No Dhimmitude

Dag,
You said:

"Tourists tend to romanticise the locals in the hope of heightening the experience of their vacations, of bringing back to the drudgeries of mundanity some stellar memories of exotica, days of living that shine brightly in the life of the harried and bored."

Very well put. This is what I saw in France; that Paris is simply another big city where people live, mostly, lives of drudgery.

It is hardly "the City of Lights."

There is little hope in Paris. There are few smiles. There is mostly bitternes, nostalgia, and "sophistication", which generally means having a disdain for enthusiasm and earnestness.

Point is, people everywhere work and struggle through their lives. The only difference is the philosophy by which they live. Ask them what that is. They will tell you.

In France, they are about tradition, sophistication, and respecting culture.

In America, we are about living free, and having a good time (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness).

The worst thing you can do is romanticize the locals.

It makes you stupid.

By the way, I know that is a digression from the subject of you post, but one of the cities that people most romanticize is Paris, so I thought I would post my thoughts on that place.

Sorry for the digression.

P.S. I fucking hated Paris.

;-)

Pastoriusw, I'll kill ten innocent by-standers for that insult!

Dag,
I'm glad you reminded me that tourists romanticize locals in tourist spots all over the world, not just in Vancouver's Gastown.
A native guy named Eddie Eagle (he made up the name Eagle for himself) hired me to paint a picture of an eagle he had drawn. I painted it, like you'd do a paint-by-number, but he didn't pay me. He got extremely aggressive when I reminded him of that fact and I was afraid of getting my skull cracked so I shut up.
A tourist browsing in a native art shop bought that artwork signed by this noble savage.
Mo

Speaking as someone who rarely goes on vacation, can anybody explain to me why I constantly see tourists have photos taken of themselves facing **away** from the beautiful sights they have supposedly traveled to see??
Seems to me, that for these photos to have true long-lasting significance, someone would want a photo of themselves looking at the sight in the background, in order to capture their reaction to it.

Instead, everybody has pictures taken of themselves with their backs to beauty.

Maybe I'm too romantic? or not romantic enough? I don't know, but it's always been a mystery to me.

I ask in all sincerity: why go somewhere special and have yourself immortalized not looking at it?

“Tourists tend to romanticise the locals...”

I found it hard to romanticise the locals of Dahab. There were a few truly ironic figures though. My friendly drug dealer, a local Bedu, was the strangest. We’d get high and shoot the shit. He liked western things and western clothes. He also told me he liked bin Laden “too much”, a sexually suggestive admission that I wrote off to poor English skills. I picked up his message though: he was an al-Qaeda fan. Now his small tourist town has been bombed. His drug revenues will undoubtedly decline. I wonder if he’ll still be a bin-Laden fan? Oddly, I think the answer will be yes.

na

I've been composing a reply since you wrote, anon. Very funny and insightful.

Anon. NA asked for a working definition of Left dhimmi fascism. This is a hurried response to that in the context of the bombings at Dahab last day.

I'm not the right person to be commenting on tourists, I think, but here I am.

Tourism raises the cackles of the average would-be snob even faster than does admission of dining at McDonald's, of raising small dogs, and of gardening nasturtiums. All of these activities are "inauthentic."

In the 18th century the "Grand Tour" caught on as a central component of the education of the classically minded bourgeoisie. Ruling elite Europeans saw themselves as inheritors of the Empires of antiquity, and because so many, especially the British, had and empire, they set out to imitate their predecessors in learning those dead languages, Greek and Latin, and in rediscovering the very ruins of antiquity to gaze upon them and become superior to them. They stood on the shoulders of the past-- not quite giants. Among many, pan-Hellenism became a fetish. And so on.

That, today, is tourism for the masses, though it more likely means in practice a bank holiday at Brighton or a sub-let in Spain or the Isle of Man. Yes, some even go so far as Egypt. It's the proletarian version of the grand tour, and it is very much a middle class pass-time. There are two kinds of snobbery involved in disliking it: the rich jet-set snobs who never see the people as they are. Those who see the tourist hordes as the Masses, whom they avoid quite successfully. The worst snobs are those who are poor, backpackers who despise the tourist as superficial trinket-snatchers.

The working class tourist is family oriented and time-bound. They have, unless they're French unionists, a few weeks to see something of the world outside their familiar routines, and often that difference is the return to last year's vacation place. They go, for example, to Club Med tourist bubble resorts in Jamaica where they see locals employed as waiters and maids, all very safe, and rightly so.

The locals, on the other hand, see an endless stream of tourists coming with an unending source of money, people who do nothing but lay around in the sun, drink, and have sex. The locals do not see the 50 weeks of effort that goes into the two in the sun. The local view of the tourist is that he or she is always lazy and drunk and promiscuous even at home, the land of endless easy money and sex. Those who criticise the tourist are those Westerners who actually meet them, the backpackers and the outcast hustlers. The backpackers have a class snobbery that attaches itself to the locals in an attempt to distinguish the backpacker from his more affluent compatriot. The backpacker finds his identity in not being a tourist but in being a traveller, somewhat like a very poor aristocrat of the 18th century, the grand tour on the dirt cheap. And like the aristocrat of the 18th century, the backpacking hippie reduces the peasant to a picaresque. It is here that we see the first elements of philobarbarism emerging clearly.

In reaction to the un-heroic and unadventurous tourist, the hippie is "in solidarity" with The! People! of whatever place takes his or her fancy, most dangerously in the Muslim world, and specifically in so-called Palestine. This becomes a mindless sentimentalisation of the barbarian. In the Raj era it was known as "going native." Today it is known as "being at one with the people." One who is not elite in terms of accomplishment is elite in moral terms, in terms of gnostic insight. Those who haven't got much money over-compensate by having an over-abundance of cultural sensitivity. They don't just buy trinkets from The! People!, the identity with The! People!. They actually live with The! People!. Vicariously they become one of The! People! through solidarity. Having little or nothing, the hippie becomes a moral aristocrat on a grand tour.

There are numerous posts here on the topic of infantalisation, which I'll leave for now. I'll touch briefly on McDonald's.

Food at McD. is not natural. It's packaged, therefore industrialised and commodified. This is a sin in the eyes of the snob because it violates solidarity with the peasants who lives with and as part of The! Land!. To live isolated from and against The! Land! is to be an inauthentic being, cut off from ones natural state of right being.

I've written and commented at great length and in detail on this topic under heading of ecology fascism, neofeudalism, and modern agriculture. One may also refer to Herder, Fichte, Heidegger, Darre and numerous other posts for details.

I haven't touched at all on dogs, a middle class version of landed aristocratic value, that of breeding farm animals. The average middle class person in the suburbs of America or the inner cities of Europe can't really breed horses in the flat. One might find space enough to have a dog or a cat instead. And a lawn is surplus agricultural holding. These things are condemned as inauthentic in the life of the middle class person. It's not aristocratic, manorial, or monastic, and it has nothing to do with man's long-tenured existence as a peasant. It's seen as the life of a philistine, a person without taste or education.

The whole of it reduces to counter-Enlightenment fascism, into Romance fascism, into philobarbarism, into cheer-leader dhimmitude.

This blog has been over the course of the past eleven months an examination of the relationship we have with ourselves as divided between the Modernist progressives and the neo-feudalist reactionaries.

Last day a commentator asked rightly for a working definition of Left dhimmi fascism.

We can see Left dhimmi fascism briefly at Dahab.

The Hilton Hotel is walled off and surrounded by armed guards. Those inside are totally isolated from events outside. In the midst of the Sinai there are concrete reflecting pools in the sand so one may gaze down from ones window to see--oneself.

Dabab itself caters to divers, middle class people who have a few weeks off time to see a world unlike any other, an underwater world of amazing beauty and exotica.

As well, it's cheap like sand and pot smokers can lie on carpets under date-thatch huts and zone out for ages.

The locals make a lot of money, and in all everyone should be fairly happy with living.

The Bedouin are different. And the Muslims are something else again.

The Bedouin are the dumpster-divers of the desert. To live among them one must be nearly physically indestructible, which, sorry to report, my partner was not. The Bedouin are vile and filthy and repulsive people, and those who romanticise them commit a crime against Humanity-- the humanity of Bedouin. They live in conditions of such extreme deprivation that no animal rights activist would tolerate it in a dog kennel. And yet, same activists fight for the continuation of same conditions for Bedouin, a matter of sentimentalised philobarbarism at the expense of people. No, hippies do not live with them because Bedouin die like flies, and those hippies who go to stay with them die too. The intelligent or even crafty Bedu goes to Dahab and makes a commercial living off of tourists. The rest die like the feral things they are. Worse, they raise their babies in the same environment to perpetuate the cycle. Hippies and idiots support it from outside, from conference rooms at the Hilton.

What do we have then? An ever flowing wave of rich tourists who lay in the sun, spend money, have sex, smoke pot, do nothing, and are loaded with money. We have those who come to tell the local they are exploited by same tourists. Admiration and awe turns to confusion and bewilderment and then to rage and suicidal violence. We can thank Presbyterian missionaries and U.N. slackers for such.

Daemonising the West and romanticising the barbarians leads to murder. And there are many who are willing to capitalise on both sides of this tarnished coin: there are those who have power, status and a meaningful existence in the old order, values they do not wish to abandon. The sheiks have the luxury of money from the West and the entitlements of local privilege. The people suffer. The Left dhimmi fascists wallow in sentimentalised guilt and moral superiority, and the locals die in squalor.

The cynics unite with the idiots to perpetuate a cycle of hatred and violence and phantasies of the Golden Age.

People are dead in Dahab today. They died because of a bad joke. Humanism is not sentimentality writ larger each day. Humanism is not romance of grand-gesture death and suicide in the public community-eye. Humanism is not heroic, not exotic, not very interesting. Humanism is about Humans. Fascism is a phantasy about something that never is but that always must be later. It is a game in which boys play dress-up and rule in a dream. It's endless playing at "cowboys and indians" with real death. It's a perpetual childhood game of irresponsibility.

Muslims play this childish phantasy game for children, and the Left dhimmi fascists tell them it's a good game.

I'm passing through, like everyone else, and stopping on the way here and there to ask about Vanity Fair. I get off track. I go away and wonder. I'm not a tourist, not even a back-packing hippie. What do I do?

Count the dead.

The philobarbarism you complain about may run counter to enlightenment ideals, it may be influenced by anti-rationalist romanticism, but it isn’t fascism. When Mussolini marched on Abyssinia he didn’t do it to marvel at the primitive authenticity of Haile Selassie's court. He did it for the glory of the Italian Empire. Fascists were more likely to celebrate the slaughter of primitives than they were to identify themselves with their plight in the face of creeping modernity.

"Fascists were more likely to celebrate the slaughter of primitives than they were to identify themselves with their plight in the face of creeping modernity."

The commentator above claims that philobarbarism is not fascism. I'll go that far. I'll even state tautologically, to keep it available to the minds of some, that only fascism is fascism. Happy now?

"He did it for the glory of the Italian Empire."

No, the Italian fascists did not identify with the Ethiopians. Who did they identify with? The Romans. The Imperial Romans, not a barbarian lot by any stretch. But what does that mean? They identified their essence, found their athenticity in Romulus and Reemus. The Italian fascists didn't wallow in sentimentalisation of Ethiopeans, they found the barbarism in their own imaginary past. For the fascist, the future is the past, and an imaginary heroic past. For the sake of returning to a Golden Age of great warriors and barbarians.

To confuse Left dhimmi fascism with Italian fascism is to either not understand any of the arguments I've presented here or it is to decide to pretend one doesn't see them.

For the Left dhimmi fascist to romanticise the barbarian past is not to say that one romanticises ones own ethnic past. One can, and on the Left, does
romanticise the barbarian as essence even without and likely because of a lack of ethnic ties.

Mussolini indvaded Ethiopia because it was one of the few places he felt he could win a war against. He did so to inflate the myth of the Italian fascist warrior. He did so to create a nativist philobarbarism in Italy.

The Left dhimmi philobarbarist, if one looks at the term dhimmi, shows clearly that the Left is creating a phantasy barbarian from outside the left and the West to attack Modernity from within. European Leftists do not have an agenda of reviving, as yet, a native superman myth of Europeans, they have instead a myth of the Palestinians, for example.

Who are the pure and heroic barbarians? Not us but the others. We are the imperialists, the racists, the bad guys, and they are the pure, the heroic, the great. Hence, anon, dhimmi fascism.

If there are more questions or if I haven't made this plain enough or if I've missed something important, please ask for further clarification. If I can I'll address this again until we have some clarity.