Pick A Tribe, Any Tribe — Part II

“Irresolvable tribal differences cannot be considered to be mere political differences.”

The following essay by El Inglés is a sequel to the one published back in February. In this follow-up he extends his observations about tribal differences in modern Britain — and the rest of the Western world — by examining various tribal fractures which may be widened and inflamed during conflicts engendered by Muslim communities against their host society.

As usual, it’s useful to remember that El Inglés’ analysis is descriptive, and not normative. That is, something similar to what he projects here is the inevitable shape of things to come if Britain’s feckless political leaders fail to wake up to the severity of the crisis that is at hand.


Pick A Tribe, Any Tribe — Part II
by El Inglés

Introduction

Let us imagine ourselves in the shoes of some reasonably high-ranking civilian official in the Pentagon. We are trying to help maintain good relations with Turkey and its military due to the importance of Turkish cooperation in the war in Iraq, yet we have to contend with the vociferous attempts of a certain American ethnic minority to achieve goals which do not appear to be in the best interests of our country in this, or perhaps any, regard. I refer to the small Armenian-American community and its lobbying efforts aimed at having the Armenian Genocide formally recognized as such at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Irrespective of one’s opinions on the Armenian Genocide, modern Turkey, the war in Iraq, or anything else, it is very difficult to see how America itself would stand to gain anything from the U.S. Senate passing a resolution to this effect, except perhaps in the most rarified and abstract sense. If, recognizing this, we in our role as Pentagon official started to grumble to ourselves about the Armenian fifth column in U.S., its ingratitude to its adopted country, and how it should never have been allowed in the first place, what might a third party make of this stream-of-consciousness string of charges? Could they be valid? Could the Armenians be a fifth column in some sense? Before discussing this point any further, let me make it clear that I have chosen the Armenian-Americans because I believe they are likely to provide a relatively non-inflammatory way into this general topic. For my own part, I have never even met an Armenian and have no strong feelings on Armenia or Armenians.

Consider a Venn diagram which represents all the different possible subjective interests a community can have. We must ignore the fact that there will never be complete consensus as to what the interests of a community will be, and instead accept that we can, broadly speaking, recognize a core set of interests for any community. We must also stress that we are talking about subjective interests, i.e. what the communities in question perceive their own interests to be, not what we, from a God’s-eye perspective, might consider them to be.

Somewhere on this diagram sits a smear of interests which represents what is good for America, and there sits also another smear which represents what is good for Armenian-Americans. Needless to say, there is a huge degree of overlap between the two smears. It is obviously in the interests of both America and Armenian-Americans for America to be strong, safe, and prosperous, and in the interests of both communities for Armenian-Americans themselves to be law-abiding and productive. But unsurprisingly, the Armenian diaspora seems to attach great significance to having the Armenian Genocide recognized as what they consider it to be, whereas Americans as a whole would surely consider the issue irrelevant at best, and a liability with respect to a strategic ally at worst. We therefore conclude that there is some divergence between the two smears of interests, as discussed in the first part of this essay.
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If the divergence between the interests of a society and an immigrant group within that society grows, if it impinges upon ever more contentious issues, and if the immigrant group itself grows as a fraction of the society as a whole, then what is the likely outcome of that set of developments, and how might we best describe it? What would we conclude about the Armenian community in America? Is it a hard-working and loyal asset in which certain legitimate political positions are unusually strong? Is it a small community of little significance and best ignored? Is it a liability, recklessly pushing its own interests without the slightest regard for the strategic position of the country which granted its ancestors a new life? Or is it, perhaps, a fifth column which, despite having contributed little to what the United States has become over the course of its history, is now trying to appropriate the country’s diplomatic heft for its own selfish purposes? Would America be better off without it?

I have already given, in no uncertain terms, my answer to similar questions vis-à-vis the Muslim population of my own country. But what of those other groups of relatively recent immigrants? What about the Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Poles, Jamaicans, Nigerians, and the rest? In the context of Islamization and possible responses, is there anything to be said about these groups? Are they allies, enemies, or simply irrelevant?

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Strangers in Our Midst?

Here, I would like to present a few observations relevant to the subject at hand by discussing in turn some friends and acquaintances of mine who can, I believe, be considered representative of certain ‘types’ that are found among immigrant communities of note in the UK. Certain key points will emerge naturally from these discussions.

The Jew

The Jew is a middle-aged psychiatrist with whom I became acquainted through a family member. Good-natured, intellectual, and a great fan of putting on silly accents after a couple of drinks, the Jew once had a fairly major disagreement with this Gentile, triggered by the response of some UK Muslims to the publication in Denmark of Mohammed cartoons.

Making fairly harsh reference to the now infamous mob of baying psychopaths who descended upon the Danish Embassy in London, I discovered that the Jew was more inclined to blame the Danish cartoonists themselves. Surely they must have known the type of response they were going to provoke, he suggested. Why couldn’t they just have left the whole thing well alone? As we discussed the subject further, it was revealed to me that the Jew, as a Jew (his words), felt disturbed by the implication being made, by me and others, that the UK contained a minority that seemed to pose a significant and growing threat to it.

It is widely observed and, I believe, not seriously disputed, that Jews in general (at least outside of Israel) tend to be ‘liberal’ in the American sense of the word, supporting mass immigration and other such policies. One suffers no great difficulty in seeing why this might be so given the rather unfortunate history of the Jewish people, and the Jew himself undoubtedly derives his abovementioned position in part from his Polish family background and the deaths of certain of his family members in the Holocaust. Needless to say, this is his prerogative. However, in the face of a potentially existential problem such as Islam and its growing presence in Western countries, the discussion cannot end there.

I argued in the first installment of this essay that certain types of divergence in the interests of component groups in a society can destroy the positive-sum game of democratic politics and that all bets are off, so to speak, as and when this happens. The most obvious example of this divergence is with respect to Islam. Ignoring for a moment the sheer madness of Jews arguing in favour of Muslim immigration into their countries of residence, when Jews do so argue they can only further the interests of the diverging group, thereby making themselves part of the problem. Furthermore, when they so argue as Jews, they become part of the problem as Jews.

I must stress the conditional nature of this claim. There is nothing intrinsic to Jews, secular or religious, that makes them a boon, a liability, or anything else vis-à-vis Islam. My claims are simply as follows:

a)		if minority groups adopt stances that force their interests to diverge from those of the majority in a given country in a non-trivial fashion, then the majority is entitled to respond, and
b)		a divergence of interests that lines up with the interests of the Muslim community, by design or accident, is about as serious a divergence as could be imagined.

I hope the Jewish population of Britain will come to see sense on the subject of Islam. I am fairly confident that the Jew himself has no illusions as to what Islam is, and I hope that he will eventually draw the correct conclusion and move from one side of the debate to the other. But if he and his fellow Jews do not, an outcome I would consider tragic, then Anglo-Saxon-Celts, as Anglo-Saxon-Celts, will be entitled to ask some tough questions as to whose side British Jews are on.

The Hindu

The Hindu is a member of my extended family in her early twenties who, having come to the UK to attend university, is currently working in London. Intelligent, and with a keen interest in women’s rights and the various minorities in the UK that hail from the Indian sub-continent, she has unfortunately internalized a number of falsehoods as to what Britain is. I splice together here various fragments of a discussion spread out over time, but am reasonably confident that I am not representing her positions unfairly. Being very fond of her, I want to stress that I am confident there is still much hope for the Hindu, who has always proven receptive to disagreement with those of her positions that I describe below, and is a long way from being a mindless PC drone.

The basic problem with the Hindu’s attitudes can best be illustrated by her response to a situation which occasionally develops in the UK, in which an arranged marriage takes place between a British man of, say, Bangladeshi origin and a freshly-imported Bangladeshi bride. The man beats, rapes and generally abuses the woman, who finds herself caught between the devil and the deep blue sea as a consequence. Trapped in a foreign country whose language may well be incomprehensible to her, without education or resources, she cannot return home as her own family will likely kill her for the shame her return will bring down on their heads.

What, then, to do? The Hindu, with an alarming degree of self-confidence, asserts to her hapless gora audience (me), that the current law on obtaining British citizenship is unfair. The minimum period of residence required to achieve citizenship prolongs their dependence upon their abusive husbands, and should be shortened to, if memory serves, two years. Moreover, a network of specialized women’s shelters should be maintained, one staffed by ethnic minority women, in which other ethnic minority women, including Bangladeshis, can find refuge in a familiar cultural setting. The British taxpayer, needless to say, is expected to pay for all this.

I characterize this viewpoint as the Disneyland mentality. There are two types of country in the world, it must be understood:

a)		normal countries, in which people care about their national identities, and where the importance of the various ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic pillars upon which those identities stand is taken for granted, and
b)		Disneyland countries, which are fun parks for the entire world.

Britain is, needless to say, a Disneyland country, which all the peoples of the world are entitled to access, to pursue that which their hearts hold dear. British passports must be handed out as necessary. Happily, this will not be problematic as the amount of paper required to produce them is small and should not put undue pressure on the public finances. These are, of course, infinite anyway and therefore open to being commandeered by foreigners without ill effect.

Note the complete contempt for British citizenship implicit in this attitude. Vitally important to get hold of, yet meaningless enough to be handed out like candy. A guarantor of access to the financial and social capital accumulated over long centuries by the British people, yet expected to be given up without a quarrel by those very same people. There is also a complacent assumption, made clearer still to me by other discussions of ours, that the large and growing numbers of woefully underperforming, criminal Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and others in the UK is not something which should trouble a native Briton. Such are the attitudes of the Hindu, attitudes as much our creation as hers, attitudes she would never have adopted without being subconsciously aware that they were already prevalent among us.

Meanwhile, the Hindu enjoys being able to go out on the town at weekends, wearing whatever she likes, and without being harassed as a matter of course. She can even walk the streets of London, alone, without fear of being dragged into a car and abducted. It is a great source of pleasure to me that that this is so, but I do wish she would consider the possibility that the qualities of the UK that first drew her to it do not seep up out of the soil. Rather, they are the products of a particular people and a particular culture, both of which are being rapidly undermined today through immigration of a type that she supports.

The ‘Secular’ Turk

The ‘secular’ Turk is the lady-friend of a friend of mine, who has lived in the UK for several years. Though she is happy to describe herself as being a non-Muslim, a certain pattern to her thinking on various interrelated subjects has impressed itself upon me of late, a pattern which it gives me no pleasure to write about.

During the Mohammed cartoon crisis, already mentioned above in relation to the Jew, the Turk, having displayed a general disapproval of the actions of the cartoonists and the Danes in general was shown (by me) a website with a large number of extremely offensive caricatures of Mohammed which an enterprising Dutchman had solicited in response to the situation. I detected a certain disquiet on her part as she viewed the caricatures, some of which were extremely offensive. As we continued to discuss the situation, the Turk voiced the following opinion: that the great (to her) project of European integration, in which Turkish accession to the EU was clearly to be some sort of crowning glory, would simply not work if people were allowed to act as the Danes were acting.

True, I responded. The publication of Photoshopped images of a Lego Mohammed deflowering a Lego Aisha probably would result in unacceptable friction between natives and Turkish immigrants if the Turks were ever allowed freedom of movement throughout the EU. This being the case, I continued, what course of action did she think we should we take? Should we strip away the freedoms of Europeans in their own countries to appease the religious totalitarianism of a group of almost entirely unwanted immigrants-to-be? Or would we have to accept that Turkish accession to the EU was impossible, and that the dawning of the Age of Aquarius would have to be delayed? At the time, she gave no answer. But her answer has become relatively clear to me over time.

Having discussed with her a variety of topics relating to immigration, Islam, and race over the last few years, certain sad realities have impressed themselves upon me. On the thorny subject of Islam, the Turk refuses to ever acknowledge either that Islam is doctrinally more problematic than any other religion, or that its adherents are more given to certain types of behaviour than the followers of other religions. I am told that religions are whatever their adherents make them, so there is nothing to be said about Islam per se. I am told that the response to the Mohammed cartoons was unremarkable, with the media simply having gone out of its way to dredge up damning footage of seething, frothing Muslims (not a difficult task, one would have thought).

I am told, in short, a great deal of nonsense by the ‘Secular’ Turk on the subject of Islam, a subject on which she appears to be quite ignorant, and things do not improve greatly when the topic of discussion is Turkey or the Turks. Here, the problem is less the plausibility of the claims made than the frightening sense of entitlement with respect to other peoples’ countries. The outrage visible on her face at the language restrictions imposed on Turkish would-be-immigrants to Germany. The unthinking assumption that massive flows of Turks into the countries of the EU would be the most natural thing in the world. The certainty that opposition to these things is simply xenophobia.

Of course, it is not surprising that the Turk adheres to these positions, as her entire mode of life is predicated on them being accepted by others. She does not, to be blunt, seem to be that interested in living in Turkey, wonderful place full of wonderful people though she would have us believe it is. Of course, this paradoxical attitude is to be found among many immigrants from the developing world who wish to leave the sundry problems and horrors of their native countries behind, whilst also guaranteeing their at least partial recreation in their adopted countries through unending influxes of the people who created them in the first place. Let us simply note here a peculiar reality, to wit, that the size and severity of the divergence of interests between the Turk and her host society is essentially as great as that which would exist were we to replace her with a standard-issue Muslim. This unhappy conclusion drives us to a further, equally unhappy one: that the avowedly non-Muslim Turk insists, in effect, that we treat her as being one anyway, with all that that implies.

Multiple Divergences

It is worth reminding readers that Britain has a very wide range of ethnic minorities, many of whom are productive and law-abiding. Broadly speaking, there are two different ways of subdividing these minorities: ethnically, into those who are black and those who are not; and religiously, into those who are Muslims and those who are not, for four different types of minorities in total. To put it bluntly, those minorities who are neither black nor Muslims (Jews, Hindus, Chinese, Poles, etc.) seem to do fairly well in British society as groups, whereas those groups which are black and non-Muslim (Jamaicans, etc.), black and Muslim (Somalis), or non-black and Muslim (Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, etc.) seem to do badly as groups.

As I have learnt from my own experience, once enough of a tribalism has reemerged in one’s thinking to enable one to categorize entire groups (i.e. Muslims) as threats as groups on the basis of concrete characteristics of those groups, then it is very difficult not to start considering other minorities, be they racially or religiously defined, from a tribal viewpoint. As Islam continues to shred the pieties and undermine the taboos of the multicultural society, it seems highly probable that starkly underperforming groups will be increasingly identified as problematic as groups in ways that are, despite many differences, similar in at least some regards to the ways in which Muslims are problematic.

Of course, given a sufficient degree of tribalism run wild, any group at all identifiable as being non-British could be the target of great unpleasantness, but it is hard to believe that widely-known and easily-verifiable differences in group behaviours will not influence the degree of hostility a given group suffers.

On this basis, I believe that no meaningful resistance to the Islamization of the UK will take place without an accompanying weakening in the legitimacy afforded the presence of underperforming groups in general. Muslims are a major component of these groups, but so is the overwhelmingly non-Muslim Afro-Caribbean community. I offer here the prediction that the status and security of this community in the UK will suffer greatly in the event of an emerging anti-Islamic tribalism. To the extent that those in this community realize this in advance, they may well attempt to prevent its emergence. In the long term, this can only increase the divergence of interests and exacerbate the problem.


The Best of the Rest

In the first installment of this essay, I concluded that Islam will be usefully opposed, and its pernicious influence over the character of Western societies hacked back to nothing, when it is identified by tribally-motivated actors as the basis of a violent, expansionist, religious tribe which would destroy everything good in the societies it was invading given the opportunity. However, I left unaddressed the question of exactly which tribe would be so opposing the believers, and what other tribe they might come into conflict with. In the closing part of this second installment, I would like to consider the various tribal fault lines that exist in my own country in the light of the discussion so far.

Whether or not the tribe opposing Islam could contain any meaningful numbers of non-natives is a question already implicitly answered by the discussion above. The very fact that one can cast an eye, as I have done, over Jews, Hindus, and others and ponder whether or not their group characteristics will be a help or a hindrance is testament to their existence as distinct tribes in some importance sense, a conclusion they would probably not disagree with. However, there exists a distressing degree of evidence that, though the divergence of interests between these groups and native Britons is usually minor, if not trivial, the growing confrontation between Islam and its host societies in the West could result in much wider divergences in areas of critical interest. What then?

Here I mention again the theme that started this installment of the essay, that of the Armenian-Americans. As far as I am aware, the Armenian-American community is a law-abiding and productive community that does not impose any particular sort of burden on its host society, much less threaten its security or political stability. However, if American relations with Turkey came to constitute an issue of overwhelming existential importance for the U.S., it is conceivable that the divergence of interests between Americans at large and Armenian-Americans in particular could become so acute as to cause a fracture — and this with a minority group not any sort of direct threat to or problem for America. For taking foreign tribes into a country creates fault lines. Some will be more obvious, some less, but most will be sufficiently resistant to dissolution as to last for a long time, and some will be permanent. Some of these fault lines may remain still most of the time, so much so that their existence is forgotten. But tremors, if not outright earthquakes, along other fault lines, will doubtless cause some of them to resonate to our disadvantage.

During times of relative political content, divergence in the interests of minority groups and their host societies are either ignored or taken as being part of the hustle and bustle of political life in free countries. However, as Islamization and counter-Islamization efforts increasingly draw blood from each other, literally or figuratively, it is highly improbable that this relative placid state of affairs will continue to obtain. I have tried to elucidate some of the key issues above in my discussions of the Jew, the Hindu, and the ‘Secular’ Turk, and will not hammer the point home further here. Rather, I would like to discuss some of the possible developments that could ensue if well-integrated, law-abiding minorities insist on pursuing interests manifestly opposed to those of native Britons.

Let it be said that, overwhelmingly, immigrants in the UK understand that they, and through them their extended tribes, are onto a Good Thing. One does not have to know the Hindu or the ‘Secular’ Turk very well to realize what a huge part of their hopes and aspirations long-term access to Western countries is. Of course, they cannot be blamed for desiring such access, and I do not think the less of them for it. However, insofar as they continue to think and act tribally, they will continue to advocate the sharing of the Good Thing that the West is with other members of their tribe, irrespective of whether or not it is in the interests of the people whose homes these Western countries are. And insofar as any member of these foreign tribes believes that rising opposition to Islam could translate more generally into reduced access to the Good Thing the West is, they must be expected to push back in the opposite direction. In so doing, they will, in effect, if not in intent, be allying themselves with those who seek to Islamize our countries. If this happens, then they will become de facto fifth columnists, part of an inadvertent pro-Islamization operation. This is a harsh judgment, but not one I can see any way of avoiding.

The significance of this can be simply put. Irresolvable tribal differences cannot be considered to be mere political differences, where Bob goes this way while Ranjit goes that. If otherwise innocuous immigrant communities insist that their interests are a) tribal and b) best-served by obstructing anti-Islamization efforts, then their ability to exert any influence on the course events take will have to be removed. Whether or not such secondary divergences occur is down to them, not us.