Islam is not the problem. The problem lies in the rules forced on us through more than a half-century of Leftist dominance. Islam would never have made such devastating inroads into our culture if the vast majority of Westerners had not unwittingly accepted those rules.
A reader in Canada sent the following email in response:
But Baron, doesn’t your statement that Islam is not the problem go counter to your own header line about a new phase of a very old war? Granted that the West’s dhimminess today is a major factor, Islam itself has always been a problem. People like Ibn Warraq… Wafa Sultan… Nonie Darwish… and many, many others have said so in rather forceful terms.
My response was to repeat what I have been saying in this space for the past five years or so:
Islam is the immediate problem, but it is not the core problem.
The underlying systemic problem is the cultural rot in the West, which mandates mass immigration as a good, and demonizes traditional Western culture. This has allowed Islam to enter, take root, thrive, and become a threat.
The West has the cultural equivalence of AIDS, which is the disease itself. Islam is a virus of opportunity like pneumonia. It will be the proximate cause of death, but it is not the root cause.
We must fight the pneumonia first, because it will be what kills us. But we must also address the underlying disease, without which the pneumonia would never have infected us.
Confronting the Socialist-Multicultural project directly is a difficult task, since it controls the entire culture. It is actually much easier to fight Islam than Cultural Marxism. Opposing Islam — which is so obviously antithetical to Western values — opens the door to the deconstruction of the Leftist hegemony.
12 comments:
Spot on. When Western self-confidence was strong in the past, Islam made no inroads and trembled in its territories. Turkey was called the 'Sick Man of Europe,' Egypt was a protectorate and Iraq was controlled by a few RAF biplanes dropping hand-held bombs on tribal elders. Even a woman, Gertrude Bell, could ride unmolested through the wilds of Arabia.
What happened? We lost our nerve, our self-confidence and our soul. When we fix ourselves, Islam will fade away like the bad dream it is.
A return to honest money would go a long way towards dismantling the power grab pf the lektier 'Elite'.
Baron,
I agree, Islamization is a result of the (numerous) dysfunctions of "Multiculturalism"--it's more a symptom than the disease.
I can't imagine earlier generations in the West "accommodating" Moslem demands.
Compared with the rise of China, Islam and the Moslem world are irrelevant however, we waste so much energy on a basically self-inflicted problem.
Henrik -
I couldn't agree more. And may I add, that in order to restore genuine prosperity, the modern welfare state has to be dismantled. That would also spell the undoing of state-sponsored multiculturalism and islamization.
In his 1941 book, "Road to Serfdom" Nobel prize winning economist F. A. Hayek honoured the vision of Hilaire Belloc's 1913 book "The Servile State". He wrote: "Even much more recent warnings which have proved dreadfully true have been almost entirely forgotten. It is not yet thirty years since Hilaire Belloc, in a book which explains more of what has happened since in Germany than most works written after the event, explained that `the effects of Socialist doctrine on Capitalist society is to produce a third thing different from either of its two begetters - to wit, the Servile State.' "
So what do you get? A parasitical master class, using the power of the State to control the people and, what's worse, people who have learned to use government to enrich themselves at their neighbour's expense.
What Belloc reformulated, knowingly or - more probably - unknowingly, was in fact the classical "laissez faire" theory about class struggle throughout the ages, a theory that was hijacked and violated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
The "masculine" version of this 3rd way, this Servile State, is fascism; the "feminine" version is welfare state progressivism (which is way beyond socialism or "cultural marxism").
It is this "third thing", the servile State, in league with their "too big to fail" political entrepreneurs and adhered to by both left and rightwing politicians, that comprises the core machinery which is disrupting our societies through monetary inflation and taxes, while corrupting civil culture throughout the West by creating massive bystander-effects. This machine runs on tax loot and FEDs (Fictional Euros and Dollars), i.e. money created out of thin air. If it were a beast, one could say, "careful, don't feed!". Perhaps with ongoing and upcoming financial crises, we are witnessing this "third way" apparatus rapidly exhausting its resources.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Good comments, all - especially Sagunto.
However, as I like to say, dead is dead - irrespective of the root or proximate cause.
Islam has killed, is killing, and will kill a WHOLE lot of humanity.
Besides we know that Islam has predated (pun here - look it up!) all of its neighbors throughout history whether those neighbors were undergoing cultural rot or not.
The real key is whether Islam's neighbors are willing to excise the gangrene that is Islam. It ain't pretty; and it ain't easy; but it's EITHER Muslims or infidels - by Islamic doctrine and Muslim choice.
@Sagunto,
Serfdom - a condition of bondage or modified slavery (forced labor) in return for protection and subsistence.
Presumably Belloc and Hayek were arguing against serfdom, in a modern context the abandonment of subsistence welfare in the U.K. for a large percentage of the indigenous population will create the conditions of servitude.
The tendency of the free market is to default to a base rate of subsistence or below subsistence thus corrupting the free market into a slave market - reducing the individual to a servile state.
JR -
"Presumably Belloc and Hayek were arguing against serfdom.."
They were both arguing against welfare state progressivism and social engineering setting us on a road to serfdom. Hayek of course argued from the perspective of freedom, which is free market philosophy (not "capitalism" as it is understood today by the economically challenged, which most of the time refers to corporatism, i.e. the economic model of choice for socialists of the fascist persuasion).
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
It needs to be named..
I have named the rot..
I found more information that helps expose the rot 'that shall not be named'
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jrcole/bahai/1999/jssr/bhjssr.htm
Originally published in The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Volume 37, No. 2 (June 1998): 234-248. Digitally republished here with additional notations, May, 1999.
Wet feet do not cause colds - however they can lower the body's resistance - allowing the cold virus to gain the upper hand.
When the dole became available to everyone, regardless of contributions paid, the British removed their boots, lay down and prepared to stop thinking.
Corporatism is not exclusively an economic mechanism of socialists the most aggressive proponents and innovators of corporatism over the last 30 years have been the U.K. Conservative party.
Unconditional subsistence welfare it could be argued has acted as a roadblock on the "Road to Serfdom". The effectiveness of that unconditional subsistence welfare roadblock should not be underestimated by the British People.
Strange bedfellows Asian immigrants in the shape of Baroness Flather and Ravi Govindia, the British counter jihad and the cabal of corporatism that are the British mainstream political parties all with their collective corporatist will for the destruction of unconditional subsistence welfare.
The elderly have feeble immune systems. Perhaps the same applies to civilizations.
Only by fighting Islam can we flush our lefty enemies out of the woodwork so that we can fight them too. We have a war on two fronts, and it'll take everything we've got to win it.
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