No Dhimmitude

Our friend Charles just sent in the following letter on the nature of the jihadi rampage in France and across the world. It's an interesting take on our situation-- and theirs. In reading this we might keep in mind the history of totalitarian thought-control, looking particularly at Plato's Republic and The Laws. Nothing has changed in the philosophy of tatalitarianism from Plato's time till today. To show that is true one might look at the nature of the term "Byzantine." Follow up on that by comparing the intellectual systems concocted by the Soviet government, a hold-over and a remake of the Byzantine courts. This line of enquiry will give clear proof of the nature of the police state, a state in which the people are in jail-- literally. But more than that, we must look at the sophisticatiion of the police state as Charles points out: it is a system of carefully planned random violence leading to terror among the civility. One brief example from Poland, if I may:

A man was arrested at 2:00 am, hauled off into the night after a great deal of noise and commotion on the part of the police. His neighbours and mates all around expected to find someday that he was imprisoned or dead. But some days later he returned, having been found guilty of an actual crime. Within days of his return, he was presented with a refrigerator. To explain: Everyone in the building had an order years long for a fridge, and they all expected to wait many years still for theirs. The criminal got one on the spot. It is sophisticated state terrorism in action. The people, knowing the man had stolen a great deal of money, was arrested and released from custody, and was then rewarded significantly by the hand of the state. The terror resides in the confusion. Do you then go commit some greivous crime in the hope of reward? No. Do you continue on as before as a law abiding citizen? Yes, for which people were randomly arrested anyway. Life makes no sense, it all being random and terrifying. People are immoblised by it. No one knows what to do, so they do nothing but cave in and live till their time is come. The technique is Byzantine. The effect is terror. The result is submission.

Charles writes of the Islamic world-view and its effects on us as outsiders; how we live at the basic levels of Humanness unchanged from the beginning:
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I am riveted by the apologist writing I'm finding, it's like a voice
from another world, the morals are so foreign to mine.

So far the most interesting observation I make about those authors
defending Islam's current treatment of women: they spend an inordinate amount
of time explaining the state of the world **before** Mohammad, [jahaliyyah: "The time of ignorance, i.e. before people had knowledge of the Quran.] and
little time on cultural comparisons *since* Mohammad. Their
approach is to rationalize the modern treatment by comparing it to
other 7th century (and even pre-7th century!) conditions!
Pathetic. Is this a similar tactic
used to justify their other objectionable customs?

Reading a book about women in Afghanistan under the Taliban, I came
across an illuminating personal anecdote. It really changed my view,
or maybe I
should say gave me a view from a new perspective, about the savagery
we saw last year in France's auto-de fe, and seemingly daily now as a
side-show to the anti-cpe riots.

I kept wondering, "what do they think they have to gain by this kind
of behavior, surely it just hurts them more than it helps?", and a
first-hand description of the Taliban's
method of operations provides the answer: conquer through fear,
control through intimidation, terrorize into submission.

The Taliban would repeatedly engage in spontaneous brutality, not out
of any provocation, but just as a matter of principle, to keep the
citizens terrified into submission. the seeming randomness
and lack of purpose behind the violence, was the major point of the
violence: terror as a means of controlling the population.

Thinking about this further, I've come to this analogy: It is similar
to the animal kingdom, in which many species puff themselves
up when confronted by a predator;
they can flare up their plumage or open up claws or tentacles,
putting on a display of force in order to intimidate the opponent
into retreat.

Is this not the exact same tactic
we are now seeing on display in Europe? Thinking of their behavior as
human behavior, it makes no sense; thinking of the behavior as animal
behavior, [ethology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethology] well, now we have a way of making sense
of it. (And what a sad conclusion this is for me to arrive at.)

There's a famously charismatic Australian naturalist named Steve
Irwin, the "Crocodile Hunter", who has been on cable television for
years hosting nature shows, primarily for a young
audience. I can now see photos and videos of the current European
jihadists and hear Steve Irwin's off-screen narration, "Crikey, look
at me, look at how tough I am, you don't want
to mess with me!", as he so often does when he enthusiastically
explains the natural reaction of everything from snakes to crocs when
they're facing down perceived adversaries.

Charles
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We are allowing our world to become an Orwellian nightmare, and it becomes so because we are afraid. We are victims of our own fear rather than any real danger from our enemies. I urge all agian to meet with your neighbours and commnity members to sit and openly discuss this problem of jihad and Left dhimmi fascism. As frightening and terrifying as our enemies appear to be, they are actually nothing much at all. We must give each other the confidence to confront the threats as they are and not as we might think they are. That will come if and when we meet and look each other in the eyes and know we are solid and true people.

We will again meet at VPL in the atrium Thursday from 7-9:00 pm to try to find ways to deal with the threat of impending sharia in the West. The storm is approaching rapidly, and those who are not prepared will find themselves overtaken by the flood of misery sure to come.


You can prepare for this onslaught of Islamic jihad against us by meeting with your neighbours and community members to plan an alternative future. It doesn't have to turn out wrong for us, but if we do nothing but await the end it wil come and we will be lost. Go out and meet your meighbours and friends and plan for the future. Wear a blue scarf or a anything at all that will identify you to those of interest. Let people know that you wil be available for them. We can win this struggle if we work together as community menmbers and as concerned citizens.

We'll be at Vancouver Public Library in the atrium Thursday evening. Where will you be?

Today's post is short because our secretary is doing her nails and I have to type this on my own. Will return next post with a continuation.


Contempt and Authenticity.

An ageing couple of some means have sent their only child off to the city from their rural estate so he could gain a profession and become something more in life than they. They fret and worry seeming endlessly about his arrival back home now that he's a doctor, and when he arrives-- snide, nasty, rude-- they dote on him. Son manages in short time to get into a duel, outrage the locals, and generally piss me off as I read Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons some many years ago.

Father, who does everything he can to be nice to his miserable kid, finally sits in a chair when the son goes out once more, sits and says to his silent and unhappy wife something like: "Mother, he hates us. We are old and boring."

There's more to the son than average youthful thoughtlessness; the son in Turgenev's novel has taken it into his head that he's a [Russian] nihilist. Son is "ultra moderne." He struggles toward an inner "authenticity" that is to my mind so phony I could choke him. He was the "Leftist" of his day, and nothing has changed since other than that the pose is so stiff and transparent that one cannot face it without retching. The pose, the true nature of the character himself, is a sign of our time. It's phony and it's rotten. It's never been any better. Our culture is turned to nihilism and pretence. It's a sham, and it's a dangerous phantasy life of pretend that's causing us to die. All of this in the pursuit of "Real Living."

If we abandon our own lives and cultures and values in favor of those of other we're not being multicultural and sensitive, modern and progressive: we are posing.

Once in Mexicio City I saw a young English woman with long bright red plaited hair and round-rimmed glasses dancing at a "Axtec Cermonial Rite." Her intensity was repellent, so focussed on the spirituality of her communion with the native spirits and so oblivious to her condition that she didn't notice that she is English. I asked my friend Juan about it next day at Walmart. "Los indios." he said, using the local term for stupid people. I was embarrassed. "Juan, you're an Indian. Why would you say that?" He grinned. "Not us, them. Look! We're buying our sacred dance costume junk from Walmart. We get these stupidos to dance around, and they give us lots of money." I remebered the red-haired girl so intense and I burst out laughing. She didn't recognise the junk from Walmart because she's never been to one, preferring to go to Native Markets to buy authentic things. Yes, things bought at Walmart, resold at the Native Market after the Native Dance. The girl obviously had no idea how ridiculous she is, and there's no reason to point it out to her. But when our whole culture is based on obvious stupidities such as this, then we are in trouble. When we despise our own culturres and efforts as harmful and hateful and pursue the falsities of Walmart Indians, then we have lost something we should have retained, if only our money.

We in the modern West are engulfed by a population of idiots who think the Walmart Indians are truer to real life than our parents. The joke is on them; but unfortunately, we have to live with these idiots. It's a serious and life-threatening problem that we might see more clearly by looking at it from a distance. We'll turn to a history of these people to see who and what they are so we can see our own more clearly. We are not facing naive young girls but the intellectuals of the 19th to mid 20th centuries.

Below we'll look at authenticity and contempt. This should shed more light on our themes of recent posts on multiculturalism, cultural relativism, and the general ruin of our time, philobarbarism. The primary source for this essay is John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939. London: Faber and Faber; 1992. First we'll look briefly at wikipedia's blurb on authenticity.
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[T]hose concerned with living authentically have often led unusual lives that opposed cultural norms; the rise of the counter-culture in the 1960s in Europe and America was seen by many as a new opportunity to live an authentic existence. Many, however, have pointed out that just because one lives unusually, one is not necessarily in an authentic state of being. The connection of the violation of cultural norms to authenticity, however, is strong and real, and continues today: among artists who explicitly violate the conventions of their profession, for example. The connection of inauthenticity to capitalism is contained in the notion of "selling out," used to describe an artist whose work has become inauthentic after achieving commercial success and thus becoming to an extent integrated into an inauthentic system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authenticity_%28philosophy%29
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When we return we'll look at the view so common today of the suburbanite as trash. this inverted snobbery of the intelligentsia is a replay of the view of the suburbanite from the 19th century. Please join us when we return.