Recommendations for the West

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files.


The West at the beginning of the 21st century suffers from a lack of cultural confidence, and is in some ways engaged in an internal struggle over the very meaning of Western civilization. This ideological “war within the West” has helped paved the way for the physical “war against the West” that is waged by Muslim Jihadists, who quite correctly view our creed of Multiculturalism and our acceptance of Muslim immigration as signs of weakness and that the West has lost contact with its civilizational roots.

Perhaps we will need to resolve the war within the West before we can win the war against the West. When Westerners such as Polish king Jan III Sobieski led their troops to victory over the Turks in the 1683 Battle of Vienna, they fought for a number of reasons: Their country, their culture and their religion, among other things. People don’t just need to live, they need something to live for, and fight for. We are against Islam. What are we for?

I would suggest that one thing we should fight for is national sovereignty and the right to preserve our own culture and pass it on to future generations. We are fighting for the right to define our own laws and national policies, not to be held hostage by Leftist Utopians, unaccountable NGOs, transnational progressives or self-appointed guardians of the truth.
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Multiculturalism is wrong because not all cultures are equal. However, it is also championed by groups with a hidden agenda. Multiculturalism serves as a tool for ruling elites to fool people, to keep them from knowing that they have lost, or deliberately vacated, control over national borders. Leftists who dislike Western civilization use Multiculturalism to undermine it, a hate ideology disguised as tolerance. Multiculturalism equals the unilateral destruction of Western culture, the only unilateral action the West is allowed to take, according to some.

There are also some libertarian right-wingers and Big Business supporters who see man only as the sum of his economic functions, as cheap labor and consumers, homo economicus. They believe not only in free markets but in free migration, and tend to downplay the impact of culture. They are Islam’s useful idiots in the fight against the West.

Although Leftists tend to be more aggressive, perhaps the dividing line in the internal struggle in the West is less between Left and Right, and more between those who value national sovereignty and Western culture and those who do not. End the nonsense of “celebrating our differences.” We should be celebrating our sameness and what binds us together. We should clean up our history books and school curricula, which have been infected with anti-Western sentiments.

Upholding national borders has become more important in the age of globalization, terrorism and mass-migration, not less. No nation regardless of political system can survive the loss of its territorial integrity, but democratic states especially so. Those who don’t want to uphold national borders are actually tearing down the very foundations of our democratic system, which is based on nation states. The fight for national sovereignty is thus the fight for democracy itself, since nobody has so far made any convincing model of a supranational democracy.

We now have a political class who spend much of their time travelling around the world. They no longer feel as attached to the people they are supposed to represent as they did in the past. This is perhaps inevitable, but it feeds a growing sense of detachment between ordinary people and their supposed leaders. We need to remind our political leaders that we pay national taxes because they are supposed to uphold our national borders. If they can’t do so, the social contract is breached, and we should no longer be required to pay our taxes. National taxes, national borders could become a new rallying cry.

The West is declining as a percentage of world population, and in danger of being overwhelmed by immigration from poorer countries with booming populations. Westerners need to adjust our self-image to being less dominant in the 21st century. As such, we also need to ditch Messianic altruism: The West must first of all save itself. We have no obligation to “save” the Islamic world, and do not have the financial strength nor the demographic numbers to do so even if we wanted to. We are not all-powerful and are not in the position to help all of the Third World out of poverty, certainly not by allowing all of them to move here.

We should take a break from massive immigration, also non-Muslim immigration, for at least a generation, in order to absorb and assimilate the persons we already have in our countries. The West is becoming so overwhelmed by immigration that this may trigger civil wars in several Western nations in the near future. We already have massive Third World ghettos in our major cities. Future immigration needs to be more strictly controlled and ONLY non-Muslim.

This immigration break should be used to demonstrate clearly that the West will no longer serve as the dumping ground for excess population growth in other countries. We have cultures and countries that we’d like to preserve, too, and cannot and should not be expected to accept unlimited number of migrants from other countries. But above all, the West, and indeed the non-Muslim world, should make our countries Islam-unfriendly and implement a policy of containment of Dar al-Islam. This is the most civilized thing we can do in order to save ourselves, but also to limit the loss of life among both Muslims and non-Muslims.

The best way to deal with the Islamic world is to have as little to do with it as possible. We should ban Muslim immigration. This could be done in creative and indirect ways, such as banning immigration from nations with citizens known to be engaged in terrorist activities. We should remove all Muslim non-citizens currently in the West. We should also change our laws to ensure that Muslim citizens who advocate sharia, preach Jihad, the inequality of “infidels” and of women should have their citizenship revoked and be deported back to their country of origin.

We need to create an environment where the practice of Islam is made difficult. Muslim citizens should be forced to either accept our secular ways or leave if they desire sharia. Much of this can be done in a non-discriminatory way, by simply refusing to allow special pleading to Muslims. Do not allow the Islamic public call to prayer as it is offensive to other faiths. All children, boys and girls should take part in all sporting and social activities of the school and the community. The veil should be banned in all public institutions, thus also contributing to breaking the traditional subjugation of women. Companies and public buildings should not be forced to build prayer rooms for Muslims. Enact laws to eliminate the abuse of family reunification laws. Do not permit major investments by Muslims in Western media or universities.

As columnist Diana West of the Washington Times points out, we should shift from a pro-democracy offensive to an anti-sharia defensive. Calling this the War on Terror was a mistake. Baron Bodissey of the Gates of Vienna blog suggests the slogan “Take Back the Culture,” thus focusing on our internal struggle for Western culture. Another possibility is “War against Apartheid.” Given sharia’s inequality between men and women, Muslims and non-Muslims, it is de facto a religious apartheid system. Calling this struggle a self-defense against apartheid would make it more difficult for Western Leftists to dismiss it.

People should be educated about the realities of Jihad and sharia. Educating non-Muslims about Islam is probably more important than educating Muslims, but we should do both. Authorities or groups of dedicated individuals should engage in efforts to explain the real nature of Islam, emphasizing the division that Islam teaches between Believer and Infidel, the permanent state of war between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb and the uses of taqiyya and kitman as religious deception.

As Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch says, we should explain why Islam encourages despotism (because allegiance is owed the ruler as long as he is a Muslim), economic paralysis, intellectual failure (the cult of authority, the hostility to free and skeptical inquiry) in Islamic countries. Let Muslims themselves begin slowly to understand that all of their political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures are a result of Islamic teachings.

Fitzgerald also suggests exploiting the many fissures within the Islamic world: Divide and conquer. Divide and demoralize. Islam has universalist claims but it talks about Arabs as the “best of peoples,” and has been a vehicle for Arab supremacy, to promote Arab conquest of wealthier non-Arab populations. In addition to divisions between Arabs and non-Arab Muslims, we have the sectarian divide between Shias and Sunnis, and the economic division between the fabulously rich oil-and-natural-gas Arab states and the poor Muslim countries.

Both the sectarian and economic divisions within Islam are best exploited by Infidels doing nothing. If the Western world stops giving Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and the Palestinians “aid,” which has in reality become a disguised form of Jizyah, this will clear the psychological air. And it will force the poorer Arabs and other Muslims to go to the rich Arabs for support.

Right now, Muslims can enjoy the best of both worlds: Following medieval religious laws while enjoying the fruits of 21st century civilization. We need to drive home the utter failure of the Islamic model by making sure that Muslims should no longer able to count on permanent Western or infidel aid in their overpopulated, self-primitivized states, whose very unviability they are prevented from recognizing by this constant infusion of aid.

We also need to deprive Arabs and Muslims as much as possible of Western Jizya in other forms, which means ending foreign aid, but also institute a Manhattan Project for alternative sources of energy, in order to become independent of Arab oil.

And as Mr. Fitzgerald asks: “What would the rich Arabs do if the Western world decided to seize their property in the West as the assets of enemy aliens, just as was done to the property owned not only by the German government, but by individual Germans, during World War II? And what would they do if they were to be permanently deprived of easy access to Western medical care?”

We also need to reject the “You turn into what you fight” argument. The British, the Americans and the Canadians didn’t become Nazis while fighting Nazi Germany, did they? The truth is, we will become like Muslims if we don’t fight them and keep them out of our countries, since they will subdue us and Islamize us by force. The West isn’t feared because we are “oppressors,” we are despised because we are perceived as being decadent and weak.

Yes, we should implement a policy of containment of the Islamic world, but for this to work we will sometimes have to take military action to crush Arab pretensions to grandeur. The Buddhists of Central Asia undoubtedly held the “moral high ground” in relations to Muslims. They are all dead now. At the very least, we must be prepared to back up our ideological defenses with force on certain occasions. Holding a higher moral standard isn’t going to defeat an Iranian President with nukes, threatening another Holocaust.

Writer Raymond Kraft explains Western softness very well: The Islamic movement “has turned the civility of the United States and Europe into a weapon and turned it against us. It has weaponized niceness, it has weaponized compassion, it has weaponized the fundamental decency of Western Civilization. We have become too civilized to defeat our enemies, perhaps too civilized to survive.”

Kraft thinks we are naïve in believing that the deeds of Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, the whole Islamic Jihad, are done by a bunch of “non-state actors.” In real life they’re agents of nation states (Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, sometimes Russia or China) who want to weaken the West by a proxy war.

The Chinese and the Russians do not want to fight an open war with the Americans, but they would be hugely pleased to see the United States cut down to size a bit, until it is about as much a threat to anybody as the European Union is now, “so the Chinese and Russians can run the global show as they see fit, ration the oil, and pocket the profits.”

There is, however, a big difference: The Islamic world always has been our enemy and always will be. China and Russia do not have to be our enemies, although our relations will be complicated because of their size and their own Great Power ambitions. We can, at best, persuade them that directly opposing us isn’t going to pay off.

I have heard several objections to the containment option. Some claim that it is too harsh and thus won’t be implemented; others say that it is insufficient and won’t work in the long run.

It’s true that in the current political situation, expulsion of sharia-sponsoring Muslims isn’t going to happen. But the current political situation isn’t going to last.

We will get civil wars in several Western countries because of this immigration, and given the increasing clashes with Muslim immigrants in France, in England and in other countries one could argue that we are seeing early signs of this already now. This will finally demonstrate how serious the situation is, and force other Western nations to ban Muslim immigration and pressure Muslim citizens to assimilate or leave.

I have heard comments that it isn’t practically doable to contain the Islamic world behind some artificial Maginot Line. When the Mongols could simply go around the Great Wall of China during the Middle Ages, it will be impossible to contain anybody in the 21st century with modern communication technology.

I understand this objection. No, it won’t be easy, but we have to at least try. Containment is the very minimum that is acceptable. Perhaps the spread of nuclear technology will indeed trigger a large-scale war with the Islamic world at some point. The only way to avoid this is to take steps, including military ones, to deprive Muslims of such technology. The Jihad is being waged with military, political, demographic and diplomatic means. The defense against Jihad has to be equally diverse.

I have also been criticized because my talk about containment and the need to limit even non-Muslim immigration smacks of the siege mentality of a friendless West. First of all, the policy of stricter immigration control isn’t based on isolationism, it’s based on realism. We’re in the middle of the largest population boom and the largest migration waves in human history. The simple fact is that far more people want to live in the West than we can possibly let in.

Technological globalization has made it easier for people to travel to other countries, but also easier for them to stay in touch with their original homeland as if they never left. We have to deal with this fact by slowing the immigration rates to assimilation levels, or our societies, and certainly our democratic system, will slowly break down.

Moreover, I’m advocating isolating the Islamic world, not the West. Even if we cannot allow all non-Muslims to freely settle in our lands, this does not mean that they have to be our enemies. Jihad is being waged against the entire non-Muslim world, not just the West. We should stop trying to “win the hearts and minds” of Muslims and start reaching out to non-Muslims.

The United Nations is heavily infiltrated by Islamic groups. We should starve it for funds and ridicule it at any given opportunity. As an alternative to the UN, we could create an organization where only democratic states could become members. Another possibility is an expansion of NATO. The most important principle at this point is to contain the Islamic world. We simply cannot allow our enemies to have influence over our policies, which they partly do through the UN.

What the West should do is to enter into strategic alliances with non-Western states that share some of our political ideals and goals. This includes non-Muslim nations such as Japan and India, perhaps also Thailand, the Philippines and others. We will, however, still need some understanding with Russia and China and some mechanism for consultations with both. Perhaps, instead of any new and formalized organization, the most influential countries will simply form ad hoc alliances to deal with issues as they arise.

The situation in the Old West in Europe is right now more serious than in the New West, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

For Europe, the most important thing to do right now is to dismantle the European Union in its present form, and regain national control over our borders and our legislation. The EU is so deeply flawed as an organization, and so heavily infiltrated by Eurabian and pro-Islamic thinking that it simply cannot be reformed. And let’s end the stupid support for the Palestinians that the Eurabians have encouraged, and start supporting our cultural cousin, Israel.

Europeans also need to ditch the welfare state, which is probably doomed anyway. The welfare state wasn’t all bad, but the welfare state economies cannot compete in a world of billions of capitalists in low-cost countries. Besides, the welfare state creates a false sense of security in a dog-eat-dog world, and it breeds a passivity that is very dangerous in the fight against Jihad. It may also indirectly contribute to the low birth rates in many European countries.

We should use the money instead to strengthen our border controls and rebuild credible militaries. Western Europeans have lived under Pax Americana for so long that we have forgotten how to defend ourselves. This needs to change, and soon.

Europeans should adopt legislation similar to the First Amendment in the American Constitution, securing the right to free speech. The reason why European authorities are becoming increasingly totalitarian in their censorship efforts is to conceal the fact that they are no longer willing or able to uphold even the most basic security of their citizenry, far less our national borders. Europe needs free speech more than ever.

[Baron Bodissey’s two cents: Europe needs a Second Amendment, too, and for the same reason.]

We need to strike a balance between defeatism and denial. Yes, the situation in Europe is now very serious, but it is not totally lost. Not yet. The Danish Cartoon Jihad has demonstrated that their Islamic arrogance encourages Muslims to become too aggressive, too early, and thus overplay their hand. Our main problem is ourselves. Europe’s elites have lost contact with the people, and the people have lost contact with reality. Western Europe is now a collection of several layers of different Utopias: Multiculturalism, welfarism, radical Feminism and transnationalism that will all soon come crashing down. The important question is how we’re going to deal with this.

Yes, we have been betrayed by our own leaders, but that’s still only part of the problem. People tend to get the governments they deserve. Maybe we get weak leaders because we are weak, or because they can exploit weaknesses in our mentality to get us where they want to; above all anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, our excessive desire for consensus and suppression of dissent, the anti-individualistic legacy from Socialism and the passivity bred by welfare state bureaucracy. Muslims are stuck with their problems and their corrupt leaders and blame everybody else for their own failures because they can never admit they are caused by deep flaws in their culture. We shouldn’t make the same mistake. Europeans export wine; Arabs export whine. That’s the way it should be.

It is highly likely that the coming generation will determine whether Europe will continue to exist as a Western cultural entity. However, just as Islam isn’t the cause of Europe’s weakness but rather a secondary infection, it is conceivable that the Islamic threat could have the unforeseen and ironic effect of saving Europe from herself. Europe will bleed but she won’t die.

As the quote goes in the Hollywood classic “The Third Man”:

”…in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love — they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Some would say that’s a tad unfair to the Swiss. Switzerland has been at the forefront of many technological developments for a long time, and we could probably learn from their example with frequent referendums and direct democracy. But it’s true that European renewals can be messy stuff.

Muslims always claim that Islamic influences triggered the Renaissance. That’s not true. But maybe it will be this time. Perhaps this life-and-death struggle with Islam is precisely the slap in the face that we need to regroup and revitalize our civilization. Is there still enough strength left in Europe to repel an Islamic invasion once more? If so, Muslims could indeed be responsible for triggering a Western Renaissance, the Second Renaissance.

It remains to be seen whether this will actually happen, or whether it is wishful thinking. Europe will unfortunately experience some warfare either way. Will this produce a Michelangelo or a Muhammad? Only time will tell.


Note from Baron Bodissey: I didn't realize that the Fjordman donation button was no longer working; I had to remove the link. For the time being, there is no way to donate to Fjordman. Put your money in high-interest short-term bonds, and wait until the opportunity comes up again... :)