remember coming up with the idea as I waited in the rain for a bus in Wimbledon, London (the bus, as is London tradition, was absurdly late.). Since then, ‘Defend the Modern World’ has been visited over half a million times, chiefly by Brits and Americans, but also by thousands of Australians, Africans, Asians and Middle Easterners, too. I am immensely proud of the work that I have done. I hope that it has done some good.

Last week, I received an offer of a teaching position in Europe. When I taught English in northern Spain last year, mainly to small groups of infants, I managed to carry on the blog simultaneously. However, I have come to the conclusion that it will be difficult for me to do the same this time around.

In light of this, and with regret, I am suspending DTMW from this week forward.

The blog will remain online – I have no intentions of deleting it – and I have scheduled a selection of the old posts I am most proud of to be published over the next few Mondays.

To those who have been loyal readers of this blog, I want to say a heartfelt and sincere thank you. Though the quality of my writing has been greatly uneven, you have always been too kind to point out my failings. I do appreciate that.

It is possible I may pick up the blog again sometime in the future, but this is uncertain. I will try to post on occasion – when the news compels me to say something; say, after a terror attack in the UK or US – but the weekly format is just not something I can keep up.

It would, of course, be impossible to adequately sum up the work of three years in a few paragraphs, so I’ll just say this; my sole motivation in writing DTMW has been an uncomplicated loyalty to Western civilisation. It is, to me, the only culture on Earth worth a penny. Nothing else has inspired me. I have not hated anything. I have sought to help protect something I love.

The contest with Islam is not going away any time soon. I do, however, have faith that we will triumph in the end. Even the most fanatical Muslim knows in his heart that the modern world is superior to the mud-huts and mutilations of the Dar-al-Salaam. We need only be loud and proud about this and eventually even the most stubborn will come around.

I wish you all the greatest possible happiness. Thank you once again for your generosity and encouragement.

David (Defend the Modern World)

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Note About Changes

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Hi,

I’ve been planning to change the way I post for a while now. I no longer believe that posting a batch of small posts each week is the most effective or professional way of presenting my writing. Instead, I am going to post longer, more ‘journalistic’ articles (usually one, sometimes two) each Monday, in order to go into topics in greater depth.

Always grateful for your visits and support.

Thank you. 

D, LDN

A Better Proposal

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I can’t recall any statement in modern history making waves higher than those generated by Donald Trump’s Muslim comments this week. From the moment the proposal left his snarled lips, the entire world has been ideologically drunk, stumbling about with no sense of proportion, history, law or context. The New York Times described the outrage directed at Trump as ‘withering fire’. The UK papers called it a ‘perfect storm’ and ‘political sensation’. In the Guardian, the normally level-headed Gary Younge reacted by saying that ‘bigotry’ (presumably he meant anti-Islam sentiment) is now ‘out, loud and proud’ in both politics and society. And so on..

As far as I have noticed, the only major political commentator to approve of Trump’s proposal is (the ever-dependable) Ann Coulter, who tweeted ‘Go, Trump, Go!” and went even further by suggesting the policy should cover all foreigners.

What actually was the idea? Well, there have been many myths advanced about what Trump actually said and meant, either to make it seem better, or – more commonly – to make it seem worse, but put most basically, Trump suggested that all Muslims be barred from entering the United States until ‘(America’s leaders) figure out what is going on (with ISIS, terrorism etc…’. At first the billionaire seemed to maintain that this would apply even to Muslim-Americans serving in wars abroad after their term had been completed, but this aspect has since been removed.

This isn’t a crazy idea, at least from a European perspective. The reason hell broke loose is because America is not Europe, and America’s Muslims are not like Europe’s Muslims. While the latter are the result of recent immigration (and a smattering of conversions), the former have a complex and native root that would be difficult or impossible to cleanly excise. Many American Muslims are Black Africans, and Black Africans are generally considered to be as American as apple pie. Given this reality, it came as little surprise to see the prodigious employment of a certain boxing legend on social media following Trump’s announcement. Indeed, were there still people not yet primed to what was going on, they might have honestly surmised that Muhammad Ali had perished, such was his ubiquity on the internet last Tuesday evening.

My own reaction to this announcement has been ambivalent. I salute and congratulate Mr Trump on his boldness, his daring and his commitment to the Western World and the preservation of its culture. But the prospect of a wholesale ban on Muslim travel is utopian. However happy the proposal’s consequences might be, it flies against the complexity of the world as it is, as well as against the realities of the United States itself. In the globalised world, it remains necessary that certain people from non-Western nations travel to the West (and vice versa). Muslim businessmen, diplomats and government officials require access for official functions – functions which are essential for the United States’ economy and for the furtherance of its global agenda. If the Muslim travel ban was implemented, the United Nations would have to be moved outside of the US – drastically diminishing the country’s soft power and shifting the political emphasis to Europe. For these (and many other) reasons I do not believe Donald Trump’s proposal is workable at the present moment. Nonetheless, the proposal is far from ‘mad’, and Mr Trump did not deserve the orgiastic right-wing back-stabbing of the past 7 days.

In my humble opinion, a more workable proposal is that advanced by many ‘radical’ parties; namely, that while (some) Muslims should be allowed to travel to the West, these must never become Western. Western citizenship should not be bestowed on any non-native person of Islamic faith. Ever. Period. The risks are too high, and the benefits are too inconsiderable for the admission of Muslims into the Western organism to make sense.

I am aware that the announcement of this policy would cause as much or more controversy as the one Trump announced, but reactions are inevitable and we have to do something.

We cannot de-Islamise Muhammad Ali, but we can make damn sure the current inhabitants of the Islamic world do not become permanent inhabitants of Boston, New York, Washington, Paris, London and Madrid.

D, LDN

Learning From Liberals

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Let’s acknowledge an unpopular but important truth. Liberals are – on average – more successful, more pleasant and more intelligent people than Conservatives. They ordinarily have better careers, better cars, better manners and more sophisticated philosophies than those on the political right. Though I can’t speak for you, I would much rather share an apartment with a liberal than with a conservative. Indeed, I have always shared properties with liberals, consciously and deliberately. They make for friendlier and less judgemental associates. They are also more likely to lend a helping hand than conservatives, to bail a friend out of trouble, to offer a patient ear etc… Why is this?

There is a well-referenced body of evidence to suggest Liberalism becomes more attractive the better off one is in society; that once a person is liberated from the brutish concerns of bread and shelter, they become more willing to turn their caring eye away from themselves and towards society as a whole. Liberalism in this sense is a luxury, an indulgence. It is not available to the majority, but can only be afforded by the privileged few.

This does (or should) count as a mark of illegitimacy for liberals, but despite it, despite knowing it, I still fundamentally prefer them as human beings. I can’t help it. There must be a reason they have scaled higher peaks than the majority, and that reason, since it usually precedes their liberalism, must be independent of it.

We are trained by our culture of egalitarianism not to speak of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ human beings. To do so is the intellectual equivalent of swearing. By polite convention, all people are strictly equal, and all perceived ‘difference’ is a merely a dancing variation on a single, immovable baseline – a baseline from which we all begin and to which we all return.

Science is unfriendly to this theory and clashes with it frequently. Indeed, society only manages to prop it up with the same primitive tactics one uses to make any common lie seem true. Social thinkers simply ignore the findings of the laboratory, the G-test and the brain scan, offering in their place the produce of their own private goodwill. Let’s not do that here.

Let’s ask the question straight – Why are superior people more liberal? I don’t think the mystery is unsolvable. In fact, I think the solution is rather simple.

Conservatism has for a long time dallied in both great and stupid ideas – and the bad ones, being very bad, have obscured and discredited the good. When the idea that private property undergirds a democratic society is promoted in the same manifesto as the idea that Africans have no place in civilised society, or that homosexuals are trying to convert the young, or that scientists are lying to the public, it will be rejected. As it should be.

This idiot-conservative coalition was never inevitable. It is rather an unfortunate development of history; a quirk of fate. And since its basis is so flimsy, it can be undone.

How might we separate conservative logic from right-wing drivel? How might we attract intelligent people away from left-liberalism and back to the cause of freedom? For a start I would suggest ruthlessly cutting loose the crazies, pushing them to form their own political clan away from the mainstream. Cultural conservative leaders and intellectuals must publically reject (denounce) homophobia, colour-racism and the belittlement of women. They must cease fighting popular culture and embrace it (in order to attract dissenting elements in Western youth). Even if it exists, the influence of religious eschatology must be undetectable in policy and never endorsed by a candidate for office. More compassion should be displayed towards the poor. Arguments against abortion and gay marriage should be secularised. Candidates from urban environments should be sought over those from rural areas. And finally, perhaps most importantly, the right must rediscover its respect for worldliness and the intellect, no longer prioritising folksiness and the limited, small-town worldview.

In an age when liberalism has gone astray and allied itself to the enemies of freedom, conservatives must fill the void they have left. To do that successfully requires adapting to new realities and discarding unnecessary burdens. The defence of Western civilisation should be a friendly, positive and vibrant cause, not a moth-eaten and eccentric one.

D, LDN

Yes, Women Can Be Evil Too.

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Over the past two years, a period in world history dominated by economic crisis and extreme violence, the Daily Mail newspaper has published small variations of the same story at least three times. It concerns the shadowy manoeuvres of a sub-division of ISIS called the al-Khansa brigade, notable for being made up exclusively of young women.

According to reports, the al-Khansa brigade is responsible for enforcing a harsh Sharia-compliant lifestyle upon women in ISIS controlled territories. If and when women fall short of Sharia standards (say, by wearing a veil of thin material, leaving it slightly transparent), members of the brigade are said to arrest the offending female and take her to a dungeon, wherein they pinch her, beat her, confine her and otherwise torture her within an inch of her life. If the offence is ‘severe’ meanwhile (some extremity of the body being entirely revealed, adultery, lesbianism etc..) the brigade arranges for the prisoner to be stoned to death.

While some have doubted the veracity of these reports (an understandable position when one considers the record of the Daily Mail), we have every reason to believe this brigade exists, and in the fashion described. Indeed, in an interview with Sky News (later reported in the Independent newspaper), an account of the activities of the brigade was recounted by a woman claiming to be a former member. The woman, then 20 years of age, told the journalists that her job “was to lash women who tried to escape or wore the wrong clothes” and that “the women who were caught trying to escape would receive 60 lashes, while women who simply wore heels or were not wearing the proper Islamic dress known as the abaya, were ‘given the ‘standard’ 40 lashes’.”

(Note: When reading of people being ‘lashed’ in the context of the Muslim world, one should never presume the lash to be a thin, flimsy or light, but thick and heavy like rope. People have died from being punished this way).

Of course it’s easy to understand why (among the thousands of cruelties exacted by ISIS fighters) this particular story has proven enduringly popular. Firstly, it appeals to the darkest recesses of the Western male mind – the unlit zone attracted to Sadism, Masochism and fascinated with the exotic and the forbidden. And secondly, it is because of the natural shock people feel when hearing of acts of brutality committed by the fairer sex, something seemingly incongruous and running against the universal grain.

But is it really so rare?

We in the West have become so used to perceiving women as victims of Islam that we probably forget there are women who want to be Muslim; that there are women who choose for themselves a very extreme interpretation of the Koran, often against the wishes of their spouse or family; in short, that women can be irrational and evil too.

Given this reality, I would say that dealing with Jihadi women should be no more morally complicated than dealing with their male counterparts. There is no feminine value left in the ranks of al-Khansa and so they must annihilated with the same ruthlessness (and with the same weapons) as IS’s frontline troops. If they are captured and refuse to provide information, they shouldn’t be spared ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ either. When you betray your sex to such a dreadful extent, you sacrifice the privileges of being that sex.

D, LDN.

ISIS, London, 2015.

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In case you are unaware – and it’s possible that large numbers of people are unaware given the lack of reportage in the media – ISIS Jihadists are clearly preparing to attack the British capital.

Three stories in particular lead me to this conclusion.

On Armed Forces Day (the 27th of June) a plot by ISIS fanatics to bomb a military parade in the borough of Merton, South London was foiled by police working in league with an undercover agent. A week later, on the 4th of July, Pakistani intelligence reported the capture of 3 militants in Peshawar, among whose possessions were detailed maps of London, ISIS materials and documents describing the most heavily populated areas of the city. And finally, about a week ago, a man (as yet unidentified) was photographed carrying a large ISIS standard down a street opposing the Houses of Parliament.

You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to put the pieces together here. We are due for a bloody nose; something along the lines of 7/7 and possibly worse. And as efficient as our security services have proven over the past ten years, if ISIS are determined to strike London, there is little that can be done to stop them. Eventually they will succeed. And then what?

If or when the attack comes, what will be the aftermath? I truly hope it’s more substantial than the passive aggressive silence that followed Lee Rigby’s slaughter. That is far from a given though, and so, if they are needed, here are some suggestions:

1. Surround and protest the Mosques connected with the perpetrators and petition for their closure/destruction.

2. If you have any Muslim friends on social networks who do not condemn the attacks, delete them and encourage friends to do the same with their own contact lists. Be brave and inform them why they are being shunned.

3.  If you haven’t already, ‘like’ the LibertyGB and EDL facebook pages and share their messages.

4. Talk to a liberal friend about Islam and provide them with the Quranic verses promoting violence against non-believers (and introduce them to this blog or like-minded sites like VladTepes, Gates of Vienna etc…).

5. Send a (polite, non-aggressive) email your local MP favouring hard and immediate measures against any organisation or ‘charity’ connected to Jihad. I have emailed MPs many times. All of them read and replied to my messages. It is worthwhile. Even if your MP is a sponge-brained liberal, they cannot ignore the majority indefinitely. It is vital to make use the power of the majority while we still have it.

6. Befriend an ex-Muslim.

7. Support local campaigns against the construction of Mosques.

I strongly believe that these measures over time can yield tangible results.

I understand that none of them have the thrilling glamour of civil war or terrorism, but then the defence of the status quo is always less glamorous than the initiatives of revolution.

We are at war with madness. A consistent and boring stupidity, unwilling and unable to recognise its ugliness and distance from the truth. The glamour it possesses is the glamour of the vandal; the dazzle of the rough and dreadful destroying the precious and worthwhile. It is not a glamour worth having.

D, LDN.

Could Islamic State Kill Islam?

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For the first time in a blue moon, Anglo-American liberals are telling the truth. Islamic State (or ISIS) are increasingly unpopular with ordinary Muslims. Although few can doubt that the actions of the terror regime are explicitly rooted in Quranic text, the exotic barbarism and random flashes of violence employed by its fighters are rarely endorsed by anyone outside of its own ranks. A swelling number of Muslim regimes (themselves backward and detestable in separate ways) are calling for the annihilation of the Caliphate, with some even looking to the infidel West for help in doing so.

The bigger picture here is fascinating. I’m starting to wonder if the very public cruelties of ISIS are causing a quiet crisis of identity for hundreds of millions of mildly devout believers. Magnifying the most extreme implication of this, I’m starting to wonder if ISIS may prove to be Islam’s fatal wound.

Islamic State is the Quran in action. That point is very important to understand. When you read the Quran, you are reading the basis for the blood-soaked terror currently engulfing Syria and Iraq. If you believe the text is endorsed by heaven, you are silently condoning the same slaughter. Now, I don’t believe that the majority of Muslims are stupid or lacking in humanity. Most of them are ordinary people, often very good-natured people, who have simply been brought up in a climate of ritualised stupidity. Given the deep roots of their cultural heritage, it was always going to take something frightful and extreme to make them question it. Has that ‘something’ now entered the stage of history?

Recall that Communism, as a philosophy and as an aspiration, declined greatly in the latter half of the Twentieth century. Most scholars agree that this process had something to do with the discovery (by historians and statisticians) of the Biblical-scale famines and state genocides of the first half of that century – events that were previously only rumors (deniable rumors). When faced with the realities of the Gulag even the most hard-hearted card-carrier began to wonder if his system of thought stood on faulty ground.

As ISIS continues to expose the consequences of applied Islam, even Saudi Arabia (the ideological source of many ISIS doctrines) finds itself swerving into panicked hypocrisy. Last month it was announced by Saudi officials that the Kingdom will be building a multi-million dollar wall spanning the entirety of its northern border to lessen the threat of an ISIS invasion.

The state of Jordan, after one of its pilots was murdered in the most bestial manner, has sworn to mobilise its military to crush the Islamic State. Egypt, having witnessed the spread of ISIS to neighbouring Libya, has brutally crushed Islamist forces within its own territory. In Tunisia, after Islamic State blew up a tourist destination in the capital city, the local population exploded in horrified shame and patriotic anger. Even Iran is warming to the West (and vice versa) as both powers seek to contain the same barbarism.

As someone who monitors these things, I have personally seen the membership of atheist groups rooted in Muslim countries swell in recent months. The citizenry of countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Morocco, Bangladesh, Qatar, Bahrain and Algeria are increasingly aware of how fragile Islam makes their prized social peace and growing economic fortunes.

Has Islamic State – organised to promote and expand the domain of Islam – sent the religion into its death-spiral?

Food for thought.

D, LDN.

4 Things Britain Can Learn from Spain.

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I’ve been working in Northern Spain for more than 4 months now. I shall be returning to England very shortly and so in the past weeks I’ve been thinking about how this country compares to my own. There are many things the UK gets right that Spain gets wrong, but to list these would be impolite to my hosts. Here instead are four things Spain does that Britain should do too…

1. Build Real Cities.

One of the greatest failures of modern British planning is the way the capital city has been allowed to dwarf the rest of the country economically, culturally and politically. The 2nd city of Britain is a glorified housing estate. The 3rd city (Manchester) is merely a scaled down version of London. Below that, most English cities are simply large towns.

Compare this to Spain, where at least 5 cities – Bilbao, Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and Seville – qualify as ‘major’. This gives Spain a wonderful balance, something sorely lacking the UK.

2. Cook Real Food.

British cuisine is an international punchline. To deny this only makes the laughter more emphatic. Spanish cuisine is simple, yet wonderfully varied. Let’s add more seafood to our diet. It extends your lifespan and is immeasurably more delicious than chips.

3. Don’t Fight High-Speed Railways.

There is currently a very silly controversy raging in Britain regarding the construction of a high-speed rail link between Birmingham and London. While I don’t know of many reasons why a Londoner would wish to go to Birmingham, high speed trains are an essential part of a modern national infrastructure. Don’t fight the future. It always wins.

4. Lift the 5pm Shutters.

There is no reason for society to shut down at 5pm. It is depressing, anti-social and economically destructive. If you want young Brits to stop getting drunk in parks, put pressure on businesses to stay open longer. In Spain, the happy part of the day begins when ours finishes.

D, LDN.

Credit Where It’s Due.

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This was never meant to be a purely negative blog. I am not immune to enthusiasm and the rose-tinted view of the world. That is why I must praise the astonishing success of our Chancellor George Osborne, with whose leadership and talent, we have risen from a state of socialist bankruptcy to become one of the strongest economies in the world.

If you remember, when the Conservative-led coalition took office, cynicism filled the air like petrol fumes. And in some cases, that cynicism has been rewarded. Our defence budget has shrunk to disgracefully low levels for example. No real effort has been expended to solve the Muslim issue in our society, or to stem the flood of immigration that so weakens our solidarity and emboldens our enemies.

But the economy is a clear odd man out. More jobs have been created Britain over the past 5 years than in any other advanced economy. As reported in the budget speech on Tuesday, that number is 7 times higher than that of socialist France (for greater comparative illustration, Osborne added that more have been created in the county of Yorkshire than in our wayfaring maritime neighbour as a whole).

I am a patriot. I want Britain to succeed, to follow the American way and shun the socialist poisons of the continent. For those reasons, I must be honest and admit that Osborne has steered the ship in the right direction, even as the fifth column rotting the wood-beams of our living quarters remains untouched.

D, LDN.

Between Paradise and Hell: The Precarious Happiness of the Christian Lebanese.

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This past week, various friends of mine have sent me the link to a viral video from MEMRI TV. It features a sultry Lebanese TV anchor cutting the microphone of a London-based ‘Imam’ after he arrogantly seeks to insert his sexual-religious authority into the conversation.

I’m not as impressed by this as others seem to be. That is because I have never truly considered Lebanon a part of the barbaric construct we call the ‘Islamic World’. Indeed, after the State of Israel, Lebanon seems to me the most civilised and modern country in the greater Middle East.

While it’s true that Muslims now make up a slight majority in the country, the civilising effects of Lebanon’s Christian elite extend deeply into its social and educational fabric. As a consequence, Lebanese Muslims tend to be more ‘secular’ than Syrians or Jordanians, and arguably for reasons directly attributable to Lebanon’s cultural diversity (one of the very time that phrase can be used positively).

If you look through an album of photographs taken in modern Beirut, you might find it difficult to distinguish the streets and piazzas from parts of Portugal, Spain or southern Italy. Despite the ancient mosques and grungy madrassas, one will also notice billboard advertisements for premium wines and Heineken Lager, bare-armed women in tight jeans and sunglasses, as well as gaudy bars and upmarket pubs catering to American and English tourists respectively.

The Lebanese Christians are proudly aware of this geo-cultural strangeness and view any comparison with other Arab states like Saudi Arabia or Jordan as wholly derogatory. Biology plays a role in this. Though all Arabs are a mixture of ancient ancestries, the Lebanese are known to be especially diverse. Genetic investigation of the Christian community has revealed a mixture of Greek, Arab and Western European genetic markers, the last being a hangover from the time when Lebanon functioned as a base for the Crusaders, some of whom remained, intermarried and got lost in the biological stew.

Though we in the West might look down on sectarian attitudes, it is surely easier to sympathise in this case. Imagine for a moment that we in England belonged to a modern, affluent and liberal(ish) country neighboured to the North and East by lands of hellish confusion. We would all eventually come to rely on sheer hostility to prevent the damaging integration of outside elements, especially if defensive alliances seem unavailable.

Only a few miles from the wine bars of Lebanon, the sub-humans of ISIS cut the heads off people accused of summoning demons or practicing witchcraft. Just a short drive from a Beirut Miss Universe pageant is a tent-city where women cannot even leave their homes.

It is hard to think of a more terrifying fragility or a more perfect misery than that of the Christian Lebanese.

D, LDN.