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They are the non-Modernists, in most cases the primitives of the world, joined now by the post-modernists, the radical hippies and Left dhimmi fascists. "They" are the people of the world as it has been forever everywhere till the 18th century. They are the rich, the poor, the people, the masses. To this day They are nearly everyone. "They" hate us.
Whether They are the Palestinians, the Muslims, the Left, the Right, the lot of them, They are not Us. We are recent and we are the Modenist minority, under threat of death, under threat of extinction. We are the hated bourgeoisie, the evil Middle Class. They are Us. We're the bad guys!
We are people who live in a Modern World. They are people who live as Man has lived forever. We are revolutionaries, rebels, those who are not as others. Among ourselves we are the majority, and we, too close to ourselves, do not see ourselves as different from the majority of the greater world. If we fail to recognise our stunning difference we will not understand the nature of the hatred that drives the primitives to murder us at random from motives of frenzy and despair. Not just us do they murder, the primitives are also murdering themselves, their children, and their possiblities of the future. This cannot go on as it has so poorly. We must recognise our states of difference and learn how to deal with them as well as we may. We have to see ourselves as the threat to Humanity that we are. They hate us, and that's a fact. Who are we that they should hate us?
We are the burghers. We came up from the middle and scored unexpectedly. The shock of the win and the shock of the loss is maddening to those who now see us holding the trophies of our victories. They hate us, and they will always hate us. Such is life.
In the history of Man there is a slow development of economics. 5,000 years ago Man began the Agricultural Revolution, and it drove the hunter/gatherers into frenzies of hatred against it. Where settled men planted, nomads wrecked, raped, and killed. They do so today. Where settled men planted and gathered surplus, nomads raided and stole and burned. They do so today. Where settled men built, nomads destroyed what they built. Us and Them. We build and create and store up goods. They destroy and murder. We develop, they regress. The root cause is development. The root cause of the hatred they feel toward us is our growth.
For every advance in Human life there is a reaction by the static people who demand a halt and a turning back to the way it was before, and Man will not stop his advance. Man moves on, slowly and painfully, and the primitives, wandering around wrecking and killing, they find themselves at a loss worse than the time before each time there is an advance. Now the advances of Man have left the primitives so far behind they cannot even rightly attack us with much hope of harm to us. They survive by our sympathy and our pity. We can kill them all in an instant, and yet we have advanced beyond that too. But the time is approaching when we will reexamine that moralistic stance and perhaps decide the tensions between the Modern and the primitive are so great that there is now a need to cut us loose from each other for permanent. Like the Israelis, we have won war after war against the primitive invasions, and like the Israelis, we give back what we have won from the aggressors because we have pity. That might change. We might not be so nice in the coming times. We might kick loose the primitives at our feet and advance into the future without any of them.
We? We are not as one. We are two.
How do we see the nature of Man? What is the purpose of life of Man and the world he lives in? For the primitive it is an endless round of survival and death and rebirth. It is an acting out of the state of nature. It is unchanging and static. Change is catastophe. Life is an animal existence perpetually in a state of nature. And now we who are Modernists are cut off from that cycle of idiocy and nature. That's the root cause of the hatred the primitives feel toward us. We left them in the muck and mire of nature. We build. We are burghers.
****Burgher:
A title. In the European Middle Ages, a burgher was any freeman of a burgh or borough; or any inhabitant of a borough, a person who lives in town. (Even in modern German the word for citizen is Bürger, and in Dutch the word for citizen is burger) Also a member of the middle class such as in bourgeois, not, for example, of the upper (manor lord) or lower (serf farmer) class.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
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Modernity didn't really begin in England in 1750; didn't happen in America in 1776; didn't start in Europe in 1789. Modernity didn't start then but it became obvious in its reality then. Those years presented the primitive world with the obvious triumph of the bourgeoisie.
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Bourgeois:
In the early Middle Ages, as cities were forming, growing and emerging, artisans and tradesmen began to emerge as an economic force. They formed guilds, associations and companies to conduct business and promote their own interests. These people were the original bourgeoisie. In the late Middle Ages, they allied with the kings in uprooting the feudalist system, gradually becoming the ruling class in industrialised nation-states. In the 17th and 18th century, they generally supported the American revolution and French revolution in overthrowing the laws and privileges of the absolutist feudal order, clearing the way for the rapid expansion of commerce.
Concepts such as personal liberties, religious and civil rights, and free trade all derive from bourgeois philosophies. But the bourgeoisie was never without its critics; it was first accused of narrow-mindedness, materialism, hypocrisy, opposition to change, and lack of culture, among other things, by persons such as the playwright Molière. The earliest recorded pejorative uses of the term "bourgeois" are associated with aristocratic contempt for the lifestyle of the bourgeoisie. Successful embourgeoisement typically meant being able to retire and live on invested income. With the expansion of commerce, trade and the market economy, the bourgeoisie grew in size, influence and power. In all industrialized countries, the aristocracy either faded away slowly or found itself overthrown by a bourgeois revolution. Thus the bourgeoisie rose to the top of the social hierarchy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
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Marx writes that history is class struggle. Good for him. He's probably right. Where he goes wrong is in the emphases, the details, and in his conclusions. Briefly, Marx writes that after the triumph of the bourgeios in the revolution to gain power from the feudalsits, thn will come another revolution in which the masses of workers and peasants will revolt and rule the world like farm animals without farmers. Somehow Marx missed the entire point of existence and still comes across as an important thinker. Marx is a counter-revolutionary, a reactionary, a renegade. His eschatological vision is of the pre-lapsarian utopia. That's not progressive. That is fascistic.
Marx and his lot today, the Left dhimmi fascists of "post-modernity," are our bane. Our own are our enemies. They are the enemies of progress and Humanity. Their goal is the restoration of Eden.
Death to them!
History is a gradual mastery of Man over nature. We Modernists have begun to master it successfully in these past few hundred years, and because of it we are freer men than any before us in history. There are those who hate our freedom. We are rebels. We do not love Mother Nature.
Beat that bitch with a chainsaw.
Free individuals do not live in communes like farm animals. Free men are not at the mercy of nature. Free men are individuals who win their own by their own efforts and are in possession of the title to their own lives. All of this offends the primitive to the point that he would and does kill us for our rebellion against nature as he lives it and as he would have everyone live it hereafter as before.
We Modernists own our own lives as private property. We are not part of the game of the primitives. Our rebellion and our success because of it drives them insane and to suicide and murder. We are settled, and we are prosperous, and they hate us because we are outside them. We don't live in a state of primitive nature. We live in cities.
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City:
[O]pinions vary on whether any particular ancient settlement can be considered to be a city. The first true towns are sometimes considered to be large settlements where the inhabitants were no longer simply farmers of the surrounding area, but began to take on specialized occupations, and where trade, food storage and power was centralized. Societies that live in cities are often called civilizations.
By this definition, the first towns we know of were located in Mesopotamia, such as Ur, and along the Nile, the Indus Valley Civilization and China. Before this time it was rare for settlements to reach significant size, although there were exceptions such as Jericho, Çatalhöyük and Mehrgarh. Harappa and Mohenjo-daro (in the Indus Valley Civilization) were the largest of these early cities, with a combined population of up to about 100,000.
During the European Middle Ages, a town was as much a political entity as a collection of houses. City residence brought freedom from customary rural obligations to lord and community: "Stadtluft macht frei" ("City air makes you free") was a saying in Germany. In Continental Europe cities with a legislature of their own weren't unheard of, the laws for towns as a rule other than for the countryside, the lord of a town often being another than for surrounding land. In the Holy Roman Empire some cities had no other lord than the emperor.
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Most towns remained far smaller places, so that in 1500 only some two dozen places in the world contained more than 100,000 inhabitants: as late as 1700 there were fewer than forty, a figure which would rise thereafter to 300 in 1900. A small city of the early modern period might contain as few as 10,000 inhabitants, a town far fewer still.
The growth of modern industry from the late 18th century onward led to massive urbanization and the rise of new great cities, first in Europe and then in other regions, as new opportunities brought huge numbers of migrants from rural communities into urban areas.... Today the world's population is about half urban, with millions still streaming annually into the growing cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
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The division between the primitive in a state of nature and the Modernist in a state of civility has something to do with cities. We'll look at it again in another post soon. We'll see Them abandoning their old ways for new, and bringing with them their hatreds and despair and their murders. In the heart of the city we will begin to see the root cause of why they hate us.
10 comments:
Our progress wealth and civilized societies depend and /always /depended using OTHERS /manpwer land resources /
youcan call it colonial and anticolonial forces..It is called exploitation.
From time to time the two are at each other's throath.. nothing new nothing revolutionary about it. It goes on forever,.
let's face it we depend on their backwardness ...
We are not better then them at any human level
I am from Europe I don't try to "defend ' anything But I Know how it feels when a country is Occupied by foreign armies and foreign philosophy...
my solution is leave them alone we can't fix it . we could not Fix the Sovjetunion all we could do wait it out when time will work on them.
It's a matter of attitude and personality, I suspect. We witness this day Eurocide, and few feel that it's worth preventing. Some feel that we shouldn't, and some even welcome it as the end of a blight on Human history removed. There's not much to do with those who will or those who won't. There is only that we do or we don't. I do, and those who do do with me or along side in some fashion. Those who don't get done, and those who oppose will win or lose according to the way of things. It's not up to me to tell what will happen or whether it's good or bad; I do because I do, and I do because it's me to do rather than to have done. Personality, attitude, the nature of the man.
Dedam, you say exploitation like it's a bad word. It means to turn to advantage, which sounds rather sensible to me. The colonial argument that the west is to blame for everything and we made them hate us just doesn't work either. India firmly contradicts that because instead of hating their ex-occupiers they instead exploit business opportunities and drive peacefully for enhanced progress.
Islam is a differnt story of course and it's a different story because it started differently. The moors were the original occupiers, the original colonials. The religion is one of violence, regardless of progress. It just so happens that the religion prevents progress, but anybody that's seen poor people in the middle east showing off their mobile phone even though they don't have a connection (can't afford it) has witnessed that technological progress is not something they feel strongly against. The issue is that thanks to the principle of abrogation, what muhamed said later in life takes precedence over what he said earlier in his life and that the what he said got nastier the older he got and the more power he had amassed. This leaves what muslims believe to be the unequivocal word of god as being undeniably a very clear instruction to constant war until all are either believers or slaves.
The west has stronger economy because it is more secular. We have more human rights and greater respect for those rights because we are secular. This has allowed our societies to largey ignore the fire and brimstone blood and death rubbish of the old testament when it comes to living out lives and governing our societies. Islam cannot say the same. Because islamic nations are not secular then the fire and brimstone is still forced into social policy by raving literalists, regardless of the fact that it is thoroughly bad news for their economies and the individuals living in such societies. Come to spain, or several other western democracies and gays can get married. It doesn't matter if you agree with that or not, our laws recognise that you don't have to agree with it. We recognise individual choice. Go to Iran and the same couple would executed by having a wall dropped on them. Go to Afghanistan, where the vast majority of the population are actually very pleased to have ben liberated from the taliban, and yet still the entire government and the vast majority of the populatio thought it was right to execute one of their own for apostacy because he admitted having become a christian.
The colonial message and the progress message are just rubbish. The issue is very definitely the scripture and the inseperability of the scripture from government. Those with power, all highly corrupt murderers and oppressors, use the scripture to manipulate their populations away from real issues and that fits perfectly with the islamofascists objective of keeping the fire and brimstone alive and kicking. That has an enormous impact. The people of india their children to have more opportunity and more comfortable lives than they had themselves and so they work hard, they do business and they do what they can to get their children educated and think not of enemies. The fantatics of islam, and there are many millions of them, concentrate instead of teaching their children the beauty of martydom and the importance of hating the infidel.
Eventually it will likley be economic reform that ends this issue. If it isn't then the truth is that there is going to be one hell of a war eventually and one way or the other it is going to be genocide on an unprecedented scale. The west will win and the world will likely become peaceful for the first time since we crawled upon it. If islamists win then it'll just mean it all happens again in another couple fo hundred years time - after we've spent some time under the harsh brutality of their colonial occupation once again.
a very enlightening article indeed. with this post i can clearly picture there is a "us" and there is a "them", and "them" hates "us". and also when i read this article i can clearly see that "them" is identified as "islam"
ok, let it be. so where is the solution in this chapter? maybe it is hidden in the lines saying that "learn how to deal with them as well as we may."
as long as you fail to understand that the soultion is not fighting, and as long as you accept this struggle as a never-ending circle, then it will go on like this. people are going to kill each other. and when they do it, it is not only "them" to blame, but also "us" because it seems like "us" doesnt know any solution other than waring.
Actually, Super hero, it is not a question of killing or not killing, but of conducting oursleves in a way to minimize the inevitable quantum of violence in human affairs. And a lot more people get killed than need be when people get desperate to think that there is some way out of your so-called "never-ending circle" and that history can progress to some final utopia or apocalyptic end point. In contrast, patiently awaiting the return of the God who will only return the day after he returns is perhaps the better policy. In the meantime, as we patiently and endlesly await god's kingdom, reality demands that we respect the other as our other, recognize that he, like us, bonds his community in opposition to his other, and so it is best to seek out an engagement with that other in a way that recognizes the reality of this tension and that seeks to mediate it by appeal to our mutual interests in engaging each other in various ways, without trying to finish each other off. And a proper engagement entails a willingness to stand up for yourself and for the social systems that can promise the most freedom to the most people, i.e. the most forms of exchange that can mediate our tensions and thus defer final solutions vis a vis the other. Cowering in some dream of transcending the circle of violence is the road to genocide. Demanding respect from the other for what you are and for human freedom is a better path. But since many wessterners, full of postcolonial white guilt, have no respect for themselves, how can they expect their other to respect them? How many years does Europe have left unless it loves itself - as a continent of nations - again?
Dag,
Where settled men built, nomads destroyed what they built. Us and Them. We build and create and store up goods. They destroy and murder. We develop, they regress. The root cause is development. The root cause of the hatred they feel toward us is our growth.
This resonates with me. I think you're exactly right. The conflict is nearly timeless--barbarity trying to push civilization into the dust.
Now, does the West have what it takes, in the 21st Century, to preserve itself?
I've never heard the matter of why-they-hate-us put so clearly. Looking forward to the sequel for this posting.
Truepeers response might require some background to make it totally sensible to the reader, which is easy enough to do by making a search of his postings and by going to http://covenantzone.blogspot.com/
Till then, I happen to be increasingly enthralled by Peer's thesis.
The question of nation and nationality arises in odd ways for many of us, we being, many of us, immigrants; and we also being of various ethnic groups, what constitutes our nationality in a nation such as-- Poland? Is it being there or is it more? Is there a national identity that transcends ethnicity? Is race nation? Is it language or blood and soil? We can'ta llow for flippant answers or mindless cliches in answer to these questions. But we must address them fully and intelligently. Our multi-culti daydreams of utopia-to-come are a nightmare of jihadis and dhimmis and drug addicts. as an immigrant of sorts to Canada, what is this ation to me, and what am I to it?
Is there such a nation as Canada? If so, what is it today, and what is it in the future if there is to be one? We must find a reason to be a nation once again, now that we've lost it in the rush to world peace and universal brotherhood.
Boundaries mean that I have diefinitiion as a man, and that I am not you, therefore you are not me and are someone else with whjom I might share in some commonly beneficial way. Or not.
Peers goes into wonderful detail on these topics, and I hack it up by doing this. I urge you to explore his thesis at your leisure.
I've been off-line for the day nd will come back to life in the city in the morning to show to the best of my ability why they hate us and what that means in terms of how we might deal with a very difficult world of conflict in a realistic fashion.
truepeers,
I'm not actually sure what you are saying. Can you please give some idea of actions that would arise from this strategy so that I can see where you are headed?
Can I also ask, do you think it is unnacceptable for a society to make a choice and decide our values are superior to yours? If not, do you therefore think that we have no responsibility to the people we consider to be viciously oppressed by an alternative ideology? If you do think we can make a choice, at what point do you decide that it is time to take action? The costs of islam are not just in deaths caused by terrorist expressionof islamic scripture but also in entire generations being restricted from freedom and half the population being practically without rights at all. How many more generations is it acceptable to leave? More than 500 million women worldwide currently have virtually no rights thanks to this ideology. Is it acceptable just to forget about them? Is it acceptable to demand their rights even if they don't demand them themselves? How about what we demond for their children?
How do you prevent europe from falling under the viciousness of sharia law without opposing islam? You can't. So how do you oppose islam without opposing islam? It really is a case of kill or be killed, whether we look at a personal level or an ideological level. So to me your "patiently waiting" seems to be a case of patiently waiting to lose the advantage and get the ideology kicked out of you.
Please don't get me wrong - I'm not advocating genocide. I do favour action over inaction even if that action involves significant force, as it did to change the Japanese ideology. Additionally, immigration and breeding rates represent a very real problem looking forward if we consider delaying action. So please can you clarify your position and detail what you would consider to be a correct approach to containing the threat of a militant theology against western secularism and freedoms?
Thanks.
CD, don't get me wrong, I don't see the choice in stark terms of either inaction or genocide; and I certainly do believe one should think that certain values are better than others and that we should champion the best kind of society: that which maximizes human freedom without falling apart.
My point is that even though I feel western societies are superior to Islam (though some western people seem to be in the midst of a death wish now, so maybe from some perspective western countries are not...), the problem of course is that many Muslims consider Islam superior. In this situation, do I try to avoid the inevitable conflict, an avoidance that I believed "super hero" was advocating? No, because realistically it's not possible: avoidance of violence will bring either more violence, or simply surrender of the pacifists, in the long run (the lessons of appeasement). On the other hand, do I imagine we will totally defeat Islam? No. We might be surprised and in a generation or two everyone will see the light and give up on Islam, but I doubt it will happen.
In this situation, we must set up pragmatic oppositions between western and Islamic values that can be more productive than doing nothing or just hoping that peace and harmony will come to the world next year. While we will not bring our conflicts to an end, active and intelligent engagement with our others is a much better than distracting ourselves with utopian or apocalyptic imaginings. WHen I speak about "patiently awaiting" I am coyly alluding to the Jewish attitude towards the return of the Messiah, as an alternative to faith in God's imminent return and final accounting.
We need to set up oppositions that can force some kind or moral reciprocity on the Islamic world, however minimal at first: we must force them to deal with us as self-interested and self-loving people. In a post today, Dag links to my post at Covenant Zone linking to a post at the GABlog where Adam mentions, for example, the model of the Israelis forcing a very basic kind of reciprocity on the Palestinians by telling them, if you send rockets or child bombers into our country, targetting civilians, we will target your leaders for assasination. In other words, we will force some very basic rules of engagement and war on you, even if you would seek to avoid such in your hopes of being allowed to do whatever you want and still be seen by many in the "white guilt" west as victims who do not owe the Israelis even the basic moral reciprocity of fighting like men. (And perhaps we should also jail the Presbyterians and CUPE people who would oppose such moral Israeli conduct!)
I think our best hope is still to play on the divisions in the Islamic world, and try to create terms by which we may pragmatically find allies and enemies there, and find ways to engage both in ways that create marginally better outcomes than we will have if we do nothing or envision ourselves in a total or final war against all of Islam. So, for example, women's rights could be one demand we make on would-be allies and the denial of such could be a justification for choosing enemies or punishing countries that don't respect basic rights. In any case we need active engagement to better define the terms of our conflicts. But this means having a patient attitude towards the human condition, knowing that conflict is inevitable and will be always with us, but that engaging it can bring about marginally better outcomes that accumulate over time. If, after the possible disappointments that may be coming in Iraq, we simply give up on "conflict", we will actualy only be asking for more of it in the long run.
As for Muslims in the west, I think there needs to be a zero-tolerance of violent Jihadist attitudes in mosques and elsewhere. If, as we go forward, that proves impossible to realize, if over time as Muslim communities in the west grow and mature, the "radicals" always gain insititutional and social dominance at the expense of the "moderates", given the support the radicals find in the Koran and other scriptures, then I think western countries will have to seriously consider stopping Muslim immigration and/or restricting the religion. But i feel we are not there yet; the "moderates" have yet a little time yet to fight for their faith. Presently, I would advocate screening out the serious Jihadists among immigrants, but holding off as long as possible on declaring any war against all of Islam; first we need to do more to find our allies and enemies in the Islamic world in a hard-headed, indeed ruthless, way.
Thanks for the detailed response Truepeers. I agree with you - I think economic forces, education and consumerism will eventually force islamic states into a similar secularism as the west has largely adopted, but I think this process could be accelerated dramatically with some well targeted, ruthless, judgemental, self-interest serving actions from the west. I think we should wake up and openly admit that there exists a very real incompatability and have the courage to recognise the enevitable outcome of that situation, which is of course a choice that our ideology of freedom will be protected and expanded on our terms. We also differ in that I think that a war against islam is a legitimate, necessary and desirable strategy, although I am not screaming for a gungho strategy of genocide or immediate violence. But we must politically force the debate. We must raise the issues and push them with the conviction that we will use force when necessary to correct what we see as wrongs. Our way or the highway, so to speak. Indeed, you do say yourself that the use of force can be legitimate.
Hell, I'm not even entirely sure what I'm trying to say since I agree with you anyway. I think I'm just trying to say I believe times will get far more dangerous and so now is the right time to put things in order and part of that order must be that every nation state on this planet has secular government and human rights legislation that gaurantees their populations of rights and opportunities similar to our own. That very definitely means that Islam has to go change or it has to go. If we can't adapt it, then we have to destroy any capability that poses a threat to us and we have to raise the stakes so high that the internal dissent caused by the stakes of the consequences will assist the islamic world in further tearing itself apart and retarding its own potential.
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