Pick a Tribe, Any Tribe

When will principle swoop in to save us?

El Inglés has returned from a premature retirement, drawn back to active duty by the clarion call of the Counterjihad, the proximate cause being his country’s recent decision to deny entrance to Geert Wilders.

In his latest essay El Inglés focuses on the failure of principle — specifically the failure of democratic principle — to provide a paradigm for effective governance under the pressure of mass Muslim immigration. In his analysis he touches on themes found in both “Surrender, Genocide, or… What?” and “Taking Care of Your Own”.


Pick a Tribe, Any Tribe
by El Inglés

Tribes

The central contention of this essay is that tribalism will prove to be an essential component, if not the central component, in allowing a defense of Western societies against Islam. There are two reasons for this. The first is that such tribalisms will tend to keep Muslims out of those societies in the first place, and the second is that certain types of situations impose such severe psychological pressure on those who would confront them that they cannot consistently or usefully do so without a type and degree of psychological reinforcement that can only be provided by a tribe.

This point implies that the freedom of action of those who would oppose the Islamization of their countries will be drastically curtailed relative to what more optimistic people may currently believe possible. Certain forms of organization will gradually be forced on those politically active in this regard, and it will be observed that, in the aggregate, people will converge on various forms of tribal organization that are, by and large, predictable in advance.

With tribes featuring so prominently in this essay, let me define them here: a tribe is simply a group of people which identifies itself as such and prioritizes the interests of its own members in a relatively visceral, instinctive fashion that is the product of said tribal identification. Almost entirely emotional in nature, it is neither rational or irrational in its operation, but arational, which is to say that reasoning plays little part in its functioning at the level of day-to-day human interaction. Of course, we could conduct a bird’s-eye analysis of any given tribalism and conclude that, at a system level, its effects were such as to further the interests of the tribe as a whole, rendering it metarational. This is however, a question that would have to be answered on a case-by-case basis, and is essentially irrelevant to the psychological factors undergirding the tribalism.

Note that tribalism does not necessarily imply hostility to other tribes or their members, though such hostility may well exist where tribal interests are deemed to be mutually incompatible. It only implies a hierarchy of interests which is followed in a relatively instinctive and unthinking fashion. Additionally, we should observe that, though there are certain obvious tribal types into which human beings, as social organisms, tend to organize themselves, it is not necessary for any of these forms of tribal organization to be implemented exclusive of the others, and most tribalisms will incorporate elements from more than one type. The most obvious and common tribal types would be those organized along racial lines (for the most obvious and literal type of tribe), cultural lines, religious lines (which tribes could be considered a subset of cultural tribes, as they pertain to behaviour and belief), ideological lines (Communists vs. Fascists), regional lines (my nation against yours, North against South), or organizational lines (a British Army regiment).

It will doubtless be anathema to some to suggest that a fairly full-blooded tribalism will be essential to any effective opposition to Islam and Islamization in Western countries. Let us then assume that there is some other basis upon which such opposition could take place. If such a basis does in fact exist, then it must surely be principle. Before examining my predicted reemergence of tribalism any further then, let us consider whether in fact principle might be able to do what I claim only tribalism can.

The Problem With Principle

A few years ago, I was in the process of discussing with a friend the possibility of creating an undercover documentary to expose the corrosive effect Islam was having on freedom of speech in the UK. Needless to say, this would have been a relatively clandestine and hair-raising operation, and there was an air of excitement and conspiracy to our discussions on the subject. After having discussed the details with my friend one night in our local pub for a couple of hours, I returned home at about midnight and discovered that someone had left a very strange message on my answering machine.

It was a barely audible conversation between two, perhaps three people, the voices muffled almost beyond comprehension. Ordinarily I would have dismissed it as an error and deleted it, but, my mind having already edged in paranoia thanks to my conspiratorial activities, I listened to it again, carefully. One of the voices seemed vaguely reminiscent of that of an old family friend, but I didn’t see how I could possible have received any such call from him.

As I recall, it was on the third listening that it occurred to me that the two voices (there were definitely only two) sounded rather like those of myself and my friend. Now that I had a fix, I thought back over our conversation that night, and realized for sure on the fourth listening that the message was about two minutes of our conversation, recorded at very low quality, but discernibly us. And that is when I suddenly started to get a rather nasty feeling. Had I ever received a phone call before from someone who had accidentally sat on their mobile in such a manner as to go into the address book and press the call button, I might have been slightly quicker off the mark in figuring out what had actually happened. But I never had, and I had never heard of it happening to anyone else either. Besides, the mind plays tricks on itself, especially at night when it is already too late to start calling people to try and investigate matters properly. So it was that I managed to convince myself that someone had recorded our conversation and had let me know about it to warn us off. Who could it have been? How could they have known? Did they know where I lived? Should I even risk going to bed? I had no answers.

This absurd and embarrassing episode (soon resolved, I am glad to say, though the film went unmade) was extremely educational and continues to influence my thinking in the following fashion: it taught me that in situations in which one believes, rightly or wrongly, that serious physical harm up to and including death may be visited upon one for defending a principle, the value that anybody other than the most exceptional human being attaches to that principle will disappear in a puff of smoke. Freedom of speech? I’d spoken about freedom of speech vis-à-vis Islam with other people like me, other middle-class, educated, white British people. No one cared about it. Why not just leave Islam and Mohammed alone? Why ruffle Muslims’ feathers? Is there a decline in our quality of life if we can’t criticize Mohammed? These stellar objections and others, though not universal, are frequently heard when one is so intrepid as to engage one’s fellow citizens on the subject of the Religion of Peace in the country that used to be Britain.
- - - - - - - - -
Rummaging around my flat for a object of suitable length and weight with which to defend myself if the believers (or anybody else, for that matter) smashed their way in, I could easily envisage the wording of the Guardian editorial that would follow the discovery of my decapitated corpse: ‘Though this terrible act must be condemned in the strongest possible terms, it is essential to bear in mind that all sides are guilty in this cultural clash, that Islam is as much sinned against as sinner. We must not let our sympathy for the victim and his family blind us to the fact that El Inglés was a psychopathic, indeed genocidal, Muslim-hater. It is hardly surprising that such fanatics invite the attention of others even more fanatical.’ Yes, I could see it all already, clear as day, as I debated the relative combat merit of a brick and a frying pan. To hell with it. If stupid, cowardly people wanted to dance to Islam’s tune, what did I care? Why risk my neck for a freedom of speech that nobody wanted?

This is the first and most fundamental problem with principles: there is no obvious reason to defend them. To be sure, it is easy to argue in favour of one set over another. It is easy enough to deal with a certain amount of opprobrium being directed at one for them. It is easy enough to have a slapfight in the pages of the New York Times Book Review because I think A and you think B. But actually defending one’s principles at the risk of, say, being hacked to pieces for them is hard, because there is no conceivable cost-benefit analysis that might indicate that there is something to be gained by it on a personal level. The benefits of defending a principle to the death accrue only to the survivors, so in the absence of the very fiercest commitment to the welfare of those survivors, it will be extremely difficult to find anyone willing to do so. And what type of commitment would that very fiercest commitment be, if not a tribal one?

Hence the key weakness of the claim that Islamization should be opposed via a defence of a universalist concept of human rights. Of course Islam should be opposed on this basis; it is a human rights catastrophe. But so what? The key question is not whether Islam should be opposed on this basis, but whether it can be, and I submit that it cannot, due to precisely those characteristics that make it such a danger: its implacable and homicidal anger towards anything that opposes it. No critical mass of people in any society will be motivated to risk injury or death in the face of such a violent and retrograde force on the basis of a desire to defend human rights. As Geert Wilders is denied entry to Britain, and our fifth-columnist Muslim talking heads lecture us on the need to keep preachers of hate out of the country, what successes are the defenders of principle enjoying? Our politicians cannot summon up the courage to oppose Muslim mobs with riot police. They would undoubtedly fare even worse facing risks that were physical rather than political. And the point at which the risk of real physical harm catches up with those opposing Islam in the West has long since been passed. Islam now spills out over and across the urban areas of virtually all of Western Europe, and appears quite unintimidated by the defenders of principle, on the streets or in television studios. When will principle swoop in to save us?

Principle might have provided a more effective defence against Islam had it been applied preemptively. If we had decided, when mass immigration into Britain commenced, that Islamic mores were incompatible with those of a civilized country, and that we would therefore, as a matter of principle, have to keep them out, principle alone would have sufficed. But trying to apply principle once significant numbers of Muslims have been admitted is meaningless. Imposing compliance with a set of principles upon a group of people which does not accept them is impossible without force, and as the group in question grows and the probability of compliance falls ever further, so grows the degree of force that would have to be brought to bear to impose that compliance. If there is a mechanism whereby principle steps onto the battlefield, waves its magic wand, and resolves these conflicts prior to the intervention of tribally-motivated actors prepared to use large-scale violence to achieve their aims, I have yet to encounter it.

It has been observed that, when human beings are shot with firearms at point blank range, they instinctively hold their hands up in front of themselves, as if to ward off bullets travelling at supersonic velocities with bare flesh. Needless to say, this is not a very effective defence mechanism in the context of gunfire, which is precisely why its persistence even in this context speaks volumes about its deeply ingrained and instinctive nature, and its evolutionary efficacy in defending against other types of violent action, such as pushes, shoves, and punches. An insistence on the importance of defending principle in the face of a totalitarian ideological force like Islam is very similar to the instinctive response of the average human being to close-range gunfire. It is a hopelessly inadequate reaction that results due to a certain evolutionary history during which it proved its efficacy, but which has given its host organism a completely inflated sense of its capabilities. We are far too accustomed to principle, it seems.

Enter Islam, and everything changes. I cannot be the only person to have watched, during the Muhammad Cartoon Crisis, a certain type of surreal discussion on television current affairs programs, in which a defender of freedom of speech and some self-parody of a Muslim hypocrite would go back and forth on the subject of whether we should be allowed (in our own countries, no less) to ‘insult’ Islam or Muhammad. Can anyone watch any of these sickening infiltrators try to argue away our freedoms and still not comprehend what we are up against? Can anyone doubt that if such people were in a position of power, there would be no sitting around the table discussing human rights when Muhammad was drawn with a bomb in his turban?

The answer to these questions seems to be yes. Amazingly, earnest and well-intentioned people still engage Muslims in discussion, in good faith, on the subject of their dismaying attachment to a frightening variety of pathological, destructive, and criminal behaviours. The inability of these people to accurately diagnose what Islam is surely stems largely from the entirely insincere commitment of so many Muslims to the same principles we ourselves value. Nothing shows Islam up for the Trojan Horse that it is like a Muslim in a suit expressing his fervent commitment to freedom of speech, whilst also appending the caveat that this does not include the freedom to insult or offend, much less the freedom to offend religious feelings. Freedom of religion is also corrupted at the hands of Muslims, from freedom to practice one’s religion in the manner one sees fit into freedom to not ever be exposed to anything of any sort, in any forum, that is critical of one’s religion. It pains me to consider how many man-hours have been wasted by good people debating these issues with Muslims who have either had nothing but hidden contempt for Western concepts of human rights, or who have internalized them through the cracked and grimy lens of Islam, discovering to their delight that implementing human rights in their most pristine form is synonymous with the implementation of sharia law.

Muslims are not, of course, the only people guilty of corrupting, intentionally or otherwise, worthy principles. Indeed, they are outclassed in this regard by frightened, Muslim-appeasing Westerners, whose ability to crawl and scrape before the followers of the Prophet whilst declaring their undying allegiance to the very highest principles of Western civilization is now beyond parody. How strange that such a dispassionate application of the principles of Western Civilization always seems to allow cowards to take the path of least resistance with respect to Islam! I am forced to the conclusion that principle is too slippery and treacherous a thing to be entrusted with our defence vis-à-vis Islam. It is all we have used so far, and the empirically-minded will surely acknowledge its rather poor track record. This situation will not change until we can relearn what we have quite intentionally forgotten.

The Utility of Tribalism

How can it be that in the last fifty years or so, so many wealthy, modern, and technologically advanced countries have seen sprout within themselves the cancer of Islam, and grow ever more weak, divided and fearful as a result? We can perhaps understand why it is not a simple matter for opponents of Islam and Islamization in countries such as Malaysia, Lebanon, or Chad to defend themselves against the encroachments of the believers. But how has it come to pass that, for example, a country like Sweden has a large, rapidly-growing Muslim population keen to have the Swedes bend at the knee to satisfy its expansionary lust? Sweden has no colonial ties with the Muslim world, it can have no sense of historical guilt with respect to it, and it is not located in proximity to any of its countries; yet it is arguably one of the European countries going under to Islam most quickly.

The simple answer to these questions is that Sweden, in keeping with every other European and European offshoot country that we bundle together under the term ‘The West,’ has been dominated for some time by political and media elites who are keen to re-engineer the psychology of their people in a coercive, top-down fashion which does not permit historic, organic tribalisms of any sort. Racial tribalism, religious tribalism, cultural tribalism — all of these have been ruled out of bounds, and once they have, there are simply no grounds upon which to object to an influx of hostile aliens. Combine this with massive international quality-of-life disparities and modern air travel, and the consequences are predictable. Some countries will become infected more quickly than others, but the basic similarity of the trajectories trodden by Western countries in this regard is quite instructive.

As I have mentioned in previous essays, I spent several years on and off living in Japan. The briefest familiarity with the country will be enough to impress upon outsiders the continuing importance the Japanese attach to the racial, cultural, and linguistic tribalism that allows them to define themselves as Japanese. This tribalism has so far precluded the mass immigration that has so altered the fabric of Western countries, and is peculiarly benign in the way it operates. Japan is, in many regards, a very hospitable and welcoming country to those foreigners who are resident there, but exceptionally reluctant to grant permanent residency, let alone citizenship, to outsiders. Even those who marry Japanese people are able to obtain only a spouse visa, which must be renewed frequently with the signature and support of the spouse in question. Those rare, minor, and temporary episodes of mass immigration from the developing world are conducted from a perspective rather different to that of, say, the Netherlands.

Whether or not the Japanese will continue to adhere to this very strict tribalism as their country continues its unusually acute demographic transition remains to be seen. I have heard it claimed that immigration policy is already changing in some regards in response to severe shortages in certain areas of the economy, but this is an issue that need not concern us here. What is of relevance is that, while it was being applied assiduously, Japanese ethno-cultural tribalism rendered Japan completely invulnerable to the encroachment of Islam. Those groups of mass immigrants who were allowed in (such as the Iranians in the late 80s and early 90s) were never considered to be anything other than short-term guests, and were fairly unceremoniously thrown out when economic conditions convinced the Japanese government of the time that there was no longer any advantage to having them.

This needs to be reiterated in a slightly different fashion. In contrast with the already frightening degree of degradation Islam has inflicted upon certain Western countries, and despite its seemingly inexorable advance and the endless stream of concessions granted it there, the Japanese people are, to all intents and purposes, oblivious to Islam and unthreatened by it, objectively or subjectively. This is to say that, instead of inflicting an eminently avoidable disaster on themselves, they have, without the application of any obvious effort, warded it off without even realizing it was there due to the remarkably potent immune system their tribalism constitutes in this regard. Nor is there the slightest reason to doubt that any Western country could have done the same had it so desired, as Islamization is not a threat without large influxes of Muslims, who are alien to all Western countries.

Casting our eye over the developed countries of the world, and those, therefore, that will be targets for Muslim immigrants, we can observe two basic phenomena and two basic consequences. In East Asia, we observe a type of defence against Islamization (and against other things too, though that is another matter) that not only seems to be completely and unfailingly effective, but that also requires no particular application or input to maintain. In the West, we observe that the absence of a widespread, mainstream and socially acceptable tribalism roughly equivalent to that of the Japanese consistently results in large and difficult-to-control influxes of criminal and seditious Muslims who, in the aggregate, will undoubtedly proceed to degrade those countries with long-term consequences that are far from pleasant to consider.

Note that this is an empirical claim about cause and effect on the subject of Islamization, not a claim about the intrinsic moral superiority of the Japanese attitude. Perhaps the more welcoming approach of Europe, striving as it does to see human unity rather than human difference, is more elevated, more inspiring, more noble in some regards. Perhaps the Japanese stance is indicative of a suspicion of, or an aversion to, things unknown or considered alien. Perhaps the European attitude deserves our respect in ways that the Japanese attitude does not. Any of these things could be true, but all are tangential to the question of what the consequences of these disparate attitudes are in a world of massive group differences in wealth-creation capabilities, cultural values, and ideological commitments. As long as Islam remains at large in the world, a favourable attitude to relatively unrestricted mass immigration will have consequences that we must take into account, like it or not.

It is a great and painful irony that the unquestioning and unquestioned nature of Japanese tribalism renders any particularly brutal or vicious application of it unnecessary, either on the part of representatives of the state or anybody else. Foreigners living in Japan do not have to fear racially motivated assault and the worst harassment one suffers consists of Japanese people trying to practice their English with you. There is no particularly hostility to be confronted despite the entrenched tribalism of the Japanese, as the Japanese feel confident and in control in their own country. If, however, Japan were to experience mass immigration of the type witnessed in the UK, I would expect an explosion of xenophobia of a type which would take the breath away. A familiarity with Japanese history over the last hundred years or so will put paid to any stereotypical notion of them as happy smiley little Asian people, nodding and bowing to all and sundry. This is the reverse side of their tribalism, which suggests that there is a balance to be struck. Perhaps the Japanese have not struck it yet, but neither have we, and we err in a direction far more dangerous to own societies than they do.

Of course, if Westerners had, at least superficially, uprooted their own tribalism and imported large numbers of ethnically and culturally different people who had also succeeded to some extent in uprooting their own, then the outcome could have been very different. Indeed, this very process has already taken place to some extent. There are productive and law-abiding ethnic minorities in various Western countries whose tribalisms, whatever form they may in fact take, do not seem to induce them to force their host societies into conflict with them. Perhaps there are even net benefits to their presence in their new countries. But I suspect that they will not enjoy their successes to date to the extent that they deserve to. For Westerners, having put enough downward pressure on tribalism to convince themselves they had vanquished it within (and therefore everywhere, since no one else ever succumbed to it), have simply imported it instead.

Deciding that their extant tribalisms were an unworthy basis upon which to organize a country, they resolved to craft proposition nations, where all would be united by their acceptance of a core proposition and its constellation of attendant principles. Unfortunately, they made a terrible error — they neglected to formulate the propositions. This has resulted in the creation of what I choose to call bureaucratic nations, which are simply geographical containers into which arbitrary collections of people are poured via the application of legal protocols. A nation of this sort will undoubtedly continue to function reasonably well for a time. Eventually though, the system must collapse, for reasons I will describe in the next section.

Tribes, Games, and the Corruption of Democracy

It has been my experience that hammering people over the head hard enough with arguments as to the destructive effects of Islam in Western countries can eventually back them up into a certain corner which, on the spur of the moment, it is not easy to dig them out of. To be sure, Islam seems to have a few issues with modernity. To be sure, Muslims don’t seem to be fitting in all that well over here in the civilized world. But in a democracy, there is little to be done, surely? We will have to take their opinions into account in direct proportion to their numbers, because democracy trumps all other considerations. Is this not the case?

Readers will not be surprised to discover that the answer to this question is “no”. Are there reasons that I would say this other than my well-known fascist temperament and totalitarian predispositions? I am happy to say that there are, but they will require some explanation. Let me put my conclusion first and state that the type of democracy conceived of by people who forward the objection to anti-Islamization efforts in the preceding paragraph is a meaningless entity, morally neutral at best. There exists a piece of territory, which is inhabited by people with a significant degree of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic homogeneity. Thankfully, this unfortunate accident of history is being erased through the blessing of mass immigration. The government of the country, and through it, the laws passed and policies implemented, are an expression of the will of the majority of the population. This is an unmitigated good and cannot be challenged irrespective of how inappropriate some laws and policies so implemented may seem to some of us. If enough Muslims were to enter the territory in question, and vote to introduce stoning as a punishment for adultery, then it would have to be introduced. Behold the wonders of democratic politics! Of course, more sophisticated thinkers will stress the importance, in a true democracy, of inalienable rights protected by a constitution and an independent judiciary. But it will suffice here to focus on the notion of majority rule as a sufficient condition for democracy, a notion which is, sadly, quite prevalent.

Exposing this notion of democracy for the sham it is will require us to dip into the language of game theory for a minute. Successful democracies can be considered games in which the various contending parties have accepted, consciously or subconsciously, that they are engaged in a game which is positive-sum for all parties in an iterated game. The general peace and prosperity which is enabled and enjoyed in such societies is powerful evidence of the benefits of such democracy. But what happens if the participants of the game and the costs and benefits of the various outcomes are altered to the point where, again, consciously or subconsciously, certain players conclude that a continuation of the game ceases to promise them long-term benefits? Are there any incentives for those components then to remain within the system at all?

It is essential that we recognize that democracy, elevated virtually to the status of a religion for some in the relatively secular West, is nothing of the sort. It is merely a truce, an armed peace, between various competing elements who believe their long-term interests to be best served by cooperation and the periodic acceptance of a necessity for compromise. If competing elements are of the same tribe and therefore have an almost complete overlap of fundamental interests, then the Brownian motion of political power over time can be accepted as centering on an equilibrium position compatible with those interests, and the stability ensuing from the compromise implicit in democracy as being in everyone’s best interests. These competing elements are not distinct sub-tribes, but opposing parties on opposite sides of any disagreement. If I believe that the minimum wage should go up 50p, and you believe it should go down 50p, then we are competing elements who will, presumably, accept that democratically-mandated changes in the minimum wage are not worth taking up arms over. Thus, we accept compromise in the interests of our long-term interests.

Tribes being what they are, it is hard to see how any country which includes within its borders significant numbers of the members of more than one tribe can continue to function democratically in any meaningful sense of the term. Perhaps there are tribes whose conflicting fundamental interests are so few and so minor that they can function as fractions of the same democratic polity for an extended period without the emergence of inter-tribal strife threatening to pull that polity apart and do more besides. But such examples are hard to come by in real human societies, and only made possible by unusual combinations of intellectual, economic, and historical trends.

Enter Islam, whose adherents seem somewhat unfamiliar with the rules of the democratic game, or the underlying notion of compromise for the long-term mutual benefits of those playing it. Indeed, they seem to be uninterested in anything but Islam and its dictates, and this is where the trouble starts. Once a country has a Muslim minority of any significant size, can it be still be said that all contending parties are engaged in a game which is still positive-sum for all parties in its iterated form? Let us be charitable and ignore the criminality, socioeconomic underperformance, terrorist tendencies, sedition, dysfunctionality, interminable demands, cultural arrogance, and general all-round unpleasantness of Muslims. In terms only of the dynamics of the simplified democratic political system I have described so far, does their entrance to the country introduce qualitative change so as to degrade the otherwise healthy functioning of the system?

The answer to this question is clearly yes. For at a stroke, the almost complete overlap of fundamental interests is replaced with the insoluble opposition of fundamentally incompatible interests everywhere we look. The interests of Muslims are, in large part, the dictates of the Quran, which are completely antithetical to everything good in Western civilization, or, for that matter, any other civilization. The zero-sum game over the minimum wage mentioned above can be won or lost by either side without jeopardizing respect for the game by the players. Were this not so, our societies would never have functioned democratically at all. But how can the native inhabitants accept that the theocratic totalitarianism of Islam will creep into their laws and ways of life whilst somehow allowing the long-term mutual benefits of democracy to continue to be enjoyed?

Let us consider the recent decision of the British government to ban Geert Wilders from entering the UK. Whether or not Wilders was allowed into the UK was always going to be a zero-sum game between our recklessly imported Muslim population and that part of the native British population not consisting of free-floating tribeless collaborators with Islam. Well, what of it? As the minimum-wage example demonstrates, compromise lies at the heart of democracy. Surely this is just one of those things that we have to accept if we are to enjoy an iterated positive-sum game with our rapidly-growing Muslim population?

Alas, no. The reasonably stable equilibrium point around which political power used to roam in accordance with temporary party-political successes has now had introduced to it a steady vector of movement in the direction of ever-greater Islamization. The ability of small Muslim populations, through explicit and implicit threats of protests, demonstrations, riots, and terrorist attacks, to intimidate extant political elites into submission (pun very much intended) is already obvious to any observer capable of rational thought.

It would scarcely be credible to suggest that there is no real political momentum being established here, or that the recent bowing and scraping to the believers is in actual fact little more than a trivial imbalance in the political equilibrium, soon to be corrected by Gordon Brown denouncing Muhammad as a paedophile and a murderer in the House of Commons, spittle flying from his lips. As Muslims continue to flood into the UK, it will become ever more difficult to avoid building on the precedents set in these days of cowardice for reasons I have examined at length elsewhere, but that are intuitively obvious anyway.

British natives are therefore faced, as a tribe, with a gradual corruption of their nation and sidelining of their interests in the name of appeasing a tribe of 7th-century religious totalitarians who are already inflicting various sorts of damage on it, via crime, terrorism, and socioeconomic underachievement. What reason could there be then, for those natives to accept that they should remain part of the democratic polity which undermines their interests so broadly and deeply? The previously long-term positive-sum trajectory of said polity has bifurcated into a trajectory that is massively to the advantage of our Muslim colonizers, and massively to the disadvantage of us, the colonized. This is to say that we are no longer ‘in it’ together, through good times and bad. We are, instead, competing parties in a game which is zero-sum at best in the long term. A system of this sort must break apart eventually, and that process of collapse is unlikely to be pleasant for anyone. Thus does democracy destroy itself, like an animal which has forgotten its own feeding habits and the mechanics, therefore, of its own sustenance.

Let me put this in personal terms. I will not, under any circumstances, accept that the members of an alien, hostile, expansionist, and culturally exterminationist religious tribe should have their interests afforded more importance than my own, in the country bequeathed to me by my ancestors, under any circumstances whatsoever. Any ‘legitimately’-obtained successes on their part in this regard, obtained through whatsoever means, are in fact rendered illegitimate due to the cancellation of the democratic contract and corruption of the democratic game that their presence in Britain implied from the start.

In Closing

Of all the essays I have written for on subjects related to Islam and Islamization so far, this one has caused me the most psychological discomfort, and by quite some margin. Arriving at the conclusion that certain friends and acquaintances adhere to positions that, in the aggregate, represent tribal interests engaged in a zero-sum game with my own, in my own country; recognizing that tribal feelings of a type I myself feel no strong attraction towards will play a vital role in the defence of what is good in that country; insisting that standard democratic processes will have to be cast aside to remove the influence of pernicious ideologies: to be frank, I would rather not have to think about any these things at all.

For even I, gentle reader, have too much of the cosmopolitan in me to rejoice in the notion of people identifying each other as mortal enemies for tribal reasons. Viewing the BNP homepage on one occasion for reasons which now escape me, I remember feeling my eyes start to glaze over at the group photos of happy white people being happy and white together. Why was it so important for them all to be white? What if one of them had been an Inuit? Would something terrible have happened? Were the Inuit any less worthy of human consideration, just because their ancestors went right when mine went left?

It seems to me that we can usefully distinguish between the subjective feelings we have towards a certain motivating factor within a complex system, and a more objective analysis of the indispensable role that the factor in question might be playing within the system as a whole. It is instructive to consider an economic example by noting, for example, that no less a figure than Adam Smith had a low opinion of businessmen, as detailed by Thomas Sowell:

“Those who favor government intervention in the economy often depict those who prefer free competition as pro-business apologists. This has been profoundly wrong for at least two centuries. Adam Smith, the 18th century founder of free market economics, was so scathingly critical of businessmen that it would be impossible to find a single favorable reference to them in his 900-page classic “The Wealth of Nations”. Instead Smith railed against the clamor and sophistry of merchants and manufacturers…”

Most of us will feel some distaste and discomfort in the presence of the more extreme and xenophobic manifestations of tribalisms, even those tribalisms which would include us among their members. Some of us will also have similar responses even to more moderate and self-protective expressions of said tribalisms, expressions that I would consider an inevitable and appropriate response to the incursions of ideologically hostile aliens. Such people will perhaps be somewhat reassured if they consider that, just as free market policies tend to create prosperity in economic systems, irrespective of the unattractive nature of certain components of those systems, appropriate tribalisms can create great security and robustness in political systems, irrespective of the unpleasantness of certain actors within those systems.

I find it helpful to consider an organization like the BNP in this light. Such research as I have conducted into it indicates to me that it is a political party whose positions are heavily influenced by National Socialist ideology, hidden though some of it may be. Though many of its voters are undoubtedly well-intentioned white British people frustrated and angry about what is happening to their country, the leadership of the party seems to be of a type one would expect on the basis of the aforementioned ideological affiliation. Yet there is a significant overlap of interest between the BNP and people like myself. What to make of this?

Let me put it succinctly: if the BNP won two seats at the next general election, I would be delighted. If it won two hundred, I would emigrate. I view BNP support as playing a role similar to that of a price in a free-market economy, which is to say that I see it as a signal conveying a certain type of information. If the BNP were to be banned and its support therefore to disappear at the electoral level, this information would be lost to the system, easing the pressure on the establishment parties to formulate a real response to Islamization, which I fervently hope they will eventually do. Lamenting the advances of nativist groups at this level would be like lamenting a rise in the price in oil when demand grows more quickly than supply. That said, given my beliefs about the gap between the true ideological commitments of the BNP leadership and the motivations of those who vote for it, it is impossible for me to avoid the conclusion that it would be a disaster for it to obtain real power.

Regardless of whether readers agree or disagree with my reading of this particular matter, I consider an emphasis on a system-level analysis important if we are not to allow knee-jerk reactions to some aspects of tribalism blind us to the essential role it must play in allowing us to oppose Islam. To those who think I am making all of this sound very simple and inoffensive, let me acknowledge in closing that reality is sure to diverge from the most optimistic predictions of any of us. I have serious doubts as to whether a tribalism that reemerges to defend against threats its former self would have preempted without difficulty will have either the opportunity or the inclination to brook much opposition from other tribes, especially on what it will consider, with no small justification, to be home territory. To the extent that we believe tribalism has costs as well as benefits, both for ourselves and for others, it might be a good idea to start considering how to rein in the excesses some will inevitably push for when the rapidly heightening tension between Islam and the West, parasite and host, finally boils over into open conflict in our own countries.