The West is hastening and intensifying its own dhimmitude in the war between Modernity and fascist reaction by appeasing the fascist Moslem umma on the one hand, and by cheerleading and pimping on the other; and both reactions come from our misguided Humanist traditions, our ignorance of why we believe and think the ideas we think we own. Many of our ideas are borrowed, and we should consider returning them for a wash. Our Humanist traditions are vitiated by a clear misunderstanding of their origins and by comtemporary deliberate misuse by the conflated fascist Left/Right reactionaries.
The three introductory pieces below show how the post-socialist Left, having lost its 19th century industrial proletarian constituency, has picked up a new group of 'victims' to keep itself in business; and how the Right, generally blinkered and ignorant of anything beyond tax return figures, having no clue as to how and why people live in other places, has fallen into the false nostalgia of "Religion of Peace" must mean that it's religion, which is good prima facia and good per se.
Welcome to the New Age, same as the Stone Age.
The sentimentalists of the middle, i.e. most Westerners, must come to terms with the bifurcation of Humanity to make a clear decision which side it is they are following. Many good-intentioned dhimmis in the West follow the ludicrous idea that there was some Golden Age that we Moderns have destroyed, and that we must preserve and protect the noble savages from losing what little of it they retain, losing it through our greed for oil, among other mineral and biochemical products. Our good intentions might possess us to care about the lives of others simply for the sake of the sanctity of Human life, but let's consider just what it is we think we are protecting, how, and why.
The following pieces deal primarily with Michel Montaigne's idea of the "Noble Savage," an essay he wrote in 1580. Once we see that he created a phantasy world based on his own imaginings we might be more aware of our own imaginings of how others truly are, and from there we might see that life is not for them the state of Eden we might like to think. If not, then what is it? And what do we owe those we are obviously at war with? What do we owe ourselves? Why do we think colonialism is a bad thing, and that William Walker is a daemon? How did we arrive at the shores of the ideological swamp of philobarbarism that leads our intellectuals and leaders to think that somehow the primitives of the world are somehow superior to the West?
Look, if you will, at the following accounts of our ideas of cannibals.
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[1] Of the sixteenth-century South American Cannibals, Montaigne informs us: "These nations...have been fashioned very little by the human mind, and are still very close to their original naturalness." Montaigne's writings predate Rousseau by almost two hundred years, and from Montaigne's essay "Of Cannibals", we can see that the myth of the Noble Savage has been around at least from Montaigne's age, if not before. There are two creative forces at work behind the Noble Savage: the naturalistic fallacy, and racism. Let us examine these two in turn.
All of us, I think, have fallen prey to the naturalistic fallacy-- the popular but logically untrue idea that "natural is good"-- at some point or another, in issues both banal (such as choosing a breakfast cereal) and more philosophical ("What is human nature?"). Our mistaken associations are complicated when we try to consider what, after all, it means for something to be natural.
When considering human nature-- in its "purest" form-- Montaigne has clear ideas about how the Noble Savage (in this instance, the Cannibal) lives up to our primeval selves:
The laws of nature still rule them, very little corrupted by ours, and they are in such a state of Purity that I am sometimes vexed that they were unknown earlier, in the days when there were men able to judge them better than we. ...This is a nation...in which there is no sort of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name for a magistrate or political authority, no custom of servitude, no riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupations but leisure ones, no care for any but common kinship, no clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of wine or wheat. The very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, belittling, pardon-- unheard of.
In other words, a total lack of "civilization" is what has allowed for the apotheosis of the Cannibal. Montaigne, as well-meaning as he may have been, takes for granted the exagerrations and outright lies spread about indigenous Americans, and subjects them to a Eurocentric analysis of what a civilization is or is not. Especially interesting is his belief that lack of words for an idea precludes it existence (echoed in works such as Orwell's essay on "Newspeak" found at the end of "1984"), although we know now that these peoples of course had words for all of the basic human vices, and were not limited in their application of them.
http://www.victorianweb.org/courses/nonfiction/montaigne/strohminger.html
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[2] Michel de Montaigne: On Cannibals (1580)
The discovery of so many new lands in the Renaissance had less impact on most Europeans than one might suppose. They were largely absorbed in recovering (and competing with) their own classical past and engaging in violent theological and political disputes among themselves. Yet some Europeans were profoundly shaken by the new discoveries into realizing that much of the world thought and lived very differently from what was then known as "Christendom." No writer was more strongly moved to view his own society from a new perspective in the light of reports brought back of the habits of the natives of the "New World" than Michel de Montaigne. He began a long tradition of using non-European peoples as a basis for engaging in a critique of his own culture, undoubtedly in the process romanticizing what Jean-Jacques Rousseau would later call "the noble savage." It is a theme which still appeals to many Westerners.
What reason does Montaigne give for judging cannibalistic Native Americans to be preferable to Europeans?
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When King Pyrrhus invaded Italy, after he had reconnoitered the armed forces that the Romans had sent out against him, he said, "I don't know who these barbarians are"--for the Greeks called all foreign peoples barbarians--"but the organization of the army I see before me is not at all barbaric." The Greeks said the same when Flaminius invaded their country, as did Philip, when he saw from a hill the orderly layout of the Roman camp which had been set up in his kingdom under Publius Sulpicius Galba. These examples illustrate how one must avoid accepting common prejudices: opinions must be judged by means of reason, and not by adopting common opinion.
I had with me for a long time a man who had lived for ten or twelve years in this other world which has been discovered in our time, in the place where Villegaignon landed, which he named Antarctic France (1). This discover of an enormous land seems to me to be worth contemplating. I doubt that I could affirm that another such may not be discovered in the future, since so many greater people than I were mistaken about this one. I'm afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than comprehension. We try to embrace everything but succeed only in grasping the wind.
. . . I do not find that there is anything barbaric or savage about this nation, according to what I've been told, unless we are to call barbarism whatever differs from our own customs. Indeed, we seem to have no other standard of truth and reason than the opinions and customs of our own country. There at home is always the perfect religion, the perfect legal system--the perfect and most accomplished way of doing everything. These people are wild in the same sense that fruits are, produced by nature, alone, in her ordinary way. Indeed, in that land, it is we who refuse to alter our artificial ways and reject the common order that ought rather to be called wild, or savage, (2) In them the most natural virtues and abilities are alive and vigorous, whereas we have bastardized them and adopted them solely to our corrupt taste. Even so, the flavor and delicacy of some of the wild fruits from those countries is excellent, even to our taste, better than our cultivated ones. After all, it would hardly be reasonable that artificial breeding should be able to outdo our great and powerful mother, Nature. We have so burdened the beauty and richness of her works by our innovations that we have entirely stifled her. Yet whenever she shines forth in her purity she puts our vain and frivolous enterprises amazingly to shame.
Et veniunt ederæ sponte sua melius,
surgit et in solis formosior arbutus antris,
et volucres nulla dulcius arte canunt. (3)
All our efforts cannot create the nest of the tiniest bird: its structure, its beauty, or the usefulness of its form; nor can we create the web of the lowly spider. All things, said Plato are produced by nature, chance, or human skill, the greatest and most beautiful things by one of the first two, the lesser and most imperfect, by the latter.
These nations seem to me, then, barbaric in that they have been little refashioned by the human mind and are still quite close to their original naiveté. They are still ruled by natural laws, only slightly corrupted by ours. They are in such a state of purity that I am sometimes saddened by the thought that we did not discover them earlier, when there were people who would have known how to judge them better than we. It displeases me that Lycurgus or Plato didn't know them, for it seems to me that these peoples surpass not only the portraits which poetry has made of the Golden Age and all the invented, imaginary notions of the ideal state of humanity, but even the conceptions and the very aims of philosophers themselves. They could not imagine such a pure and simple naiveté as we encounter in them; nor would they have been able to believe that our society might be maintained with so little artifice and social structure.
This is a people, I would say to Plato, among whom there is no commerce at all, no knowledge of letters, no knowledge of numbers, nor any judges, or political superiority, no habit of service, riches, or poverty, no contracts, no inheritance, no divisions of property, no occupations but easy ones, no respect for any relationship except ordinary family ones, no clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of wine or wheat. The very words which mean "lie," "treason," "deception," "greed," "envy," "slander" and "forgiveness" are unknown. How far his imaginary Republic would be from such perfection:
viri a diis recentes (4)
Hos natura modos primum dedit. . . . (5)
They have their wars against peoples who live beyond their mountains, further inland, to which they go entirely naked, bearing no other arms that bows and sharpened stakes like our hunting spears. The courage with which they fight is amazing: their battles never end except through death of bloodshed, for they do not even understand what fear is. Each one carries back as a trophy the head of the enemy that he has skilled, and hangs it up at the entrance to his home. After having treated their prisoners well for a long time, giving them all the provisions that they could one, he who is the chief calls a great assembly of his acquaintances. He ties a rope to one of the arms of the prisoner and on the other end, several feet away, out of harm's way, and gives to his best friend the arm to hold; and the two of them, in the presence of the assembled group, slash him to death with their swords. That done, they roast him and eat him together, sending portions to their absent friends. They do this, not as is supposed, for nourishment as did the ancient Scythians; it represents instead an extreme form of vengeance. The proof of this is that when they saw that the Portuguese, who had allied themselves with their adversaries, when they executed their captives differently, burying them up to the waist and firing numerous arrows into the remainder of the body, hanging them afterward, they viewed these people from another world, who had spread the knowledge of many vices among their neighbors, and who were much more masterly than they in every sort of evil, must have chosen this sort of revenge for a reason. Thinking that it must be more bitter than their own, they abandoned their ancient way to imitate this one.
I am not so concerned that we should remark on the barbaric horror of such a deed, but that, while we quite rightly judge their faults, we are blind to our own. I think it is more barbaric to eat a man alive than to eat him dead, to tear apart through torture and pain a living body which can still feel, or to burn it alive by bits, to let it be gnawed and chewed by dogs or pigs (as we have no only read, but seen, in recent times, not against old enemies but among neighbors and fellow-citizens, and--what is worse--under the pretext of piety and religion. (6) Better to roast and eat him after he is dead.
Translated by Paul Brians
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The following essay provides more detail and insight into the dhimmi intellectual mind:
[3] http://www.townhall.com/phillysoc/sheehan.htm
White men have been thinking about Indians since Columbus sailed into the Caribbean in the late fifteenth century, but seldom in that long period have they paid much attention to the real Indian. They have, instead, been interested largely in themselves and as a consequence most conceptions of the native people have been extensions of the European and American imaginations.
Columbus saw the Indians as savages, an idea derived from ancient thinking that has persisted into the current century. From that early perception later generations have drawn a host of equally wrong-headed notions of what constituted the native world. The Indian, for example, has been seen as an agent of untethered violence, a hapless victim, a member of a vanishing race, a moral exemplar, a repository of ecological wisdom, a source of constitutional lore, and the harbinger of a New Age. Needless to say, none of these descriptions quite fits the real Indian and most of them are far wide of the mark.
Thus no vision of the Indian has endured longer or been the source of as much scholarly or popular mischief as the savage, in both its noble and ignoble form. After the appearance of the new world on the European horizon, Montaigne in the late sixteenth century offered the most apt definition of the noble side of this creature. He painted a picture of pristine innocence set against the common features of European civilization. In fact the picture was blank. He described a native world devoid of letters, numbers, politics, property, commerce, farming, and political order, in which humanity contrived to be at the same time both idle and prosperous. In the middle of the next century Hobbes reversed the image, describing its ignoble form. Using most of Montaigne’s categories (he added the absence of society which Montaigne had only implied), Hobbes portrayed a scene of unrelieved human misery and viciousness presided over by the grinding fear of violent death. Neither conception added anything to anthropological clarity. Human beings are not blank slates and the societies they construct are not empty vessels doomed never to be filled. American Indians inhabited a world strikingly different from the life transplanted in the New World from Europe, but it was not a world without parts. It was a genuine way of life and not simply an antic appendage of the European experience.
Although the idea of the savage in both its forms has pervaded European and American thinking about the Indian, a rough division in usage can be made between the two sides. The noble savage has usually been the possession of the intellectuals, often enough those who have experienced little contact with the native people. The obvious exceptions support the generalization. The ignoble savage idea proved more congenial to those people who lived on the border between the two societies and hence experienced closer contact. Rivalry for land and war no doubt fueled this attitude. Thomas Jefferson’s career makes the point. Although he never lived near Indian country or even visited it, when most of the warriors joined the British in the Revolutionary War, he made his views of Indian savagery clear in the Declaration of Independence and later recommended their extermination. But after the Revolution, in the quiet of his study, he often fell into the ways of the intellectual and compared his own society unfavorably to the life lived by the noble Indians. By the close of the nineteenth century when the Indian wars had died down and the warrior was no longer a danger, the ignoble savage gradually went out of style. But the noble savage, with his claim to innocence and virtue, persisted and has fed the twentiety-century appetite for victims.
One could hardly dispute the native people’s claim to victimhood. After the arrival of European settlers the native population declined precipitously, their land base dwindled, and eventually their cultural integrity collapsed. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the remaining independent tribes were confined to reservations and became wards of the government. No doubt part of this process could be laid at the feet of Europeans. They intended to displace the Indians on the greater part of their lands, and from the earliest years they sought the transformation of native culture. It was not until the 1930s that the federal government abandoned assimilation as the basis of its Indian policy and decided to preserve the Indians in their native ways. But by any measure the most serious factor in native decline, the catastrophic drop in population from about seven million (the high estimate) north of Mexico at the time of discovery to approximately a half million in 1900 could not be attributed to the purposive actions of white men. Instead it was the unwitting transfer to America of maladies, mainly smallpox and various respiratory diseases, that Indians had never before experienced, that dealt the most serious blow to native population. Warfare, though frequent enough between the two societies, trailed as a distant second. Many whites were no doubt pleased at the drop in native numbers and some even suggested that the process be encouraged, but the spread of disease could not generally be attributed to deliberate actions.
Although victims of a sort and for long periods of time apparently on the road to extinction, the Indians never quite vanished. They fought with Europeans and among themselves at regular intervals, but except in certain limited circumstances the death toll was never high. In fact it was usually higher among the whites. Of course white numbers could better afford the loss. Over the long term alcohol, which Indians in North America had never possessed, spread devastation. It became indispensable in the Indian trade and all measures by both the British and American governments to curb its sale proved futile. From the beginning the Indians found European products attractive, but they tended to adopt them to their own uses. In time, however, this transfer of cultural artifacts worked subtle changes in native life. Indians became more and more dependent on trade with the whites to supply the goods they required to make their way in this new environment. To take one example, the Indians soon discovered the efficiency of muskets in hunting and war. But they had no tradition of metallurgy and thus depended on white gunsmiths for repair of these fragile instruments. Nor could they make powder themselves, which gave the Europeans a critical measure of control over Indian activity.
Neither the British empire nor the American government sought the extermination of the native people. On the contrary from the beginning assimilation had been the intention. Though not without its successes, assimilation never seemed to fully triumph over Indian resistance and the deleterious consequences of European presence in America. Decline in population, a shrinking land base, chronic alcoholism, and growing dependence all undercut much of the hope for the incorporation of Indians into the white man’s world. By the first half of the nineteenth century, collapse and malaise seemed far more characteristic of the tribes east of the Mississippi than assimilation. Within the next half century the process largely repeated itself west of the river, though intermarriage, government schools, missionary efforts, and migration into the cities once again afforded a measure of success. In the twentieth century policy moved from assimilation to preservation, turning great numbers of Indians into welfare clients.
It is important to observe that societies do not disintegrate simply because they are assaulted by powerful external forces. They collapse to some extent because of internal weakness. Indians faced an aggressive European culture with stone-age technology, weak political organization, extraordinary susceptibility to disease, low resistance to alcoholism, and finally an animism that left them a limited capacity to accommodate adversity. They depended on shamans to mediate between the spirit world and the immediate human situation. With the coming of Europeans, shamans found it increasingly difficult to stave off the risk of pollution. For many Indians the very order of reality lost its stable core.
In the late twentieth century this doleful story caused much anguish among intellectuals and reformers, who unhappy with their own world were prompted to stress the responsibility of Europeans and to exaggerate the virtue of the native people who had endured so much suffering, thus raising the level of the white man’s guilt. As Johann Huizenga described the process: “A culture wishing to be free of itself experiences a perpetual longing for the uncivilized.” As a consequence many historians, Wilcomb Washburn and James Axtell come to mind, sought evidence of noble savagery in the native way of life. They didn’t find quite the social void that Montaigne had led them to expect, but they did discover a number of traits that matched liberal moral and social ideals. Indians, they contended, were free, equal, democratic, pacifist, feminist, sexually uninhibited, ecologically blessed and, curiously, happily communal and in touch with the primal energies that rule the universe.
As anthropology the project is largely worthless. Only the last point has much merit. The native people were indeed communal and believed themselves to be in league with the spirit forces that governed the universe. Most Indians were organized socially into clans and small villages, united by kinship. But that is about all that can be said for these recent interpretations. Take the other supposed native traits in turn.
Indians might have been free before the European encounter in the sense that they were generally not dominated by a foreign power. But it must be noted that in the seventeenth century the Iroquois in the northeast held sway over the remnants of a dozen or so conquered tribal groups, as did Powhatan in Virginia and the Natchez on the lower Mississippi. Otherwise Indians were not free in the way that European settlers in America were to try to become after the eighteenth century. They remained bound by communal and kinship obligations, very different from the contractual arrangements that increasingly characterized the lives of their white neighbors. Equality, of course, involved a similar set of definitions. It implied individualism, the separation of the person from organic and historical ties, a personal autonomy quite foreign to Indian conceptions. Although native societies were not steeply hierarchical as were European before the late eighteenth century, they were organized vertically. Authority often rested loosely in family groups and could be hereditary. Although land was communal, personal property was not. Even the potlach, which ended in the distribution of property, required a preliminary accumulation and, of course, established the prestige of the person responsible. Thus talk of freedom and equality among the Indians as though they were qualities of a life unencumbered by social boundaries makes no anthropological sense.
In the sense that democracy required individualism, the Indian tribes were hardly democratic. The issue here usually centers on the Iroquois League. This arrangement had been created in the late fifteenth century by the five Iroquoian tribes that lived in what was to become New York in order to end the strife that had been constant in the region. In the future instead of fighting among themselves, the Iroquois would be free to subjugate their neighbors. It was an alliance among independent groups and exercised no governing authority. Nor was it democratic. The Grand Council of the league contained unequal representation from each of the tribes, some of the members were hereditary and some appointed.
Could such an institution have served as the archtype of the Constitution? A number of historians think so. In the late eighties Congress thanked Iroquois for their contribution to the nation’s founding and in 1996 the William and Mary Quarterly devoted fifty of its pages to the subject. Not only did the argument in favor of the thesis prove to be extraordinarily thin, but the founders it turns out knew little about the structure of the League. The League itself bore no resemblance to the Constitution. If the founders had chosen to duplicate it, the American republic would certainly have been a very different kind of political order. The significance of this curious episode lies in the continued effort of many intellectuals to find what obtained among the Indians superior to their own ways.
There can be little doubt that Indian warfare, mainly because of the improvement in technology, became more destructive after the European arrival. But, at the same time, it is clear that native life before that date was fraught with violence. Young men gained their manhood by proving themselves in hunting and war. The Indians lived by the law of blood. Every injury required redress. Compensation might sometimes be made in goods, but more often it involved murder and mayhem. As a result native life was far from peaceful. In the wars of empire that engulfed the eastern half of the continent in the eighteenth century, neither the French nor the British had trouble finding Indian allies. In fact, the long history of conflict in North America seldom involved simply Indians against whites.
As for feminism, native culture did conform to one branch of the modern feminist movement. Women occupied a separate sphere. Village and domestic life belonged to them. But native societies were not matriarchal. They were, however, generally matrilineal east of the Mississippi, which gave to women, invariably older women, considerable influence in clan affairs. Sometimes this role spilled over into the political arena as, for example, in selecting the membership on the Grand Council of the Iroquois League. Clan mothers exercised a veto on membership. But they did not serve on the council, and they did not wield formal political power, even in the villages.
If Indians were sexually unrestrained, they would certainly be an exception among primitive people. Lack of inhibition seems more characteristic of civilization, or decadence, than of native cultures. It is true that early explorers found an ample supply of what they called trade women, but this practice was probably more indicative of the requirements of hospitality and the status of women than any tendency toward excessive sexual freedom. In truth Indians lived by strict rules concerning sex. They were monogamous and punished adultery by women severely, sometimes with mutilation. The menses held sacred meaning, and women at that time of month posed a serious threat to the future success of hunters and warriors. Although warriors from the eastern tribes regularly took female captives in their raids on both whites and Indians, they did not engage in rape, not because they had any particular respect for women but because of the taboo that attached to sexual activity during periods of conflict. Clearly Indians did not live by the sexual rules that bound Europeans, but neither did they enjoy the mythic promiscuity attributed to the noble savage.
Do the Indians deserve their reputation for ecological wisdom? Certainly they made a less significant mark on their environment than the Europeans who came after them. For one thing, their numbers were far fewer. Some seven million stone-age people living in the vast stretches of the continent north of Mexico were not likely to greatly change the character of the land. Yet it remains true that any human population, no matter its size, will leave traces of itself. The Indians, for example, made generous use of fire, sometimes with salutary consequences but frequently in order to slaughter great numbers of animals or to defeat an enemy. And east of the Mississippi, in the Southwest, and in California they farmed the land. Early settlers in New England describe extensive acreage under cultivation. Native villages could hold numbers above a thousand with the attendant consequences for the surrounding landscape. The continent was far from an untouched Eden when the Europeans made their landings.
The argument for the ecological Indian hinges in great measure on the native belief in the sacral meaning of both animate and inanimate nature. This belief did require native people to hunt and to farm with care for the ceremonial niceties of their animism. But it did not keep them from cultivating expansively and moving on to new lands when they had worn out the old. Nor did it keep some tribes from using a Buffalo jump in hunting, or fire for mass kills, or stream poisoning to increase the take in fish. The ceremonial Indian was not necessarily the provident Indian.
In truth late twentieth-century interpretations that treat the Indians as an ideal may be a long way from Montaigne and Hobbes. The noble savage is but a pale reflection of the existential void so evident in the early years of discovery and settlement. For the current generation that venerable figure has become merely a convenient pawn against which to measure their own world. And in the process they do a great deal of violence to the real Indian. He is reduced to a parody of their own unfulfilled longings, a perverse kind of ideological imperialism that detaches the native people from their own culture and absorbs them into the white man’s struggle to be free of his own discontent.
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Saturday, June 18, 2005
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Privacy
Cogito ergo sum; coito ergo sum.
Post-lapsarian Man pays a terrible price for his short and nasty life: not just death, but the foreknowledge of his own death. And he passes the bill to his children for them to pay it too. Exiled, east of Eden, even unto the Land of Nod, man makes his children and their children pay the price of understanding. And he tries to cheat the price, claiming that this price is not the price he must pay but some other price, some deal is to be made, some escape clause that he'll deal with later-- but not yet!
Gilgamesh asks: "Must I too, like my friend, lay me down, never to rise again forever?"
Is our mortality ennobling, or does it just produce more dirt?
If we look at the world of man as he lived before the age of Modernity we'll see a world with very little privacy, a world in which men were little more than beasts to be used till they die, and then off to heaven with the soul of them, maybe. A man's private life, his individual reason for being, his inherent worth as who he is, was more or less not an issue. His own existence was not his own private possession. such today is the world of Islam. That has some genuine benefits, like having a reason unquestionable for living and dying, for having children, for existing at all.
We'll bury Cindy tomorrow, and who really cares? Cindy was maybe 50 or 25. It's hard to say. She used to scurry up and down the median on the street, screaming, spitting, pounding on cars that stopped for the traffic light, demanding money from those who had to stop. She was filthy, ugly, and generally disgusting. No one loved her, and we don't miss her. She died in the parking lot beside the diner. Connect the dots. She had scabby sores and running sores, and the scratches ran from one to another. But Cindy died as an individual person, free in her own way to live and die as a person in her own right.
Nearly 2000 years ago Jewish slaves died building the Latrun Road for the Romans. The Jews, slaves in Israel, died building a road for their conquerers. Nearly 2,000 years later that very Latrun Road saved Jersalem's Jews from annihilation during the War of Independence.
On average the meat wagon hauls away a body a day on our street here. Is there some reason for the lives of those who die like dogs? Ask in 2,000 years, friend.
Post-lapsarian Man pays a terrible price for his short and nasty life: not just death, but the foreknowledge of his own death. And he passes the bill to his children for them to pay it too. Exiled, east of Eden, even unto the Land of Nod, man makes his children and their children pay the price of understanding. And he tries to cheat the price, claiming that this price is not the price he must pay but some other price, some deal is to be made, some escape clause that he'll deal with later-- but not yet!
Gilgamesh asks: "Must I too, like my friend, lay me down, never to rise again forever?"
Is our mortality ennobling, or does it just produce more dirt?
If we look at the world of man as he lived before the age of Modernity we'll see a world with very little privacy, a world in which men were little more than beasts to be used till they die, and then off to heaven with the soul of them, maybe. A man's private life, his individual reason for being, his inherent worth as who he is, was more or less not an issue. His own existence was not his own private possession. such today is the world of Islam. That has some genuine benefits, like having a reason unquestionable for living and dying, for having children, for existing at all.
We'll bury Cindy tomorrow, and who really cares? Cindy was maybe 50 or 25. It's hard to say. She used to scurry up and down the median on the street, screaming, spitting, pounding on cars that stopped for the traffic light, demanding money from those who had to stop. She was filthy, ugly, and generally disgusting. No one loved her, and we don't miss her. She died in the parking lot beside the diner. Connect the dots. She had scabby sores and running sores, and the scratches ran from one to another. But Cindy died as an individual person, free in her own way to live and die as a person in her own right.
Nearly 2000 years ago Jewish slaves died building the Latrun Road for the Romans. The Jews, slaves in Israel, died building a road for their conquerers. Nearly 2,000 years later that very Latrun Road saved Jersalem's Jews from annihilation during the War of Independence.
On average the meat wagon hauls away a body a day on our street here. Is there some reason for the lives of those who die like dogs? Ask in 2,000 years, friend.
We, Revolutionaries....
In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, who, squatting
upon the ground, held his heart in his hands, and ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?" "It is bitter--bitter," he answered;
but I like it because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.
Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and other Lines, III. 1895.
The French peasantry fought against the three internal feudal French Estates of King, Nobility, and Church, sending those more or less whole to the chopper, which made way for an upward movement of class power in the hands of the new bourgeios class of merchants and industrialists, made posible with the great assistence of the vast armies of the petit-bourgeios and peasants themselves, the latter of whom split into those complacent and self-satisfied grubbers who today are the French population, and on the lower rung, the extremists who were to go on to become the communards and communists, those who today are the dhimmi intelligensia of Western Europe, the the nouveau-sansculottes in Gucci loafers. The socio-economic contradictions between the bourgeios and the peasants grew, not so deeply in France as in England, but in France more violently due, perhaps, to the experience of 1789 revolution, which hardly took place on the streets of Britain as it did across Europe. The revolutions of 1848 were an attempted power-grab by the Continentl peasants, who lost, and who are now, with the exception of 1968ers, satisfied with their political representation within government and society at large. In Britain, the conditions of the workingclasses are much the same. The history of the revolution in the United States took a different turn spending its endergies by going west, by annihilating the local indigenous poplulation as opposed to guillotining the existing ruling classes or forming liberal-socialist unions as in Britain. And Russia, as backward as any place could be in Europe, took until 1917 to make its contribution to the revolution of Modernity, a failed contribution by any reasonable standard, and one that Russia suffers from today. The German Revolution, which is nearly completely ignored, is the one that should interest us most deeply in regard to the state of Islam and Modernity today, the German Revolution lasting from 1800 to 1946, the revolution of reaction, the revolution that has settled upon the world of Islam like an Alp, the revolution of Romance.
The French Revolution of 1789 wiped out the parasitic classes and invented for Humanity the intellectual programme of Modernity: liberty, equality, and community membership. The English invented privacy and individualism, the pursuit of unlimited personal wealth and protection from privilge and arbitrary expropriation as well as the useful concept of independent corporate identity. The American Revolution gave space for man to exercize his right to democratic individualism and personal identity as an individual agent through purchase of private land, the law of bourgeois ownership being superimposed upon Nature, and the personal arms to fight against tyranny, should it ever try to raise its ugly head in the land. The Russian Revolution worked its way into a Byzantine pseudo-scientific swamp of socialist utopia, from which it is still trying to find its way out. The French spread their revolution across Europe by force; the English spread theirs by commerce and gun-boats; the American by land-theft and permanent colonialization; the Russians by ineptitude and force. Germany sat still. Whine as people do, the American Revolution stopped dead at the coast of California. Germany waited.
"[A]lone of all the contemporary revolutions, the French was ecumenical. Its armies set out to revolutionize the world; its ideas actually did so." (Howsbawm: p. 75.) Well, obviously some people didn't read the paper that day. The Napoleonic spread of the French Revolution was even less successful than the spread of the American Revolution. The revolutions of ideas and ideology stalled, and it is the British revolution, the Industrial Revolution, that continued to roll onward, continuing to this day to crush all resistence. Where ideas failed to take root, factories were born in their place. The French proprieter, the British shop-keeper, the American businessman, these are the revolutionaries of Modernity. Those three revolutionary paths represent the contemporary possiblities of universal progressive revolution. They are a sad lot in terms of Romance.
The German Revolution, postponed and denied until the collapse of the Weimar Republic, was the equivalent of the Sansculotte terror of 1789-93 and 1848. Of both, we can see: "The peasantry never provides a political alternative to anyone; merely, as occasion dictates, an almost irresistable force or an almost immovable object. The Sansculottes were... the actual demonstrators, rioters, constructors of barricades. [S]ansculottism provided no real alternative either. Its ideal, a golden past of villages and small craftsmen or a golden future of small farmers and artisans undisturbed by bankers and millionaires, was unrealizable. History moved dead against them. Sansculottism was so helpless a phenomenon that its very name is largely forgotten...." (Hobsbawm: p. pp. 84-85.) The Sansculottes might be forgotten, but their brethern the Nazis are not, nor are those of the same mold today, the various Islamic terrorist cliques and the fascist movement of Islam itself. They are a continuum of lumpen-proletarian reactionaries, hysterics and utopians. They are all the same undistinguishable mess of Romantic and vicious peasant losers that was the generality of the feudal and primitives' world before the freedoms of Modernity took hold of the Human mind from the Renaissance onward to our blessed time. The dangerous classes and the immovable peasantry need to be removed, as we have seen in our own history since 1793. When they are in support of reaction they cause mass movements of murderous and genocidal war. Today they are fascist Islam, children of the Nazis, grandchildren of the Sansculottes, the wasted remnants of the primitive life of Humanity. They are a sad lot in terms of Modernity.
"France made its revolutions and gave them their ideas... and European (or indeed world) politics were largely the struggle for and against the principles of 1789, or even the more incendiary ones of 1793." (Hobsbawm: p 73.)
So it is that we today are still in the midst of the Modernist Revolution, and we, being so placed, are revolutionaries. Our Islamic and dhimmi adversaries today are simply another manifestaion of the fascist reaction of pre-1776/79 and modern industrialism. The immovable peasantry of Islam will either move or it will not. Its only movement so far is one backward, a retrenchment of primitivism, an outbreak of Sansculotte lumpen terrorism, of Nazi Romaniticism.
Our paths of Modern Revolution are at crossroads, as is the human population itself, and we must analyse our future path clearly to engage in the proper understanding of the direction we will take. Our Muslim cousins are content to stew in their hatreds, and their dhimmi collaborators are happier to see them die than to assist in the spread of universal progress, denying such a concept legitimately exists, hearkening to Neitzche for authority, bandying about vacuuities such as Relativism of various ideological brands, and generally fighting a retrograde war in favor of fascist philobarbarism and sentimentalist primitivism at the cost of human life beyond measure. But ours is the predominant revolutionary force that will prevail, though where it will take us is a question unknown at this point, and one we must consider to be sure we wish to follow along rahter than revert to animal stupdities of Islam and like primitivisms and infantalizations of humanity by the Left. We have to know our enemies, their world-view, their goals so we know that we either agree or that we will make total war for our success. We are right or not. We will fight or not.
The Moslem world of reaction is doomed. The human race is bifurcating before our eyes, and there is no thread strong enough to stitch together the rift. We must answer clearly the single question of our time: "What is to be done?" What are we to do with the evil and filthy savage squatting in the desert feasting on his own heartfelt hatreds?
upon the ground, held his heart in his hands, and ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?" "It is bitter--bitter," he answered;
but I like it because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.
Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and other Lines, III. 1895.
The French peasantry fought against the three internal feudal French Estates of King, Nobility, and Church, sending those more or less whole to the chopper, which made way for an upward movement of class power in the hands of the new bourgeios class of merchants and industrialists, made posible with the great assistence of the vast armies of the petit-bourgeios and peasants themselves, the latter of whom split into those complacent and self-satisfied grubbers who today are the French population, and on the lower rung, the extremists who were to go on to become the communards and communists, those who today are the dhimmi intelligensia of Western Europe, the the nouveau-sansculottes in Gucci loafers. The socio-economic contradictions between the bourgeios and the peasants grew, not so deeply in France as in England, but in France more violently due, perhaps, to the experience of 1789 revolution, which hardly took place on the streets of Britain as it did across Europe. The revolutions of 1848 were an attempted power-grab by the Continentl peasants, who lost, and who are now, with the exception of 1968ers, satisfied with their political representation within government and society at large. In Britain, the conditions of the workingclasses are much the same. The history of the revolution in the United States took a different turn spending its endergies by going west, by annihilating the local indigenous poplulation as opposed to guillotining the existing ruling classes or forming liberal-socialist unions as in Britain. And Russia, as backward as any place could be in Europe, took until 1917 to make its contribution to the revolution of Modernity, a failed contribution by any reasonable standard, and one that Russia suffers from today. The German Revolution, which is nearly completely ignored, is the one that should interest us most deeply in regard to the state of Islam and Modernity today, the German Revolution lasting from 1800 to 1946, the revolution of reaction, the revolution that has settled upon the world of Islam like an Alp, the revolution of Romance.
The French Revolution of 1789 wiped out the parasitic classes and invented for Humanity the intellectual programme of Modernity: liberty, equality, and community membership. The English invented privacy and individualism, the pursuit of unlimited personal wealth and protection from privilge and arbitrary expropriation as well as the useful concept of independent corporate identity. The American Revolution gave space for man to exercize his right to democratic individualism and personal identity as an individual agent through purchase of private land, the law of bourgeois ownership being superimposed upon Nature, and the personal arms to fight against tyranny, should it ever try to raise its ugly head in the land. The Russian Revolution worked its way into a Byzantine pseudo-scientific swamp of socialist utopia, from which it is still trying to find its way out. The French spread their revolution across Europe by force; the English spread theirs by commerce and gun-boats; the American by land-theft and permanent colonialization; the Russians by ineptitude and force. Germany sat still. Whine as people do, the American Revolution stopped dead at the coast of California. Germany waited.
"[A]lone of all the contemporary revolutions, the French was ecumenical. Its armies set out to revolutionize the world; its ideas actually did so." (Howsbawm: p. 75.) Well, obviously some people didn't read the paper that day. The Napoleonic spread of the French Revolution was even less successful than the spread of the American Revolution. The revolutions of ideas and ideology stalled, and it is the British revolution, the Industrial Revolution, that continued to roll onward, continuing to this day to crush all resistence. Where ideas failed to take root, factories were born in their place. The French proprieter, the British shop-keeper, the American businessman, these are the revolutionaries of Modernity. Those three revolutionary paths represent the contemporary possiblities of universal progressive revolution. They are a sad lot in terms of Romance.
The German Revolution, postponed and denied until the collapse of the Weimar Republic, was the equivalent of the Sansculotte terror of 1789-93 and 1848. Of both, we can see: "The peasantry never provides a political alternative to anyone; merely, as occasion dictates, an almost irresistable force or an almost immovable object. The Sansculottes were... the actual demonstrators, rioters, constructors of barricades. [S]ansculottism provided no real alternative either. Its ideal, a golden past of villages and small craftsmen or a golden future of small farmers and artisans undisturbed by bankers and millionaires, was unrealizable. History moved dead against them. Sansculottism was so helpless a phenomenon that its very name is largely forgotten...." (Hobsbawm: p. pp. 84-85.) The Sansculottes might be forgotten, but their brethern the Nazis are not, nor are those of the same mold today, the various Islamic terrorist cliques and the fascist movement of Islam itself. They are a continuum of lumpen-proletarian reactionaries, hysterics and utopians. They are all the same undistinguishable mess of Romantic and vicious peasant losers that was the generality of the feudal and primitives' world before the freedoms of Modernity took hold of the Human mind from the Renaissance onward to our blessed time. The dangerous classes and the immovable peasantry need to be removed, as we have seen in our own history since 1793. When they are in support of reaction they cause mass movements of murderous and genocidal war. Today they are fascist Islam, children of the Nazis, grandchildren of the Sansculottes, the wasted remnants of the primitive life of Humanity. They are a sad lot in terms of Modernity.
"France made its revolutions and gave them their ideas... and European (or indeed world) politics were largely the struggle for and against the principles of 1789, or even the more incendiary ones of 1793." (Hobsbawm: p 73.)
So it is that we today are still in the midst of the Modernist Revolution, and we, being so placed, are revolutionaries. Our Islamic and dhimmi adversaries today are simply another manifestaion of the fascist reaction of pre-1776/79 and modern industrialism. The immovable peasantry of Islam will either move or it will not. Its only movement so far is one backward, a retrenchment of primitivism, an outbreak of Sansculotte lumpen terrorism, of Nazi Romaniticism.
Our paths of Modern Revolution are at crossroads, as is the human population itself, and we must analyse our future path clearly to engage in the proper understanding of the direction we will take. Our Muslim cousins are content to stew in their hatreds, and their dhimmi collaborators are happier to see them die than to assist in the spread of universal progress, denying such a concept legitimately exists, hearkening to Neitzche for authority, bandying about vacuuities such as Relativism of various ideological brands, and generally fighting a retrograde war in favor of fascist philobarbarism and sentimentalist primitivism at the cost of human life beyond measure. But ours is the predominant revolutionary force that will prevail, though where it will take us is a question unknown at this point, and one we must consider to be sure we wish to follow along rahter than revert to animal stupdities of Islam and like primitivisms and infantalizations of humanity by the Left. We have to know our enemies, their world-view, their goals so we know that we either agree or that we will make total war for our success. We are right or not. We will fight or not.
The Moslem world of reaction is doomed. The human race is bifurcating before our eyes, and there is no thread strong enough to stitch together the rift. We must answer clearly the single question of our time: "What is to be done?" What are we to do with the evil and filthy savage squatting in the desert feasting on his own heartfelt hatreds?
Thursday, June 16, 2005
A Modern Tragedy
Land flight. Social change. Cultural disintegration. Political upheaval. And reactionary longings for the imagined, romantic past of the 'Golden Age' before everything went wrong, before 'they' came-- to ruin the otherwise perfect life of the otherwise perfect people. The Master Race. Triumphant war. Soil Mysticism. Great men doing great deeds in the lost age of heroes. All these glories replaced by little men who tear up the large and turn everything into the small, the counted, the priced, the banal, the mediocre, the petit-bourgeios privacies of individualism. These concepts all are large features of fascism, worth much discussion at a later date. We'll look here at the movement from "The Land" to the city, in this case the movement from land to city in the development of the Industrial Revolution, and in so seeing the effects of the Industrial Revolution we might see the effects and outcomes of Capitalism on the world of the primitive Islamic world today. The importance of land flight to the cities and of personal ownership of property outside the traditional collective or tribal holdings lays in the emotional effects of this culture-shift from feudalism to industrialism, particularly in regard to the disruption in the minds of the community-at-large going through a change unlike anything before it, more devastating than defeat in war which one can hope to reverse at some later date, more devastaing than natural disaster from which one can recover to rebuild the old anew, a cultural shift not wanted and fiercely resisted by the dispossesed and resisted from the depths of religious passion, ages-old traditional identity, and other dark wells of sullen emotional sustenance. And worse than the effects on the life of the victim of this change is that it is better than anything they had before, better and better by the day, and it precludes any hope of returning to the past except by way of poisoned imaginings and death. To be improved, to have ones past stripped away, to be left humiliated by superior forces beyond ones own abilities, to feel oneself mocked and infantalized in the face of the world is to feel shame and outrage, not gratitude. To resort to violence is obvious, regardless of the outcome. And who really cares?
It is the flaw of the Left that they have sunk into the slough of sentimentality and philobarbarism to the point of fascist collaboration with the reactionariy forces of Islam in its demise. No traditonal culture is worth preserving if it precludes the benefits Modernity brings to those who cannot choose to reject them, i.e. children. There is no sanctity to be found in child mortality due to primitivism. The cult of philobarbarism is a fascist evil cloaked in Red. Exposed, it is a dark and evil force that needs be slain for good. Progress, regardless of the privilege accrued in the oligarchies is worth the life of those kept forom the benefits of Progress and Modernity. Postcard people do not exist. Only real people do, and they have Human rights that are natural to all people, universally, regardless of geographical circumstances of birth, regardless of anything.
To attain the benefits of Modernity people have to accept or not the changes that modern economics demand. Life is tough, and some people die from it. Well, so what? It is only our duty to save thsoe who can be saved, even if we are reluctantly forced to remove from the course of Progress those who resist it.
We have argued here that the changes required to transform the primitive world into the modern world will come from men and women like William Walker, land pirate and small-time psychopathic killer who tried to enslave the populations of Central America in the early 19th century. Had he succeeded Central America today would be little different economically from the majority of the southern United States or western Europe. It's unfortunate that Walker failed-- unfortunate for Central Americans. We shouldn't repeat the mistake our forefathers made in stopping Walker from succeeding.Today we have a chance to transform the Moslem world, to bring them, however reluctant they might be, to the new age of mankind.
Howsbawm writes in The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 that the Industrial Revolution required masses of labourers disciplined to work in factories, men and women who were forced by circumstances to remove themselves from rural areas to cities, and from subsistence farming at best to highly regimented mechanized factory labour, creating social relations unlike anything they'd experienced prior, and leaving in its wake a swath of human destruction unseen before in human history, devastation even unlike defeat in war because in the Industrial Revolution the change was from the cyclical to the linear, from the land to the city, from the community to the individual. The new age of Capitalism brought not only hardship, pain, and death, and it came in the form not merely of evil but of blankness, a souless, grinding destruction that meant nothing in human terms, only in terms of money. The purpose of life became the value one could wring from ones employer, ones personal worth as ones value in the workplace.
The first great revolution in human history was that of agriculture, discounting walking upright, the discovery of fire, and the invention of the wheel; and for 5,000 years common people did little but build up enough surplus to create small cities that housed and supported their tiny elites of priests, kings, warriors. Small and incremental changes in cultures, the rising and falling of predatory empires, and the constant wasting of the human population in repetitive cycles of agriculture and animal husbandry, that was the life of man, its superstructures of religion and tradition forming transparent gloss over the hellishness of living a life for nothing. And then came industrial invention, one atop the other, accelerating and expanding geometrically, exploding the old life and crushing the usual grass under metal monsters spewing smoke and spitting steam, monsters that devoured humans by the industrial tonne, turning life into a nightmare that possessed William Blake to write of the new land "The New Jersualem"
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic Mills?
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we bave built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
Hobsbawm writes:
The rapid growth of towns and non-agricultural settlements in Britain had naturally long stimulated agriculture, which is fortunately so inefficient in its pre-industrial forms that quite small improvements-- a little rational attention to animal husbandry, crop-rotation, fertilization and the lay-out of farms, or the adoption of new crops-- can produce disproportionately large results.
[It is in] the 1840s, the period when agricultural science and engineering may be said to have come of age. The vast increase in output which enabled British farming in the 1830s to supply 98% of the grain for a population between two and three times the mid 18th century size, was achieved by general adoption of methods pioneered in the early 18th century, by rationalization and by expansion of the cultivated area.
All these in turn were achieved by social rather than technological transformation, by the liquidation of medieval communal cultivation with its open field and common pasture, (the 'enclosure movement,') of self-sufficient peasant farming, and of old-fashioned uncommercial attitudes towards the land. (Hobsbawm: p.64.)
When agriculture no longer required masses of labourers to cultivate and harvest crops, and when with a mere fraction of the labour force able to produce huge crops there was no purpose for labourers on the land; and if not for cities to escape to, as in the case of the Scottish during the "Clearances", there was famine on the land for those who places were taken over by sheep.
The Corn Laws with which the agrarian interst sought to protect farming...against the tendency to treat agriculture as an industry like any other, to be judged by the criteria of profitablity alone...were rearguard actions against the final introduction of capitalism into the countryside...the Corn Law [abolished] in 1846.
[A]n industrial economy needs labour, and where else but from the former non-industrial sector was it to come from? (Hobsbawm: p. 65.)
Rationalization of land rather than sentimentalization of land, or worse, mystification of land as irrationalist esse and volkgeist, that is the problem of cultural atomism, of individuality after a human history of communitarian life. Industry needed labourers, and cities took them in. The transitition from what Marx calls the idiocy of rural living to the souless and brutal edxistence of modern industrial cities was unbearably harsh for most, but the advantage of wage-slavery over land-slavery is, once the hurdle is cleared, more beneficial than anything before it. But what happens to those primitives who leap from the rural idiocy to the city and find nothing but an empty city full of people? a city without work or industry or reason for being? Where are the advantages for displaced man? Man, alienated from the land, from his family, tribe, tradition, and usual condition; and man thrown naked into a souless city is left without the worhtless cover of religion and shallow meanings therefrom. Who and what is responsible? Why is the lost perfection of the past gone from his life? Blame 'them.'
When all that was usual is past and not returning, then it is obviously the end of the world. The chiliastic interpretation of the state of lost man is too normal. Of course the world is at an end, and if one is of the chosen or perfect religion, if one submits properly to the will of Allah, if one restores the caliphate and imposes sharia on the masses, then Allah will have mercy on the believer, and he will go to paradise, that which is lost to him in the flight from the land and from the traditions of the past now destroyed and humiliated by Modernity and Progress, of which there is nothing to show for it but money. For the primitive man who finds himslef in the city without the benefits of work even in factories, then there is only the intense loss of the rural and the lost religious to compensate for that loss. To be more religious is to cling to the hope in the grip of hopelessness. And since religion fails obviously, the lost man must recreate the lie interminably rather than create life within the new social and economic matix of Modernity. Or kill as many others as possible in blowing himself up for Allah.
The conflict between the past of rural idiocy and Modernity comes to this:
[B]oth Britain and the world knew that the Industrial Revolution launched in these islands by and through the traders and entrepeneurs, whose only law was to buy int the cheapest markets and seell whithout restriction in the dearest, was transforming the world. Nothing could stand in its way. The gods and kings of the past were powerless before the businessmen and steam-engins of the present. (Hobsbawm: p. 68-69.)
Fascist Islam, like it or not, is doomed. We witness in our day its demise, and it is a terrible thing of madness and suicide. Those who cling to the imagined glories of the past are doomed, and those who pretend to care about those same people are little better than criminals who make the death of millions inevitable in the conflict between those who will make the transition to modernity and progress and those who will cling to Islam as they sink into the history of failed peoples.
It is the flaw of the Left that they have sunk into the slough of sentimentality and philobarbarism to the point of fascist collaboration with the reactionariy forces of Islam in its demise. No traditonal culture is worth preserving if it precludes the benefits Modernity brings to those who cannot choose to reject them, i.e. children. There is no sanctity to be found in child mortality due to primitivism. The cult of philobarbarism is a fascist evil cloaked in Red. Exposed, it is a dark and evil force that needs be slain for good. Progress, regardless of the privilege accrued in the oligarchies is worth the life of those kept forom the benefits of Progress and Modernity. Postcard people do not exist. Only real people do, and they have Human rights that are natural to all people, universally, regardless of geographical circumstances of birth, regardless of anything.
To attain the benefits of Modernity people have to accept or not the changes that modern economics demand. Life is tough, and some people die from it. Well, so what? It is only our duty to save thsoe who can be saved, even if we are reluctantly forced to remove from the course of Progress those who resist it.
We have argued here that the changes required to transform the primitive world into the modern world will come from men and women like William Walker, land pirate and small-time psychopathic killer who tried to enslave the populations of Central America in the early 19th century. Had he succeeded Central America today would be little different economically from the majority of the southern United States or western Europe. It's unfortunate that Walker failed-- unfortunate for Central Americans. We shouldn't repeat the mistake our forefathers made in stopping Walker from succeeding.Today we have a chance to transform the Moslem world, to bring them, however reluctant they might be, to the new age of mankind.
Howsbawm writes in The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 that the Industrial Revolution required masses of labourers disciplined to work in factories, men and women who were forced by circumstances to remove themselves from rural areas to cities, and from subsistence farming at best to highly regimented mechanized factory labour, creating social relations unlike anything they'd experienced prior, and leaving in its wake a swath of human destruction unseen before in human history, devastation even unlike defeat in war because in the Industrial Revolution the change was from the cyclical to the linear, from the land to the city, from the community to the individual. The new age of Capitalism brought not only hardship, pain, and death, and it came in the form not merely of evil but of blankness, a souless, grinding destruction that meant nothing in human terms, only in terms of money. The purpose of life became the value one could wring from ones employer, ones personal worth as ones value in the workplace.
The first great revolution in human history was that of agriculture, discounting walking upright, the discovery of fire, and the invention of the wheel; and for 5,000 years common people did little but build up enough surplus to create small cities that housed and supported their tiny elites of priests, kings, warriors. Small and incremental changes in cultures, the rising and falling of predatory empires, and the constant wasting of the human population in repetitive cycles of agriculture and animal husbandry, that was the life of man, its superstructures of religion and tradition forming transparent gloss over the hellishness of living a life for nothing. And then came industrial invention, one atop the other, accelerating and expanding geometrically, exploding the old life and crushing the usual grass under metal monsters spewing smoke and spitting steam, monsters that devoured humans by the industrial tonne, turning life into a nightmare that possessed William Blake to write of the new land "The New Jersualem"
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic Mills?
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we bave built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
Hobsbawm writes:
The rapid growth of towns and non-agricultural settlements in Britain had naturally long stimulated agriculture, which is fortunately so inefficient in its pre-industrial forms that quite small improvements-- a little rational attention to animal husbandry, crop-rotation, fertilization and the lay-out of farms, or the adoption of new crops-- can produce disproportionately large results.
[It is in] the 1840s, the period when agricultural science and engineering may be said to have come of age. The vast increase in output which enabled British farming in the 1830s to supply 98% of the grain for a population between two and three times the mid 18th century size, was achieved by general adoption of methods pioneered in the early 18th century, by rationalization and by expansion of the cultivated area.
All these in turn were achieved by social rather than technological transformation, by the liquidation of medieval communal cultivation with its open field and common pasture, (the 'enclosure movement,') of self-sufficient peasant farming, and of old-fashioned uncommercial attitudes towards the land. (Hobsbawm: p.64.)
When agriculture no longer required masses of labourers to cultivate and harvest crops, and when with a mere fraction of the labour force able to produce huge crops there was no purpose for labourers on the land; and if not for cities to escape to, as in the case of the Scottish during the "Clearances", there was famine on the land for those who places were taken over by sheep.
The Corn Laws with which the agrarian interst sought to protect farming...against the tendency to treat agriculture as an industry like any other, to be judged by the criteria of profitablity alone...were rearguard actions against the final introduction of capitalism into the countryside...the Corn Law [abolished] in 1846.
[A]n industrial economy needs labour, and where else but from the former non-industrial sector was it to come from? (Hobsbawm: p. 65.)
Rationalization of land rather than sentimentalization of land, or worse, mystification of land as irrationalist esse and volkgeist, that is the problem of cultural atomism, of individuality after a human history of communitarian life. Industry needed labourers, and cities took them in. The transitition from what Marx calls the idiocy of rural living to the souless and brutal edxistence of modern industrial cities was unbearably harsh for most, but the advantage of wage-slavery over land-slavery is, once the hurdle is cleared, more beneficial than anything before it. But what happens to those primitives who leap from the rural idiocy to the city and find nothing but an empty city full of people? a city without work or industry or reason for being? Where are the advantages for displaced man? Man, alienated from the land, from his family, tribe, tradition, and usual condition; and man thrown naked into a souless city is left without the worhtless cover of religion and shallow meanings therefrom. Who and what is responsible? Why is the lost perfection of the past gone from his life? Blame 'them.'
When all that was usual is past and not returning, then it is obviously the end of the world. The chiliastic interpretation of the state of lost man is too normal. Of course the world is at an end, and if one is of the chosen or perfect religion, if one submits properly to the will of Allah, if one restores the caliphate and imposes sharia on the masses, then Allah will have mercy on the believer, and he will go to paradise, that which is lost to him in the flight from the land and from the traditions of the past now destroyed and humiliated by Modernity and Progress, of which there is nothing to show for it but money. For the primitive man who finds himslef in the city without the benefits of work even in factories, then there is only the intense loss of the rural and the lost religious to compensate for that loss. To be more religious is to cling to the hope in the grip of hopelessness. And since religion fails obviously, the lost man must recreate the lie interminably rather than create life within the new social and economic matix of Modernity. Or kill as many others as possible in blowing himself up for Allah.
The conflict between the past of rural idiocy and Modernity comes to this:
[B]oth Britain and the world knew that the Industrial Revolution launched in these islands by and through the traders and entrepeneurs, whose only law was to buy int the cheapest markets and seell whithout restriction in the dearest, was transforming the world. Nothing could stand in its way. The gods and kings of the past were powerless before the businessmen and steam-engins of the present. (Hobsbawm: p. 68-69.)
Fascist Islam, like it or not, is doomed. We witness in our day its demise, and it is a terrible thing of madness and suicide. Those who cling to the imagined glories of the past are doomed, and those who pretend to care about those same people are little better than criminals who make the death of millions inevitable in the conflict between those who will make the transition to modernity and progress and those who will cling to Islam as they sink into the history of failed peoples.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
al-Luddites
The sea-change in modern history that upsets our Muslim cousins so deeply today is the change from the feudal and primitive way of life they know--and whether they feel it's good or not, they do feel an attachment to it simply because it is their way of life, traditional and simple, basic and predictable, soothing in its utter idiocy--to the revolutionary life of the American, French, and Industrial Revolutions. Even in the West, in an intellectual mindscape rather than the geographical landscape, there are many who long for the certainties of fascism and blood purity and for the primitive lusts of savageries, hierarchy, and brutal, imperious authority. In the West there are those who love to worship the barbarian life they've lost and cannot return to, a sentimentalist's nostalgia for a falsely reconstructed vision of pre-modern purity and innocence, a time when men were men and women were bent over. The three revolutions above put paid to that remnant of social and cultural primitivism in many parts of Western Europe and North America. Many among us today hate that freedom from the fascist norm of the past. Having lost it they long to regain it through some vicarious association with primitives, in the current case, with Muslims. But who cares if Muslims love their own slavery? Let them have it if they so choose; but do not suggest that anyone is entitled to raise children into a slave system, for there is no right anywhere to destroy the lives of ones own simply because of the thunderous stupidity of many who argue for it on the grounds of sanctity of tradition or cultural practice. Those are people we should feel delight in exiling to uninhabitable wildernesses to let them extinguish themselves for the greater good of the future of Humanity. Who needs suicide-bombers killing at random for the sake of the preservation and even restoration of the evils of the regressionists? Let them die. In fact, let's be active in our pursuit of furthering the telos of Humanity.
Yes, the primitives feel that their lives are worth preserving-- and worth losing-- in the struggle for the future of deciding the course of human history. In this epoch of revolution we must say that we are on the side of progress or of reaction, and we must act accordingly. Those of us who are progressively inclined, regardless of our bolshevik numbers, have the same imperative to win the struggle against the forces of reaction; and no sentimentality about the primitives need enter into it. One side or another must prevail, regardless of the dhimmi nonsense we read from our dhimmi/collaborator fellows. The obvious contradictions of the historical anti-thesis in struggle against the thesis are clear to all, even to the dhimmi cum fascists in powerful academic and government positions in the West. The historical inevitability of the struggle is not lost on any but the densest of dhimmis in the furthest suburban shopping-mall wonderlands. Even the most primitive Muslims on Earth understand clearly that we are in a struggle for the future course of Humanity. The primitives understand that in order to survive at all they must stop all Human progress and turn back the Human endeavour to the point that all becomes like the 7th century of the Arabian desert. The contradictions of economies are too great to allow the continuation of Modernity which outstrips the primitives geometrically on a daily schedule. The march of Progress is wearing bedroom slippers, and it's time to change into jack-boots, like it or not. Or if not, if our modern world is not worth preserving and enhancing, we must in acts of good-faith turn dhimmi and fight Modernity with all our power. Someone has to go, and if it's the modern man, then so be it, but let it happen soon because the time came long ago, and the suspense is killing a lot of people who would do better to get it over with.
The birth of Modernity is a violent and painful time in the history on Humanity. Hobsbawm writes in The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 on the tearing apart of the old world of tradition, rural poverty, top-to-bottom ignorance, and the general miseries of the world-at-large as the Industrial Revolution came into being:
Its most serious consequences were social: the transition to the new economy created misery and discontent, the materials of social revolution. And indeed, social revolution in the form of spontaneous risings of the urban and industrial poor did break out, and made the revolution of 1848 on the continent, [and made] the vast Chartist movement in Britain. Nor was the discontent confined to the labouring poor. Small and inadaptable businessmen, petit-bourgeios, special sections of the economy, were also the victims of the Industrial Revolution and of its ramifications. Simple-minded labourers reacted to the new system by smashing the machines which they thought responsible for their troubles; but a surprisingly large body of local businessmen and farmers sympathized profoundly with these Luddite activities of their labourers, because they too saw themselves as victims of a diabolical minority of selfish innovators. (Hobsbawm: pp. 54-55.)
With an irony only the gods could enjoy, an irony bordering on German Irony, it falls to those who are Progressives to fight for the revolutions that stalled in America and France and Britain, the revolutions of Modernity. Standing in opposition to the continuation of those revolutions are the Luddite Moslems of the world, primitive fascists who love their primitivism and their innately evil traditional cultures.Islam is a fascism, and those who support it from the sidelines are fascist collaborators, dhimmi pimps, the scum of our societies of modern progress. We who are progressive must act as revolutionaries in the name of progressivism, and we must pursue our revolutionary activities with professionalism and dedication that Lenin showed possible and unbeatable in the face of reactionary force. We call for the overthrow and destruction of the forces of reaction, the military occupation of primitives' lands, and the enslavement of those populations under a dictatorship of Progressivism till the primitives are no long extant. Us or them.
Yes, the primitives feel that their lives are worth preserving-- and worth losing-- in the struggle for the future of deciding the course of human history. In this epoch of revolution we must say that we are on the side of progress or of reaction, and we must act accordingly. Those of us who are progressively inclined, regardless of our bolshevik numbers, have the same imperative to win the struggle against the forces of reaction; and no sentimentality about the primitives need enter into it. One side or another must prevail, regardless of the dhimmi nonsense we read from our dhimmi/collaborator fellows. The obvious contradictions of the historical anti-thesis in struggle against the thesis are clear to all, even to the dhimmi cum fascists in powerful academic and government positions in the West. The historical inevitability of the struggle is not lost on any but the densest of dhimmis in the furthest suburban shopping-mall wonderlands. Even the most primitive Muslims on Earth understand clearly that we are in a struggle for the future course of Humanity. The primitives understand that in order to survive at all they must stop all Human progress and turn back the Human endeavour to the point that all becomes like the 7th century of the Arabian desert. The contradictions of economies are too great to allow the continuation of Modernity which outstrips the primitives geometrically on a daily schedule. The march of Progress is wearing bedroom slippers, and it's time to change into jack-boots, like it or not. Or if not, if our modern world is not worth preserving and enhancing, we must in acts of good-faith turn dhimmi and fight Modernity with all our power. Someone has to go, and if it's the modern man, then so be it, but let it happen soon because the time came long ago, and the suspense is killing a lot of people who would do better to get it over with.
The birth of Modernity is a violent and painful time in the history on Humanity. Hobsbawm writes in The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 on the tearing apart of the old world of tradition, rural poverty, top-to-bottom ignorance, and the general miseries of the world-at-large as the Industrial Revolution came into being:
Its most serious consequences were social: the transition to the new economy created misery and discontent, the materials of social revolution. And indeed, social revolution in the form of spontaneous risings of the urban and industrial poor did break out, and made the revolution of 1848 on the continent, [and made] the vast Chartist movement in Britain. Nor was the discontent confined to the labouring poor. Small and inadaptable businessmen, petit-bourgeios, special sections of the economy, were also the victims of the Industrial Revolution and of its ramifications. Simple-minded labourers reacted to the new system by smashing the machines which they thought responsible for their troubles; but a surprisingly large body of local businessmen and farmers sympathized profoundly with these Luddite activities of their labourers, because they too saw themselves as victims of a diabolical minority of selfish innovators. (Hobsbawm: pp. 54-55.)
With an irony only the gods could enjoy, an irony bordering on German Irony, it falls to those who are Progressives to fight for the revolutions that stalled in America and France and Britain, the revolutions of Modernity. Standing in opposition to the continuation of those revolutions are the Luddite Moslems of the world, primitive fascists who love their primitivism and their innately evil traditional cultures.Islam is a fascism, and those who support it from the sidelines are fascist collaborators, dhimmi pimps, the scum of our societies of modern progress. We who are progressive must act as revolutionaries in the name of progressivism, and we must pursue our revolutionary activities with professionalism and dedication that Lenin showed possible and unbeatable in the face of reactionary force. We call for the overthrow and destruction of the forces of reaction, the military occupation of primitives' lands, and the enslavement of those populations under a dictatorship of Progressivism till the primitives are no long extant. Us or them.
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Crapper's Bida: Tres Moderne
Islam is at war with Modernity, stuck in a primitive mind-set and hysterical at the sight of the changing world around them, a world far more functional than their own, better in every way other than in familiarity, one thing people cling to regardless of its general harm.
A news reader on a generic t.v. science show once noted that sharks did not evolve in a period between 500 to 50 million years ago. Moslems give the impression they would like to be like those sharks, but without that change in the past 50 million years or so. Too bad for them that we did crawl out of the slime to stand on our own two feet. Now those pockets of resistence have to go the way of all flesh, like it or not. The world does change, and it changes in ways that are obvious and unsettling to those who cannot cope with change of any sort, who fly into violent tantrums at the thought of bida, of innovation of any kind. Too bad for them. These modern times of ours will pass away into newer times, and in in 500 million years no one will even remember this particular post. Life goes on, and Islam, a pocket of resistence to change has to dry up and blow away--or some such thing.
Ours is a time of revolution, though many of us are so accustomed to it as the staus quo that we don't think of ourselves as revolutionaries at all. In shark years, 1776 and 1789 are nothing at all; but in Moslem years these few past centuries are the end of the world for them, the end of the parasitical fantasy life of roaming and raping, pillaging and murdering at will and at random. Napoleon's landing at Alexandria put the end to Islam for good and ushered in the end of Islam for all of eternity.
Our lives as a species changed fundamentally then too, though we accept it as the norm, and as good norm, this age of modernity. We gained the advantages of personhood and individual rights, concepts that have gradually over the past 200 odd years grown to fit us as we've grown to fit them. And along with freedom, privacy, liberty, equality, and brotherhood we also gained the advantages of the Industrial Revolution, something so ordinary in our lives today that it is inconceivable to return to anything like the 1990s, a time without access to the Internet. Islam, on the other hand, is still living in the remnants of the Middle Ages, and desires strongly to remain there, at any cost, even at the cost of life itself.
For many of us, to give up the advances of the past ten years of computer technology would be an unbearable hardship. To look back to the 1780s is impossible for any but the most stone-hearted of historians. Hobsbawm, in The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848, writes:
What does the phrase 'the Industrial Revolution broke out' mean? It means that some time in the 1780s, and for the first time in human history, the shackles were taken off the productive power of human societies, which henceforth became capable of the constant, rapid and up to the present limitless multiplication of men, goods, and services. This is now technically known to the economists as the 'take-off into self-sustained growth.' No previous society had been able to break through the ceiling which a pre-industrial social structure, defective science and technology, and consequently periodic breakdown, famine, and death, imposed on production. (Hobsbawm: p. 43.)
In roughly 200 years we have gone from starving peasants in primitve conditions living like modern-day Moslems to a world of modern technology and Human progress, not only as fact but as attitude, expectation, and right.
The Industrial Revolution was not indeed an episode with a beginning and an end. To ask when it was 'complete' is senseless, for its essence was that henceforth revolutionary change became the norm. It is still going on; at most we can ask when the economic transformations had gone far enough to establish a substantially industrialized economy, capable of producing, broadly speaking, anything it wanted within the range of the available techniques.... By any reckoning this was probably the most important event in world history, at any rate since the inventoion of agriculture and cities. (Hobsbawm: p. 44.)
Islam died the day the Mamluks ran away and Napoleon's forces shelled al-Azhar. The modern world arrived on the shores of Egypt, and nothing can be the same ever again. Even our own lives cannot be as restricted as they were ten years ago.And yet Islam and our dhimmi collaborators wish to drag us into a false nostalgia for the golden age of the early caliphate of the 7th century.
Ah, but Islam does not wish to give up our modern technologies. They do not and never have contributed to it, and they've resisted it on religious grounds, as we note in Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers or in Peter Mansfield's primer, The Arabs, and elsewhere:
"Although it was the Arabs who introduced paper into Europe in the 8th century (after learning how to manufacture it from the Chinese when they captured Samarkand in 704) they rejected tmechanical book printing for centuries because it was an infidel invention unsanctioned by God." (Mansfield p:. 117)
"Islam's first printing press, which flourished in the first half of the 18th century, printed in all 17 books...." (Bernard Lewis: 2001, p. 140.) "Islam's first printing press was introduced in 1728. Started by Ibrahim Muteferrika, a Hungarian seminarist in Turkey." (Ibid: p.28.)"Had to close his shop in 1745. The mullahs prohibited printing presses." Mansfield: p. 157.) Printing was "banned on the grounds that the word "Allah could be composed in type that would be cleaned of ink by a brush that could contain pig bristles." (Boorstin: pp. 543-47.)
How does it happen then that Islam is addicted to our technology today? V.S Naipaul writes numerous times in Beyond Belief that Moslems incorporate Western technology into the world of Islam as objective realia shorn of its ideological subject; and they refuse to admit to themselves that the technology is inherently Western due to the mode and means of its production, that it is objectively capitalist and therefore objectively Western in its underlying meaning and sentiment. Technology is Western, and for Moslems to ignore that would be like Jews ignoring the origins of medical texts produced in Nazi Germany. In the West we do not use medical illustrations from Nazi Germany regardless of the acurate detail and benefit they might somehow possess and transmit. It is fruit from a poisoned tree, and yet Islam does not see the same poison in Western technology. It cannot, because otherwise Islam would still be living in the Dark Ages, living, for example, without electricity. But further, the Islamic tradition is to steal technology from others for its own use and prestige, a hold-over from its origins as a tribal warrior code of hunter/gatherer nomadic bandits. But the contradictions of Modernity and Islam are so glaring that only a definitive split in the Moslem's conscious mind can account for the easy use of capitalist goods produced by Modernity.
Naipaul relates the story of a Pakistani peasant who sits in squalor and hates modernity: "His world had shrunk to a hut in a crumbling village. He was prepared for even that to crumble away further, once the faith was served." (Naipaul: p. 89.)
There's something to be said for the security of the primitive world of fascism and violence, not what Hobbes would write but this, the dhimmi mantra of philobarbarism, the cry against modernity for all its real and imagined problems:
[Modernity] has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash-payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiam, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom--Free Trade. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary,the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classe All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.(Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto. 1848; rpt. 1987: p. 23-24.)
Some few of us at least are fond of Modernity, and we see little benfit to longing for the fascist past of the Rightly Guided Caliphate. Forget for a moment the simple joys of the Internet. Before deciding whether modern living is evil and that we should return to the world of the 7th century, sit for a while in private contemplation and look at the big picture of Modernity, as in the example below.
Thursday, February 25, 1999
FEATURES
FACTOID
Some crap about toilets
Venice Buhain
The Daily
Sanitation is one of those miracles of modern life that seems invisible until something goes horribly wrong and it fails to be there for our septic needs. It usually takes some emergency - such as being stranded on campus at 9 a.m. on a Sunday - to remind us how vulnerable we are without our toilets.
It is a misconception that the appropriately named Thomas Crapper (or Sir John Crapper) invented the modern toilet. This common story probably was made popular by the 1969 book, Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper, by Wallace Reyburn. While there really was an English plumber named Thomas Crapper who sold toilets throughout England with his last name embossed on them, he developed no real advances to modern sanitation. Reyburn, who also later wrote the satirical book Bust-Up: The Uplifting Tale of Otto Titzling and the Development of the Bra, may have known about the 19th-century plumber, and made a few assumptions, but it's not clear that Reyburn's "biography" of Crapper is meant to be satirical.
Like Shakespearean plays, flush toilets are a gift to our modern era from England's Renaissance. Sir John Harington, an eccentric poet and inventor, invented a flush lavatory in the late 16th century and installed one in Queen Elizabeth's residence in Richmond, Surrey.
However, it took several centuries of advances in plumbing and city planning for England's sewers to catch up to the modern convenience of automatic handling of human waste. As recently as the late-19th century, enteric fever and typhoid seemed to attack upper class households at a higher rate than the lower class households. It was determined that the cause was inadequate sewage management. More upper-class than lower-class people did their business in the comfort of their own homes and, consequently, had more exposure to waste matter. When Edward, Prince of Wales, caught typhoid while visiting the Countess of Londesborough in 1871, it started a national crusade for redesigning the septic and sewer systems.
Toilet technology continues to progress. Mark, a Sales Representative at plumbing supply company Keller Supply, says that new federal regulations require that newly installed household toilets lower their water use from 3.5 to 1.6 gallons. (Mark asked that his last name be withheld.) He notes that some companies at first had trouble manufacturing toilets to meet the new standard, but there are now pressure assisted systems that help maintain a satisfactory flush. However, the basic flushing mechanism has remained mostly the same as the old standard toilet with which most college students are familiar.
At first glance, it almost seems as if Rube Goldberg could have invented the flushing mechanism, although on closer inspection, the toilet is a delightfully elegant and uncomplicated machine. The handle lifts a flapper or rubber ball blocking the flush valve at the bottom of the tank. All the water in the tank flows into the bowl, and the flapper falls back into place. This sudden change in weight in the bowl causes the water to be sucked down. There is an extreme bend in the drainpipe that acts as a siphon - gravity pulls the water down the drain.
The toilet "reboots" itself in an equally elegant fashion. An air-filled rubber ball is attached to a lever that is in turn attached to a plunger that blocks the tall water supply pipe. This entire mechanism is charmingly called a "ballcock." When the toilet is flushed and the tank is empty, the ball drops to the bottom of the tank, the lever lifts the plunger, and water can pass from the ballcock into a different pipe that fills the tank. As the tank fills, the ball is lifted by the water, and the lever replaces the plunger which stops flow between the supply and the pipe. In some toilets, a "float cup" attached to the plunger does the work of the ball and the lever.
The bowl has a separate fill tube, which also works by a siphon. One end of the flexible tube is attached to the water supply pipe and the other end dangles into a tall "overflow pipe," which fills the bowl slowly. When the weight of the water in the bowl reaches a certain point, the bowl stops filling, and the water fills the overflow pipe, until it reaches the end of the fill tube. This blocks the siphon and stops the water supply.
There's a lot more to flushing troubles down the drain than meets the eye.
Sources: Adams, Cecil. More of the Straight Dope.
Wright, Lawrence. Clean and Decent.
Reyburn, Wallace. Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper.
"Harington, Sir John." Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Basic Plumbing. Sunset Books
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A news reader on a generic t.v. science show once noted that sharks did not evolve in a period between 500 to 50 million years ago. Moslems give the impression they would like to be like those sharks, but without that change in the past 50 million years or so. Too bad for them that we did crawl out of the slime to stand on our own two feet. Now those pockets of resistence have to go the way of all flesh, like it or not. The world does change, and it changes in ways that are obvious and unsettling to those who cannot cope with change of any sort, who fly into violent tantrums at the thought of bida, of innovation of any kind. Too bad for them. These modern times of ours will pass away into newer times, and in in 500 million years no one will even remember this particular post. Life goes on, and Islam, a pocket of resistence to change has to dry up and blow away--or some such thing.
Ours is a time of revolution, though many of us are so accustomed to it as the staus quo that we don't think of ourselves as revolutionaries at all. In shark years, 1776 and 1789 are nothing at all; but in Moslem years these few past centuries are the end of the world for them, the end of the parasitical fantasy life of roaming and raping, pillaging and murdering at will and at random. Napoleon's landing at Alexandria put the end to Islam for good and ushered in the end of Islam for all of eternity.
Our lives as a species changed fundamentally then too, though we accept it as the norm, and as good norm, this age of modernity. We gained the advantages of personhood and individual rights, concepts that have gradually over the past 200 odd years grown to fit us as we've grown to fit them. And along with freedom, privacy, liberty, equality, and brotherhood we also gained the advantages of the Industrial Revolution, something so ordinary in our lives today that it is inconceivable to return to anything like the 1990s, a time without access to the Internet. Islam, on the other hand, is still living in the remnants of the Middle Ages, and desires strongly to remain there, at any cost, even at the cost of life itself.
For many of us, to give up the advances of the past ten years of computer technology would be an unbearable hardship. To look back to the 1780s is impossible for any but the most stone-hearted of historians. Hobsbawm, in The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848, writes:
What does the phrase 'the Industrial Revolution broke out' mean? It means that some time in the 1780s, and for the first time in human history, the shackles were taken off the productive power of human societies, which henceforth became capable of the constant, rapid and up to the present limitless multiplication of men, goods, and services. This is now technically known to the economists as the 'take-off into self-sustained growth.' No previous society had been able to break through the ceiling which a pre-industrial social structure, defective science and technology, and consequently periodic breakdown, famine, and death, imposed on production. (Hobsbawm: p. 43.)
In roughly 200 years we have gone from starving peasants in primitve conditions living like modern-day Moslems to a world of modern technology and Human progress, not only as fact but as attitude, expectation, and right.
The Industrial Revolution was not indeed an episode with a beginning and an end. To ask when it was 'complete' is senseless, for its essence was that henceforth revolutionary change became the norm. It is still going on; at most we can ask when the economic transformations had gone far enough to establish a substantially industrialized economy, capable of producing, broadly speaking, anything it wanted within the range of the available techniques.... By any reckoning this was probably the most important event in world history, at any rate since the inventoion of agriculture and cities. (Hobsbawm: p. 44.)
Islam died the day the Mamluks ran away and Napoleon's forces shelled al-Azhar. The modern world arrived on the shores of Egypt, and nothing can be the same ever again. Even our own lives cannot be as restricted as they were ten years ago.And yet Islam and our dhimmi collaborators wish to drag us into a false nostalgia for the golden age of the early caliphate of the 7th century.
Ah, but Islam does not wish to give up our modern technologies. They do not and never have contributed to it, and they've resisted it on religious grounds, as we note in Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers or in Peter Mansfield's primer, The Arabs, and elsewhere:
"Although it was the Arabs who introduced paper into Europe in the 8th century (after learning how to manufacture it from the Chinese when they captured Samarkand in 704) they rejected tmechanical book printing for centuries because it was an infidel invention unsanctioned by God." (Mansfield p:. 117)
"Islam's first printing press, which flourished in the first half of the 18th century, printed in all 17 books...." (Bernard Lewis: 2001, p. 140.) "Islam's first printing press was introduced in 1728. Started by Ibrahim Muteferrika, a Hungarian seminarist in Turkey." (Ibid: p.28.)"Had to close his shop in 1745. The mullahs prohibited printing presses." Mansfield: p. 157.) Printing was "banned on the grounds that the word "Allah could be composed in type that would be cleaned of ink by a brush that could contain pig bristles." (Boorstin: pp. 543-47.)
How does it happen then that Islam is addicted to our technology today? V.S Naipaul writes numerous times in Beyond Belief that Moslems incorporate Western technology into the world of Islam as objective realia shorn of its ideological subject; and they refuse to admit to themselves that the technology is inherently Western due to the mode and means of its production, that it is objectively capitalist and therefore objectively Western in its underlying meaning and sentiment. Technology is Western, and for Moslems to ignore that would be like Jews ignoring the origins of medical texts produced in Nazi Germany. In the West we do not use medical illustrations from Nazi Germany regardless of the acurate detail and benefit they might somehow possess and transmit. It is fruit from a poisoned tree, and yet Islam does not see the same poison in Western technology. It cannot, because otherwise Islam would still be living in the Dark Ages, living, for example, without electricity. But further, the Islamic tradition is to steal technology from others for its own use and prestige, a hold-over from its origins as a tribal warrior code of hunter/gatherer nomadic bandits. But the contradictions of Modernity and Islam are so glaring that only a definitive split in the Moslem's conscious mind can account for the easy use of capitalist goods produced by Modernity.
Naipaul relates the story of a Pakistani peasant who sits in squalor and hates modernity: "His world had shrunk to a hut in a crumbling village. He was prepared for even that to crumble away further, once the faith was served." (Naipaul: p. 89.)
There's something to be said for the security of the primitive world of fascism and violence, not what Hobbes would write but this, the dhimmi mantra of philobarbarism, the cry against modernity for all its real and imagined problems:
[Modernity] has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash-payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiam, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom--Free Trade. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary,the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classe All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.(Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto. 1848; rpt. 1987: p. 23-24.)
Some few of us at least are fond of Modernity, and we see little benfit to longing for the fascist past of the Rightly Guided Caliphate. Forget for a moment the simple joys of the Internet. Before deciding whether modern living is evil and that we should return to the world of the 7th century, sit for a while in private contemplation and look at the big picture of Modernity, as in the example below.
Thursday, February 25, 1999
FEATURES
FACTOID
Some crap about toilets
Venice Buhain
The Daily
Sanitation is one of those miracles of modern life that seems invisible until something goes horribly wrong and it fails to be there for our septic needs. It usually takes some emergency - such as being stranded on campus at 9 a.m. on a Sunday - to remind us how vulnerable we are without our toilets.
It is a misconception that the appropriately named Thomas Crapper (or Sir John Crapper) invented the modern toilet. This common story probably was made popular by the 1969 book, Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper, by Wallace Reyburn. While there really was an English plumber named Thomas Crapper who sold toilets throughout England with his last name embossed on them, he developed no real advances to modern sanitation. Reyburn, who also later wrote the satirical book Bust-Up: The Uplifting Tale of Otto Titzling and the Development of the Bra, may have known about the 19th-century plumber, and made a few assumptions, but it's not clear that Reyburn's "biography" of Crapper is meant to be satirical.
Like Shakespearean plays, flush toilets are a gift to our modern era from England's Renaissance. Sir John Harington, an eccentric poet and inventor, invented a flush lavatory in the late 16th century and installed one in Queen Elizabeth's residence in Richmond, Surrey.
However, it took several centuries of advances in plumbing and city planning for England's sewers to catch up to the modern convenience of automatic handling of human waste. As recently as the late-19th century, enteric fever and typhoid seemed to attack upper class households at a higher rate than the lower class households. It was determined that the cause was inadequate sewage management. More upper-class than lower-class people did their business in the comfort of their own homes and, consequently, had more exposure to waste matter. When Edward, Prince of Wales, caught typhoid while visiting the Countess of Londesborough in 1871, it started a national crusade for redesigning the septic and sewer systems.
Toilet technology continues to progress. Mark, a Sales Representative at plumbing supply company Keller Supply, says that new federal regulations require that newly installed household toilets lower their water use from 3.5 to 1.6 gallons. (Mark asked that his last name be withheld.) He notes that some companies at first had trouble manufacturing toilets to meet the new standard, but there are now pressure assisted systems that help maintain a satisfactory flush. However, the basic flushing mechanism has remained mostly the same as the old standard toilet with which most college students are familiar.
At first glance, it almost seems as if Rube Goldberg could have invented the flushing mechanism, although on closer inspection, the toilet is a delightfully elegant and uncomplicated machine. The handle lifts a flapper or rubber ball blocking the flush valve at the bottom of the tank. All the water in the tank flows into the bowl, and the flapper falls back into place. This sudden change in weight in the bowl causes the water to be sucked down. There is an extreme bend in the drainpipe that acts as a siphon - gravity pulls the water down the drain.
The toilet "reboots" itself in an equally elegant fashion. An air-filled rubber ball is attached to a lever that is in turn attached to a plunger that blocks the tall water supply pipe. This entire mechanism is charmingly called a "ballcock." When the toilet is flushed and the tank is empty, the ball drops to the bottom of the tank, the lever lifts the plunger, and water can pass from the ballcock into a different pipe that fills the tank. As the tank fills, the ball is lifted by the water, and the lever replaces the plunger which stops flow between the supply and the pipe. In some toilets, a "float cup" attached to the plunger does the work of the ball and the lever.
The bowl has a separate fill tube, which also works by a siphon. One end of the flexible tube is attached to the water supply pipe and the other end dangles into a tall "overflow pipe," which fills the bowl slowly. When the weight of the water in the bowl reaches a certain point, the bowl stops filling, and the water fills the overflow pipe, until it reaches the end of the fill tube. This blocks the siphon and stops the water supply.
There's a lot more to flushing troubles down the drain than meets the eye.
Sources: Adams, Cecil. More of the Straight Dope.
Wright, Lawrence. Clean and Decent.
Reyburn, Wallace. Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper.
"Harington, Sir John." Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Basic Plumbing. Sunset Books
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Monday, June 13, 2005
Modern Revolution
Wealth is an indicator of more than mere money: it signifies freedom to keep the product of ones labour, to keep it from alienation; but more than that, wealth signifies the right of the person to create wealth without interference from above, from the government or the ruling oligarchies of entrenched privilege. Why should we care? The rich get rich, the poor get poorer.
Well, that's only the case if there is a limited availability to grow, at which time to get more one would indeed have to take from another. Such is not the case in our economic system, a case in point being the Saudi theives who raise the price of oil to outrageous highs while the rest of the world continues to expand economically in spite of them. In America more people are now millionaires than last year. No one got poorer because rich people broke into their homes or hovels and stole from them. Millionaires didn't cut wages and raise working hours at the bottle-washing factory. The economy world-wide, outside the Moslem world, expanded, thus more millionaires. This site is not dedicated to cheerleading for millionaires, though they are encouraged to donate money to us if they wish. We are here to expose dhimmitude, to show that we are in the grip of a mental idiocy that threatens to destroy our world of modern civilization and progress by pandering to primitives and barbarians who would and will destroy our very lives if they can. Our purpose here is to show the results of dhimmitude and how we can fight against it. The rich getting richer is simply one example of the benefit of democracy in the world, and how that democracy must expand to include all people as a basic Human right--for everyone. And Islam is a reactionary force that prevents freedom and democracy, one that does not allow for private riches in the hands of citizens at large. Millionaires are simply an indicator of democracy at work in the marketplace of ideas.
Islam is a fascism, a totalitarian ideology pretending to be a religion. In truth it is a prison for the mind as well as for the body of the citizenry at large. Islam is an evil corruption of the human mind and spirit, one that locks the Moslem into a primitive state of semi-consciousness, that drains the intellect, and poisons the mind to love death more than anything in life. There is little more evil in the world today than Islam. And the fact is that the Western world lived in a similar state untill fairly recently, until the Renaissance and especially until the American and French Revolutions. Those revolutions broke up the bonds of the mind of Mankind, and now, unfortunately, the revolutuions have ceased to spread. It is our position here that those revolutions must again spread, by force if need be, across the face of the world, and damn the resistence.
Modernity is good, a progressive force in human life that must grow until it encompasses the entire human race. progress is relatively new as a concept. Modernity and progress are revolutionary concepts that come to us via the American and French revolutions, also from the British Industrial Revolution. Regardless of their places of origin, those revolutions are of universal benefit. It is a crime against humanity to stop the spread of the benefits of those revolutions.Islam is resistent, is reactionary in its insistence that there shall be no progress in the Islamic world. We argue that such a stance is a crime against humanity. Those who resist the benefits of Modernity must be swept away, or, as George Orwell would have it put in plain English, they must be killed. The forces of reaction must be dragged from their places of refuge and they must be destroyed physically if they resist the progress of humanity. The Terror of Year Two of the French Revolution must pale in comparison if we are to save hiumanity for the evil of Islam to save Moslems by the billion.
Modernity isn't perfect. It is the best way to pursue the course of human good at this time, and it opens the gates to further improvement in the lives of humanity for the future. Islam has closed those gates and is waging war against both Modernity and its own citizens to the point of suicide. The American, French and Industrial Revolutions must continue, and the forces of reaction must continue to die in an ocean of blood if they resist. It is obvious. It is necessary.
Eric J. Hobsbawm, Marxist historian, writes in The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, of the difference between our world and that of the world of Islam and the world of our ancestors thus when he contrasts the word of reaction to the world of progress:
The Great Encyclopaedia of Diderot and d'Alembert was not merely a compendium of progressive social and political thought, but of technological and sientific progress. For indeed the conviction of the progress of human knowledge, rationality, wealth, civilization and control over nature with which the eighteenth century was deeply imbued, the 'Enlightenment,' drew its strength primarily from the evident progress of production, trade, and the economic and scientific rationality believed to be associated inevitably with both. (Hobsbawm: p. 34.)
Seeing was believing for the intellectuals of the French Revolution, and they saw improvement in the life of ordinary men and women even more than 200 years ago in the concurrent revolution of science and technology, primitive as it was then. Hobsbawm continues with nothing less than a paean to capitalism, whether he's aware of it or not. He argues that revolution in France, for the rights of man universal and the industrial revolution in the making spread wealth and freedom to those who before those revolutions were subject to primitive feudalism, alienated from the products of their labour by the class interests of the latifundist aristocracy, the church, and whoever had the means and might to take wealth from those who produced it, i.e. the peasantry. Limited distribution of the wealth? Yes, without a doubt. The capital accumulation in the hands of the few was unprecedented even in ancient times, causing starvation among the working classes in newly industrialized cities, themselves new as a human concept. The important feature here though is the concept of revolution that broke down the feudal regimes and made way for the idea of Progress itself, a concept that seems to have been either forgotten or deliberately ignored by the Left in recent years in favor of philobarbarism and Left reaction in favor of infantalization of the lumpen-proletariate for lack of a working class to dominate. There is progress, and even the 18th century had ample evidence of it in France and England. It is evidence of the bifurcation of the world of today, a split between those of the inheritance of the Revolutions and the world of primitivism and Modernity.
Islam is a totalitarian reactionary ideology of the feudal past that Western Europe and America evolved beyond. The Islamic world is stuck in a primitve and violent past human effort to control the world through evil superstiton by means of a fascist poligion. Islam is the modern equivelent of the feudal French Estates of privilege. We argue that Islam, like the Estates, must go to the chopping block.
In the story below we see that in one small county in the west of the United States there are more rich people than before, and one can be certain that they are rich because there is little impediment to their creative abilities to create wealth. In the story below we can see the rise of ordinary people in America who in the lands of Islam would be slaves to feudalism, savages living in poverty and ignorance and disease because the world of Islam refuses the concept of progress. Wealth is not everything, and Islam does have its appeal to those who love totalitarian certainties. For the rest of us, the nature of progress is well shown in the numbers below. Personal wealth is indicative of progress in personal lives, achieved in a progressive system of designed and protected intellectual pursuit, something not allowed in Islam, something at risk in the dhimmi West.
Hobsbawm has a number of important and interseting observations we can use to analyse Islam and the forces of reaction in our time. For the next number of posts we'll look at his work and see what we can do to destroy the dhimmi attitude that prevails today in the West by considering his insights into our recent past that resemble the state of Islam today. We hope to show through the works of a communist that the world of progress is facing a fascist Islam, and that even a communist can see it must die.
Below we can see the legacy of peasants who live in a free country, the fruit of progress at its most trivial but most obvious. This story below comes from a San Diego newspaper:
http://www.nctimes.com/
San Diego County now has 34,950 millionaires
By: North County Times staff and wire reports
San Diego County's cadre of millionaires is growing at a rate that outstrips the growth of millionairedom around the world and across the nation, a pair of reports on the increase of so-called high-net-worth individuals showed Tuesday.
The 2005 World Wealth Report by financial management company Merrill Lynch and business consultant Capgemini found that the number of high-net-worth individuals ---- persons whose net worth, excluding the value of their primary residence, is at least $1 million ---- grew by 600,000 last year around the globe. The number of those calling the San Diego region home grew 10.72 percent to 34,950, a separate report by local market research firm Claritas found. It could not be determined whether Claritas and the other firms used the same database.
The wealth report found that there were 8.3 million people worldwide with $1 million or more in financial assets at the end of 2004, up from 7.7 million a year earlier.
Their total wealth rose 8.2 percent to $30.8 trillion in 2004, giving them control of nearly a quarter of the world's financial assets, according to Petrina Dolby, vice president of Capgemini's wealth management practice.
The 8.2 percent increase was the strongest since an identical 8.2 percent rise in 1999, she said.
Not surprisingly, the expansion of the millionaire class was especially strong in North America because of the solid economic growth last year in both the United States and Canada. The group swelled by 9.7 percent nationwide, a full 1 percent behind San Diego County's crop of new millionaires.
"Significantly, North America surpassed Europe both in total high net worth individuals population and wealth for the first time since 2001," when North American investors were hard-hit by the bursting of the technology stock bubble and the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The Asia-Pacific region also showed strong growth.
According to the latest figures, the number of high-net-worth individuals included 2.7 million in North America with a total of $9.3 trillion in assets; 2.6 million in Europe with $8.9 trillion; 2.3 million in the Asia-Pacific region with $7.2 trillion; 300,000 in Latin America, including Mexico, with $3.7 trillion; 300,000 in the Middle East with $1 trillion; and 100,000 in Africa with $700 billion.
The study also looked at what it termed "ultra-high-net-worth individuals," who have at least $30 million in financial assets.
Their ranks increased by 6,300 individuals, or 8.9 percent, in 2004 to 77,500 worldwide, the study said.
San Diego County now has 34,950 millionaires.
***
For more info please follow the link above.
Well, that's only the case if there is a limited availability to grow, at which time to get more one would indeed have to take from another. Such is not the case in our economic system, a case in point being the Saudi theives who raise the price of oil to outrageous highs while the rest of the world continues to expand economically in spite of them. In America more people are now millionaires than last year. No one got poorer because rich people broke into their homes or hovels and stole from them. Millionaires didn't cut wages and raise working hours at the bottle-washing factory. The economy world-wide, outside the Moslem world, expanded, thus more millionaires. This site is not dedicated to cheerleading for millionaires, though they are encouraged to donate money to us if they wish. We are here to expose dhimmitude, to show that we are in the grip of a mental idiocy that threatens to destroy our world of modern civilization and progress by pandering to primitives and barbarians who would and will destroy our very lives if they can. Our purpose here is to show the results of dhimmitude and how we can fight against it. The rich getting richer is simply one example of the benefit of democracy in the world, and how that democracy must expand to include all people as a basic Human right--for everyone. And Islam is a reactionary force that prevents freedom and democracy, one that does not allow for private riches in the hands of citizens at large. Millionaires are simply an indicator of democracy at work in the marketplace of ideas.
Islam is a fascism, a totalitarian ideology pretending to be a religion. In truth it is a prison for the mind as well as for the body of the citizenry at large. Islam is an evil corruption of the human mind and spirit, one that locks the Moslem into a primitive state of semi-consciousness, that drains the intellect, and poisons the mind to love death more than anything in life. There is little more evil in the world today than Islam. And the fact is that the Western world lived in a similar state untill fairly recently, until the Renaissance and especially until the American and French Revolutions. Those revolutions broke up the bonds of the mind of Mankind, and now, unfortunately, the revolutuions have ceased to spread. It is our position here that those revolutions must again spread, by force if need be, across the face of the world, and damn the resistence.
Modernity is good, a progressive force in human life that must grow until it encompasses the entire human race. progress is relatively new as a concept. Modernity and progress are revolutionary concepts that come to us via the American and French revolutions, also from the British Industrial Revolution. Regardless of their places of origin, those revolutions are of universal benefit. It is a crime against humanity to stop the spread of the benefits of those revolutions.Islam is resistent, is reactionary in its insistence that there shall be no progress in the Islamic world. We argue that such a stance is a crime against humanity. Those who resist the benefits of Modernity must be swept away, or, as George Orwell would have it put in plain English, they must be killed. The forces of reaction must be dragged from their places of refuge and they must be destroyed physically if they resist the progress of humanity. The Terror of Year Two of the French Revolution must pale in comparison if we are to save hiumanity for the evil of Islam to save Moslems by the billion.
Modernity isn't perfect. It is the best way to pursue the course of human good at this time, and it opens the gates to further improvement in the lives of humanity for the future. Islam has closed those gates and is waging war against both Modernity and its own citizens to the point of suicide. The American, French and Industrial Revolutions must continue, and the forces of reaction must continue to die in an ocean of blood if they resist. It is obvious. It is necessary.
Eric J. Hobsbawm, Marxist historian, writes in The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, of the difference between our world and that of the world of Islam and the world of our ancestors thus when he contrasts the word of reaction to the world of progress:
The Great Encyclopaedia of Diderot and d'Alembert was not merely a compendium of progressive social and political thought, but of technological and sientific progress. For indeed the conviction of the progress of human knowledge, rationality, wealth, civilization and control over nature with which the eighteenth century was deeply imbued, the 'Enlightenment,' drew its strength primarily from the evident progress of production, trade, and the economic and scientific rationality believed to be associated inevitably with both. (Hobsbawm: p. 34.)
Seeing was believing for the intellectuals of the French Revolution, and they saw improvement in the life of ordinary men and women even more than 200 years ago in the concurrent revolution of science and technology, primitive as it was then. Hobsbawm continues with nothing less than a paean to capitalism, whether he's aware of it or not. He argues that revolution in France, for the rights of man universal and the industrial revolution in the making spread wealth and freedom to those who before those revolutions were subject to primitive feudalism, alienated from the products of their labour by the class interests of the latifundist aristocracy, the church, and whoever had the means and might to take wealth from those who produced it, i.e. the peasantry. Limited distribution of the wealth? Yes, without a doubt. The capital accumulation in the hands of the few was unprecedented even in ancient times, causing starvation among the working classes in newly industrialized cities, themselves new as a human concept. The important feature here though is the concept of revolution that broke down the feudal regimes and made way for the idea of Progress itself, a concept that seems to have been either forgotten or deliberately ignored by the Left in recent years in favor of philobarbarism and Left reaction in favor of infantalization of the lumpen-proletariate for lack of a working class to dominate. There is progress, and even the 18th century had ample evidence of it in France and England. It is evidence of the bifurcation of the world of today, a split between those of the inheritance of the Revolutions and the world of primitivism and Modernity.
Islam is a totalitarian reactionary ideology of the feudal past that Western Europe and America evolved beyond. The Islamic world is stuck in a primitve and violent past human effort to control the world through evil superstiton by means of a fascist poligion. Islam is the modern equivelent of the feudal French Estates of privilege. We argue that Islam, like the Estates, must go to the chopping block.
In the story below we see that in one small county in the west of the United States there are more rich people than before, and one can be certain that they are rich because there is little impediment to their creative abilities to create wealth. In the story below we can see the rise of ordinary people in America who in the lands of Islam would be slaves to feudalism, savages living in poverty and ignorance and disease because the world of Islam refuses the concept of progress. Wealth is not everything, and Islam does have its appeal to those who love totalitarian certainties. For the rest of us, the nature of progress is well shown in the numbers below. Personal wealth is indicative of progress in personal lives, achieved in a progressive system of designed and protected intellectual pursuit, something not allowed in Islam, something at risk in the dhimmi West.
Hobsbawm has a number of important and interseting observations we can use to analyse Islam and the forces of reaction in our time. For the next number of posts we'll look at his work and see what we can do to destroy the dhimmi attitude that prevails today in the West by considering his insights into our recent past that resemble the state of Islam today. We hope to show through the works of a communist that the world of progress is facing a fascist Islam, and that even a communist can see it must die.
Below we can see the legacy of peasants who live in a free country, the fruit of progress at its most trivial but most obvious. This story below comes from a San Diego newspaper:
http://www.nctimes.com/
San Diego County now has 34,950 millionaires
By: North County Times staff and wire reports
San Diego County's cadre of millionaires is growing at a rate that outstrips the growth of millionairedom around the world and across the nation, a pair of reports on the increase of so-called high-net-worth individuals showed Tuesday.
The 2005 World Wealth Report by financial management company Merrill Lynch and business consultant Capgemini found that the number of high-net-worth individuals ---- persons whose net worth, excluding the value of their primary residence, is at least $1 million ---- grew by 600,000 last year around the globe. The number of those calling the San Diego region home grew 10.72 percent to 34,950, a separate report by local market research firm Claritas found. It could not be determined whether Claritas and the other firms used the same database.
The wealth report found that there were 8.3 million people worldwide with $1 million or more in financial assets at the end of 2004, up from 7.7 million a year earlier.
Their total wealth rose 8.2 percent to $30.8 trillion in 2004, giving them control of nearly a quarter of the world's financial assets, according to Petrina Dolby, vice president of Capgemini's wealth management practice.
The 8.2 percent increase was the strongest since an identical 8.2 percent rise in 1999, she said.
Not surprisingly, the expansion of the millionaire class was especially strong in North America because of the solid economic growth last year in both the United States and Canada. The group swelled by 9.7 percent nationwide, a full 1 percent behind San Diego County's crop of new millionaires.
"Significantly, North America surpassed Europe both in total high net worth individuals population and wealth for the first time since 2001," when North American investors were hard-hit by the bursting of the technology stock bubble and the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The Asia-Pacific region also showed strong growth.
According to the latest figures, the number of high-net-worth individuals included 2.7 million in North America with a total of $9.3 trillion in assets; 2.6 million in Europe with $8.9 trillion; 2.3 million in the Asia-Pacific region with $7.2 trillion; 300,000 in Latin America, including Mexico, with $3.7 trillion; 300,000 in the Middle East with $1 trillion; and 100,000 in Africa with $700 billion.
The study also looked at what it termed "ultra-high-net-worth individuals," who have at least $30 million in financial assets.
Their ranks increased by 6,300 individuals, or 8.9 percent, in 2004 to 77,500 worldwide, the study said.
San Diego County now has 34,950 millionaires.
***
For more info please follow the link above.
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Tattarrus: Dressed to Kill
It's the nature of Humanitiy to engage in--or indulge in--war. The unfortunate side of war today, worse seemingly now than ever before, is the limitlessness of (defined as at risk) combatants and other 'enemies.' War isn't any longer a physical and emotional contest between competing groups of men, nor even a sweeping plague of murder and enslavement: today war is total-- it is genocide. The traditional three days of robbery, rape, and murder has given way to extermination of populations now that primitives have modern weapons and technology. They just don't stop. And we revolutionaries of Modernity, we are faced with a faceless and primitive hoarde rivalling the Huns. We do not exterminate the populations we conquer. We don't even conquer nations anymore. Ours is a sentimentalist's approach to war, to win hearts and minds through foreign aid packages and containment and pacification of hostile elements. Ours is the road to oblivion--ours,not theirs.
The writer below is an Iranian, a clever and insightful man who sheds more light on Western foreign policy than does any politican in Washington today. Of course, our politicians ignore him. But someone in a position of influence had better start listening and reading the works of intelligent and insightful people before it comes time that our furious backlash is so horrible that we are forced by fact of our own survival to strike at Islam itself with modern technological fury that will wipe out a billion people who truly have no crime to pay for other than that of their cultural insanity, a fine-point we won't bother considering in the heat of murdering them, of fulfilling the death-wish of modern Islamic culture.
Below is an example of how insane Islam is. We commit a serious crime ourselves when we engage in rational debate with irrational people. We do not gain by rationally discussing crazy issues with insane people. Their lives are at risk, and when we indulge in debate with them on their terms we lose sight of the basic insanity of their positions, of the ground of their illogic, and the irrationality of their axioms. There is no discussion to be had. There is only force, one side or the other prevailing. And dhimmi sentimentality is the crime we commit by pandering to the insanity of the suicidal. It is our moral duty to grab them from the ledge and retrieve them and sedate them and re-train their children, to turn them by force and slavery into modern revolutionaries like ourselves, men and women free to think rationally if we so choose. Anything lesser course is murder.
The average Moslem adult has a right to commit suicide, and who really cares? The problem is in Moslems raising their children to commit suicide. Parents do not have such a right. Cultures and nations do not have such a right. And we do not have a right to ignore it. We have a duty to stop the breeding of suicide-culture.
We, as enlightened Modern revolutionaries, inheritors of the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution-- we Modernist Revolutionaries-- have a duty to stop the mass suicide of Islamic peoples. Our dhimmi governments will not intervene effectively. We must rid ourselves of our leaders and find new leaders who grasp the importance of the lives of individuals world-wide, Moslems or others, leaders who will act in defence of Humanity at large, and who will unleash the next phaze of our Revolution to free the rest of the world from the evils of pre-modern life. We must have progressive leadership in the West if we are to survive ourselves and free at the same time the remaining people of the stalled Western revolutions of Modernity. It is our position that the best way of doing so is to encourage free men and women to colonize the world in the name of American Triumphalism, men and women armed and powerful who will colonize, live in, and become natives of other lands as we do in America. We must follow the path set by William Walker, being free men and women set on conquest and the expansion of our Revolutions and the spread of the beneifts of Modernity for universal Man.
To succeed in permant conquest of other lands we must organize ourselves into parties of professional revolutionaries in the same way V.I Lenin formed his party; and with the same ruthlessness that Stalin transformed in his land, we must show the world that Modernity is here to stay and that it is triumphant. We must send our emmisaries to other lands with ultimatums demanding their surrender and their submission to slavery, regardless of the face of our demand's absurdity. And at the first sign of rejection, the first hint of the refusal to submit to our Melian Dialogue, then we must conquer those lands of the primitive and subdue them forever.
Those who resist the spread of Modernity are those who are the children of Sawney Beane. If we refuse to invade Sawney Beane's Islamic cave now we will be forced later to exterminate the whole brood of them. As Jabotinsky points out too obviously for us to ignore, it is the only moral position moral people can take.
In the sad case of Iran, the Iranian people are slaves of the fascist Islamic Force that they will only rid themselves of by Violence and the Sorelian Myth of the General Strike. We cannot reason with the fascists of Islam. They must first be crushed by Violence. They must be enslaved. It is our only moral option.
Below we see the mind of Islam at work. It is insane. It is suicidal. We must stop them from killing the Moslem world at large.
***
http://www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/article_7493.shtml
TO KILL OR NOT TO KILL
Jun 11, 2005
Amir Taheri
An obscure Arabic word is making a comeback from centuries of oblivion to dominate the debate about whom Muslims are allowed to kill in the service of political goals.
The debate has been triggered by the killing of large numbers of Muslims, including women and children, by Islamist insurgents in Iraq. Are such acts permissible? Judging by fatwas (religious opinions) and articles by Muslim theologians and commentators, the Islamic ummah (community) is divided on the issue.
Those who believe that killing innocent people, including Muslims, is justified in certain cases, base their opinion on the principle of tattarrus. The word, which originally meant "dressing up," was first used as a religious term in the book "Al-Mustasfa" ("The Place of Purification") by Abu-Hamed al-Ghazali (d.1127), to mean "using ordinary Muslims as human shields for Islamic combatants against infidel fighters."
In the 13th century, the theologian Ibn Tayimiah wove a whole doctrine around the term to justify the killing of Muslims while combating Mongol invaders. By century's end, however, the concept had fallen into disuse and a new consensus developed against the killing of noncombatants.
But in 1995 Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian mentor of Osama bin Laden, used the concept in his book "The Rule for Suicide-Martyr Operations." Arguing that the ends justify the means, al-Zawahiri insisted that the killing of Muslims, including women and children, was not a sinful act provided the combatants were fighting "the enemies of Islam."
More recently, that view has been endorsed by Yussuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian sheik working in Qatar. Initially, al-Qaradawi had ruled that only three categories of unarmed individuals could be killed: apostates, who have turned their back to Islam; homosexuals, who "dirty" the pure society ? and Israelis, including unborn children, who could grow up to join the Jewish army.
Now, however, al-Qaradawi has expanded his doctrine to allow for the killing of innocent Muslims in Iraq. His argument is stark: What matters is the broader interest of the Islamic ummah which could, under certain circumstances, necessitate operations in which Muslim civilians lose their lives.
That position is supported by several Saudi theologians, including Hammoud al-Uqalla, Ali al-Khudhair, Nasser al-Fahd, Ahmad al-Khalidi and Safar al-Hawali. Their argument is that the broader interest of the ummah requires the expulsion of the U.S.-led forces from Iraq and that
the killing of innocent Iraqis in whatever numbers is of no concern to the combatants, whose place in paradise is assured.
Other Saudi theologians, including Abu-Muhammad al-Maqdasi and Abu-Basir al-Tartussi, go further and apply tattarrus to situations where no "infidel" troops are present. Thus they justify the killing of innocent Muslim Saudis in Saudi Arabia because, they claim, such actions could lead to the establishment of a "truly Islamic regime."
The starkest defense of tattarrus in its new sense has come from Abu-Musaab al-Zarqawi, the al Qaeda mastermind in Iraq. "Islam establishes a hierarchy of values in all domains," he wrote in a recent missive posted on Islamist Web sites. "In [that hierarchy], protecting the faith is more important than protecting the self. Killing the mutumarresoun [i.e, civilian Muslims who live under the control of the infidel] is necessary to prevent the faith of the infidel from striking root [in the land of Islam]."
The only point of dispute among supporters of tattarrus is related to procedural matters. Can Islamic combatants decide whom to kill and when or should they obtain a fatwa in every single case?
Showabel al-Zahrani, a Saudi militant and author of "Views of Theologians Concerning the Rules of Raids and Tattarrus" claims that what is needed is a "flexible understanding" of the concept. "To demand that a combatant get all his operations approved by a theologian in advance is a demand for inaction," he writes. "The better rule is to allow the combatant to do as he sees fit and have his actions approved afterwards."
Zarqawi, too, says there is no need for fatwas in each case: A fatwa issued by bin Laden in 1999 authorizing the killing of "enemies of Islam" is sufficient. It is up to the muqatelin (combatants) to decide who is an enemy of Islam.
Abu-Unus al-Shami, an insurgent leader killed in Baghdad last September, held a similar position. His claim was that the insurgents in Iraq had "permanent authority" to kill whomever they thought was necessary in order to "re-conquer Iraq for Islam."
Abu-Hufus al-Masri, the mastermind of the 2004 Madrid massacre, also claimed that the combatants had had the authority to decide when and where and against whom to strike: "We are at war against the infidel and its apostate allies," he wrote. "And in a war he who fights has the
authority to decide what action is best, leaving the final judgment to The Most High."
Sheik Muhammad Hussein Fadhlallah, the spiritual leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah, however, says that combatants do not have such authority and should refer each case to an authorized "mujtahid" (guide) such as himself. Fadhlallah is uncomfortable by the fact that the majority of
those killed by the insurgents in Iraq are Shiites like himself.
While the majority view among Islamist activists seems to justify tattarrus, many other voices are raised against it.
Grand Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Sistani, the primus inter pares of Shiite theologians, condemns tattarrus in its current sense as an "innovation" (bid'aah) and has called on Iraqi Shiites not to embark on revenge killings against Sunni insurgents.
Sheikh Mohammad Sayyed Tantawi, dean of Cairo's al-Azhar University, insists that Islamic law "rejects all attempts on human life and all attacks on civilians."
"Nothing in Islam justifies the deliberate killing of non-combatants," Tantawi says. "Tattarrus applies to collateral damage in a war between two regular armies, and not to action perpetrated by self-styled combatants."
Najih al-Ibrahim, another Egyptian theologian, also castigates what he terms "the abuse of tattarrus."
"No one can use tattarrus to justify the shedding of innocent blood," he says. "The only time that tattarrus is allowed is when Muslim combatants have to kill a fellow Muslim who is captured by the infidel and may, under torture, reveal secrets that could help the infidel against the true believers. Apart from that, shedding Muslim blood is the gravest of sins in Islam."
Yet another Egyptian theologian, Hisham Abdul-Zahir, says the insurgents' killing of Iraqi civilians is "totally unjustifiable under any circumstances."
"Tattarrus is relevant only in the case of Muslim women and children who are captured in a war by the infidel," he says. "In such a situation, it would be permissible to kill them to prevent them from being converted into other faiths by the infidel or abused by infidel soldiers."
Jassim al-Shamri, a Saudi theologian, rejects the authority of the "self-styled ulema" to reinterpret Islamic concepts for political goals.
"These gentlemen sit in air-conditioned rooms and drink iced mango juice and issue fatwas for indiscriminate killing," al-Shamri says. "We never see any of them or their children sent on suicide missions."
Sheikh Abdul-Muhsin al-Ubaikan, a Saudi theologian, has proposed "a theological summit" to discuss tattarrus and related issues.
"Is it enough for an individual to say he is fighting for Islam in order to claim a license to kill anyone, anywhere and anytime?" al-Ubaikan asks.
Amir Taheri, an Iranian author and journalist based in Europe, is a member of Benador Associates.
© Iranian.ws
***
Chairman Mao pointed out that all political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Nothing has changed, and we are fools to ignore his insight. We must kill the criminal fascists of Islam, take over their populations, enslave them, and spread the revolution of Modernity to the entire world. It is our moral duty.
The writer below is an Iranian, a clever and insightful man who sheds more light on Western foreign policy than does any politican in Washington today. Of course, our politicians ignore him. But someone in a position of influence had better start listening and reading the works of intelligent and insightful people before it comes time that our furious backlash is so horrible that we are forced by fact of our own survival to strike at Islam itself with modern technological fury that will wipe out a billion people who truly have no crime to pay for other than that of their cultural insanity, a fine-point we won't bother considering in the heat of murdering them, of fulfilling the death-wish of modern Islamic culture.
Below is an example of how insane Islam is. We commit a serious crime ourselves when we engage in rational debate with irrational people. We do not gain by rationally discussing crazy issues with insane people. Their lives are at risk, and when we indulge in debate with them on their terms we lose sight of the basic insanity of their positions, of the ground of their illogic, and the irrationality of their axioms. There is no discussion to be had. There is only force, one side or the other prevailing. And dhimmi sentimentality is the crime we commit by pandering to the insanity of the suicidal. It is our moral duty to grab them from the ledge and retrieve them and sedate them and re-train their children, to turn them by force and slavery into modern revolutionaries like ourselves, men and women free to think rationally if we so choose. Anything lesser course is murder.
The average Moslem adult has a right to commit suicide, and who really cares? The problem is in Moslems raising their children to commit suicide. Parents do not have such a right. Cultures and nations do not have such a right. And we do not have a right to ignore it. We have a duty to stop the breeding of suicide-culture.
We, as enlightened Modern revolutionaries, inheritors of the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution-- we Modernist Revolutionaries-- have a duty to stop the mass suicide of Islamic peoples. Our dhimmi governments will not intervene effectively. We must rid ourselves of our leaders and find new leaders who grasp the importance of the lives of individuals world-wide, Moslems or others, leaders who will act in defence of Humanity at large, and who will unleash the next phaze of our Revolution to free the rest of the world from the evils of pre-modern life. We must have progressive leadership in the West if we are to survive ourselves and free at the same time the remaining people of the stalled Western revolutions of Modernity. It is our position that the best way of doing so is to encourage free men and women to colonize the world in the name of American Triumphalism, men and women armed and powerful who will colonize, live in, and become natives of other lands as we do in America. We must follow the path set by William Walker, being free men and women set on conquest and the expansion of our Revolutions and the spread of the beneifts of Modernity for universal Man.
To succeed in permant conquest of other lands we must organize ourselves into parties of professional revolutionaries in the same way V.I Lenin formed his party; and with the same ruthlessness that Stalin transformed in his land, we must show the world that Modernity is here to stay and that it is triumphant. We must send our emmisaries to other lands with ultimatums demanding their surrender and their submission to slavery, regardless of the face of our demand's absurdity. And at the first sign of rejection, the first hint of the refusal to submit to our Melian Dialogue, then we must conquer those lands of the primitive and subdue them forever.
Those who resist the spread of Modernity are those who are the children of Sawney Beane. If we refuse to invade Sawney Beane's Islamic cave now we will be forced later to exterminate the whole brood of them. As Jabotinsky points out too obviously for us to ignore, it is the only moral position moral people can take.
In the sad case of Iran, the Iranian people are slaves of the fascist Islamic Force that they will only rid themselves of by Violence and the Sorelian Myth of the General Strike. We cannot reason with the fascists of Islam. They must first be crushed by Violence. They must be enslaved. It is our only moral option.
Below we see the mind of Islam at work. It is insane. It is suicidal. We must stop them from killing the Moslem world at large.
***
http://www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/article_7493.shtml
TO KILL OR NOT TO KILL
Jun 11, 2005
Amir Taheri
An obscure Arabic word is making a comeback from centuries of oblivion to dominate the debate about whom Muslims are allowed to kill in the service of political goals.
The debate has been triggered by the killing of large numbers of Muslims, including women and children, by Islamist insurgents in Iraq. Are such acts permissible? Judging by fatwas (religious opinions) and articles by Muslim theologians and commentators, the Islamic ummah (community) is divided on the issue.
Those who believe that killing innocent people, including Muslims, is justified in certain cases, base their opinion on the principle of tattarrus. The word, which originally meant "dressing up," was first used as a religious term in the book "Al-Mustasfa" ("The Place of Purification") by Abu-Hamed al-Ghazali (d.1127), to mean "using ordinary Muslims as human shields for Islamic combatants against infidel fighters."
In the 13th century, the theologian Ibn Tayimiah wove a whole doctrine around the term to justify the killing of Muslims while combating Mongol invaders. By century's end, however, the concept had fallen into disuse and a new consensus developed against the killing of noncombatants.
But in 1995 Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian mentor of Osama bin Laden, used the concept in his book "The Rule for Suicide-Martyr Operations." Arguing that the ends justify the means, al-Zawahiri insisted that the killing of Muslims, including women and children, was not a sinful act provided the combatants were fighting "the enemies of Islam."
More recently, that view has been endorsed by Yussuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian sheik working in Qatar. Initially, al-Qaradawi had ruled that only three categories of unarmed individuals could be killed: apostates, who have turned their back to Islam; homosexuals, who "dirty" the pure society ? and Israelis, including unborn children, who could grow up to join the Jewish army.
Now, however, al-Qaradawi has expanded his doctrine to allow for the killing of innocent Muslims in Iraq. His argument is stark: What matters is the broader interest of the Islamic ummah which could, under certain circumstances, necessitate operations in which Muslim civilians lose their lives.
That position is supported by several Saudi theologians, including Hammoud al-Uqalla, Ali al-Khudhair, Nasser al-Fahd, Ahmad al-Khalidi and Safar al-Hawali. Their argument is that the broader interest of the ummah requires the expulsion of the U.S.-led forces from Iraq and that
the killing of innocent Iraqis in whatever numbers is of no concern to the combatants, whose place in paradise is assured.
Other Saudi theologians, including Abu-Muhammad al-Maqdasi and Abu-Basir al-Tartussi, go further and apply tattarrus to situations where no "infidel" troops are present. Thus they justify the killing of innocent Muslim Saudis in Saudi Arabia because, they claim, such actions could lead to the establishment of a "truly Islamic regime."
The starkest defense of tattarrus in its new sense has come from Abu-Musaab al-Zarqawi, the al Qaeda mastermind in Iraq. "Islam establishes a hierarchy of values in all domains," he wrote in a recent missive posted on Islamist Web sites. "In [that hierarchy], protecting the faith is more important than protecting the self. Killing the mutumarresoun [i.e, civilian Muslims who live under the control of the infidel] is necessary to prevent the faith of the infidel from striking root [in the land of Islam]."
The only point of dispute among supporters of tattarrus is related to procedural matters. Can Islamic combatants decide whom to kill and when or should they obtain a fatwa in every single case?
Showabel al-Zahrani, a Saudi militant and author of "Views of Theologians Concerning the Rules of Raids and Tattarrus" claims that what is needed is a "flexible understanding" of the concept. "To demand that a combatant get all his operations approved by a theologian in advance is a demand for inaction," he writes. "The better rule is to allow the combatant to do as he sees fit and have his actions approved afterwards."
Zarqawi, too, says there is no need for fatwas in each case: A fatwa issued by bin Laden in 1999 authorizing the killing of "enemies of Islam" is sufficient. It is up to the muqatelin (combatants) to decide who is an enemy of Islam.
Abu-Unus al-Shami, an insurgent leader killed in Baghdad last September, held a similar position. His claim was that the insurgents in Iraq had "permanent authority" to kill whomever they thought was necessary in order to "re-conquer Iraq for Islam."
Abu-Hufus al-Masri, the mastermind of the 2004 Madrid massacre, also claimed that the combatants had had the authority to decide when and where and against whom to strike: "We are at war against the infidel and its apostate allies," he wrote. "And in a war he who fights has the
authority to decide what action is best, leaving the final judgment to The Most High."
Sheik Muhammad Hussein Fadhlallah, the spiritual leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah, however, says that combatants do not have such authority and should refer each case to an authorized "mujtahid" (guide) such as himself. Fadhlallah is uncomfortable by the fact that the majority of
those killed by the insurgents in Iraq are Shiites like himself.
While the majority view among Islamist activists seems to justify tattarrus, many other voices are raised against it.
Grand Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Sistani, the primus inter pares of Shiite theologians, condemns tattarrus in its current sense as an "innovation" (bid'aah) and has called on Iraqi Shiites not to embark on revenge killings against Sunni insurgents.
Sheikh Mohammad Sayyed Tantawi, dean of Cairo's al-Azhar University, insists that Islamic law "rejects all attempts on human life and all attacks on civilians."
"Nothing in Islam justifies the deliberate killing of non-combatants," Tantawi says. "Tattarrus applies to collateral damage in a war between two regular armies, and not to action perpetrated by self-styled combatants."
Najih al-Ibrahim, another Egyptian theologian, also castigates what he terms "the abuse of tattarrus."
"No one can use tattarrus to justify the shedding of innocent blood," he says. "The only time that tattarrus is allowed is when Muslim combatants have to kill a fellow Muslim who is captured by the infidel and may, under torture, reveal secrets that could help the infidel against the true believers. Apart from that, shedding Muslim blood is the gravest of sins in Islam."
Yet another Egyptian theologian, Hisham Abdul-Zahir, says the insurgents' killing of Iraqi civilians is "totally unjustifiable under any circumstances."
"Tattarrus is relevant only in the case of Muslim women and children who are captured in a war by the infidel," he says. "In such a situation, it would be permissible to kill them to prevent them from being converted into other faiths by the infidel or abused by infidel soldiers."
Jassim al-Shamri, a Saudi theologian, rejects the authority of the "self-styled ulema" to reinterpret Islamic concepts for political goals.
"These gentlemen sit in air-conditioned rooms and drink iced mango juice and issue fatwas for indiscriminate killing," al-Shamri says. "We never see any of them or their children sent on suicide missions."
Sheikh Abdul-Muhsin al-Ubaikan, a Saudi theologian, has proposed "a theological summit" to discuss tattarrus and related issues.
"Is it enough for an individual to say he is fighting for Islam in order to claim a license to kill anyone, anywhere and anytime?" al-Ubaikan asks.
Amir Taheri, an Iranian author and journalist based in Europe, is a member of Benador Associates.
© Iranian.ws
***
Chairman Mao pointed out that all political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Nothing has changed, and we are fools to ignore his insight. We must kill the criminal fascists of Islam, take over their populations, enslave them, and spread the revolution of Modernity to the entire world. It is our moral duty.
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