Westerners who long to submit themselves to Islam (or to Mexicans)

A correspondent said that Hamas wants to drive the Israelis into the sea. I replied:

Hamas in classic Islamic fashion is not threatening to kill all Israeli Jews but, if the Jews surrender, to subject them to dhimmi status, non-citizen status, and the jizyah tax.

This of course is the same arrangement that Western liberals (and not a few “conservatives”) constantly praise as the “tolerant, richly pluralistic” tradition of Islam, as supposedly exemplified in Andalusia and the Abbasid Caliphate. I am convinced that many Western liberals secretly and inchoately yearn for the imposition of such a system. They would prefer being second class but “tolerated” subjects of an Islamic caliphate than continue to bear the burden of being the guilty, power-wielding majority group of the white Christian West.

Another correspondent said:

Western liberals secretly yearn for their own subjugation because liberalism is, at the end of the day, the demand that one abnegate oneself by treating one’s own people and identity as no more valuable than that of the Other, while doing precisely the opposite of this is the precondition of existing at all, for an individual as for a people. This Christ-like self-sacrifice is, of course, secularized Christianity, and in the absence of the Christian faith that Jesus forgives us every day for not living up to His example, it has no choice but to seek worldly outlet in self-destruction.

Christian ethics without Christian religion is fatal.

A third correspondent sent this:

“I am convinced that many Western liberals secretly and inchoately yearn for the imposition of such a system. They would prefer being second class but “tolerated” subjects of an Islamic caliphate than continue bearing the burden of being the guilty, power-wielding majority group of the white Christian West.”

That is the most horrifying comment I have heard this year, not because it is outrageous, but because it is accurate.

Another reader comments:

This is a new wrinkle, that Westerners are longing to submit to Islam (but not to the one true God). What better home than Islam for self- and God-hating people who are searching for degrading submission? It’s as if Islam were created just for such a time, for such a people: they will get a harsh god who will rule them as they want. As another reader observed, it is horrifying.

In a nutshell I think it goes like this: Reject God, loathe self, degrade self horribly, embrace Islam. The “Enlightenment” is this trajectory playing out, and we are the horrified gallery. That people would embrace Islam but reject Christianity shows the colossal gap between the two. I shun any and all alliances with Muslims—the minds are so far apart, they suggest on one hand a Divine and on the other a devilish origin. Any alliance with Islam, for any reason, is a trap.

Another reader writes:

This story reminds me of what I have observed about some liberal Anglo acquaintances, particularly in the Midwest. That is, not merely a passive acceptance of, but an actual longing to see American culture engulfed by unlimited illegal immigration from Mexico. There seems to be a definite vibe of “we deserve it, after all” and an eagerness to assume their place as minority subjects to the new, vastly superior Mexican majority. These people also exhibit an immense romanticization of Mexican culture and Mexican nationals themselves (They are more genuine than phony Americans…They are free spirits who reject our outdated, anal European restrictions…They occupy a higher plane of consciousness…Whatever.) Another interesting stipulation is that this vanquishing of American culture MUST originate from Mexico and Mexicans specifically—no other immigrant nationalities need apply. Many of these Americans who lavish such favor on Mexicans show a conspicuous lack of interest in, nor sympathy for, illegal aliens from Europe or Asia. My guess is that such groups are not viewed as sufficiently corrosive and toxic to American culture, nor likely to arrive in sufficient numbers, as the millions coming from third world Mexico. Thus they are less “desirable” conquerors, in a perverse sort of way.

LA reply:

Thank you for this. Though I’ve been thinking about this problem for over 20 years, I feel as if I’m seeing a dimension of it I never saw before. I’ve always been aware that Westerners were yielding to and had no will to resist the Third-World encroachment, and that they celebrated America’s increasing diversity and the reduced relative numbers and power of whites. But I don’t think I ever saw it as a positive desire on the part of liberal whites that the Third-World actually take over. Now I realize that that is the logical end point of everything that white America and the white West has been doing, and, moreover, that it makes sense of all their other seemingly senseless attitudes. In other words, it’s not just a careless thoughtless sentiment which they would abandon as soon as they saw where it was heading. It is what they want, though they may not have consciously realized it yet.

If in your conversations with your liberal acquaintances you (or anyone reading this) hear specific comments that express this longing to see our culture engulfed and whites made into a minority, and if you can share them without violating confidences, please consider sending them to me either for posting here, or privately if you prefer.

Carl Simpson writes:

I think that the phenomenon of liberals wanting to submit themselves to Islam very much fits in with Seraphim Rose’s description of liberalism as part of a spiritual disease process whose ultimate outcome is nihilism. As mentioned in your exchange with Paul Gottfried, liberals reject all objective value—present in our own civilization, culture and in our very selves. As one of the other readers put it so succinctly: “In a nutshell I think it goes like this: Reject God, loathe self, degrade self horribly, embrace Islam.”

Embracing Islam (or dhimmitude) is the ultimate atonement for the manifold sins of our civilization. Having rejected the true atonement, the whole ethos of liberalism decays over time into a suicidal death-wish. Islam is the liberals’ angel of death, who has been allowed in to carry out the final sacrifice and deliver them from their unbearable guilt.

Howard Sutherland writes:

Interesting comment from your reader about libs who actually welcome their displacement by Mexicans, but are indifferent to the assorted Asians. I’m sure your correspondent is right about their romanticizing the Other. I have seen enough of that from well-heeled Texans (not all libs, at least not in their own minds), who really should know better. Another aspect of it is that libs feel guilty because we “stole” our country from the Indians. There aren’t that many American Indians left to give the country back to, though. Up from the deeper South comes the walking salve for the libs’ guilt: Indians! Millions of ‘em, all speaking wonderful, colorful foreign languages. Mexicans (other Central Americans too, I suppose) are different from the other invaders: in the minds of the guiltiest of libs, this land is their land, and it is only right that we should welcome them back. If they wind up outnumbering us, Inshallah. That, of course, ignores the fact that our redskins are about as related to the Indians and Meztizos of Mesoamerica as the Portuguese are to the Finns. It also ignores that none of the ancestors of our new invaders ever had roots in the lands we made into America. But when has a liberal ever let facts get in the way of his feelings?

Rick Darby writes:

I agree with you and your correspondents that there is an unconscious or semi-conscious wish among some liberals for submission of the United States to outside cultures.

Besides the reasons already mentioned, there is another.

Many intellectuals are fascinated by the idea of vast, impersonal forces that shape history. Such notions are most basically prompted, I think, by self-flattery: the intellectual can see the “big picture,” unlike us proles, who are wrapped up in petty loyalties to nations or local traditions. The far-seeing intellectual is beyond the concerns of mere individuals—for him it’s the great cultural and political movements that sweep all before them, with the momentum of inevitability, that matter.

So, Karl Marx attracted generations of soi-disant “progressives” with his idea of the foregone victory of the working class over capitalism, an idea so powerful that no evidence to the contrary could signify anything but a speed bump. It’s a heady feeling, I expect, to feel yourself surfing the crest of the great wave.

The intellectuals reared in the pure or slightly diluted Marxism of our institutions of higher learning may or may not have lost their faith in the class struggle, but they still crave that “high.” And they’ll take the bait of any large-scale trend that offers to provide it.

How many times have you heard, “There’s no turning back the resettlement of the southwest by Mexicans—it’s a done deal”? Have you ever heard it expressed in a tone of regret? I haven’t; it always comes with a faint air of satisfaction. The unstoppable force of history is at work. It’s beyond the control of any of us, or all of us.

They probably don’t think of it in this way, but people who seem to assume that Eurabia is inevitable (e.g., Mark Steyn), and that “you can’t stop 1.3 billion Muslims,” get a little thrill at the idea that they are present at the Big Change, watching it from grandstand seats. Why consider it to be a battle, like those Cro-Magnon traditionalists do, when you can sit back and enjoy the show with your superior above-it-all perspective?

LA replies:

I think Mr. Darby has presented a profound insight into the psychology of modern intellectuals. Not believing in God or the transcendent, they make into their god the perceived secular trend of the moment, and they become the prophets of this god.

Mr. Darby’s theory does not contradicts but compliments the ideas expressed earlier in this discussion. Liberals hate their own society, and are ready to see it destroyed or replaced. Mr. Darby explains the belief with which many liberal intellectuals have replaced the former beliefs in country and civilization and fixed moral principles that they’ve abandoned, namely the unfolding dialectic of secular history, and their own role as its knowers and interpreters.

Another reader writes:

I think one problem that European-Americans have is that they can’t understand Spanish so they can’t detect the shallowness that many immigrants have, whereas they can detect the shallowness in their their fellow European-Americans who are unskilled/uneducated. So they imagine that the immigrants must be better.

Also, the upper class EAs feel no solidarity with their own lower classes, because they feel that the lower classes are not as “good” as they, the upper classes, are. So they don’t fight for the lower classes in this case where, if they don’t, immigrants who share very little of their culture will come in and swamp the common culture of both the UC and LC. In the past, not fighting for the LC had no cost, so the UC was able to indulge in that ability to feel superior.

The solution, I think, is to push Sailor’s citizenist approach. If properly framed this can appeal to the left. Then left and right can agree on immigration restriction.

Another reader writes:

This is a very interesting and disturbing thread, the idea that liberals actually want to see their civilization subjugated to relieve themselves of their guilt.

There is, however, a slight problem with this view, even though it seems to have exceptional explanatory power. It is a cardinal rule of politics that people will not take concrete losses for the sake of abstract principles. It is equally true that people will not take disproportionate concrete losses for the sake of those same principles. This fact explains why liberals are such colossal hypocrites on so many subjects. They, for example, pine for the betterment of minorities but live in neighborhoods with demographic profiles out of the 1950s. Or they demand higher taxes to pay for all kinds of sevices for the poor, but work to reduce the taxes they themselves have to pay. Liberalism is, in other words, marked with a severe degree of NIMBY-ism.

This brings into question how serious they are about really sacrificing themselves for their principles. Are they truly willing to expose themselves to the murder and rapine that would follow their decline into “second class” or “merely tolerated” status? Are they truly willing to give up their cushy lawyer/academic/journalist/techie/bureaucrat jobs just to alleviate their guilt? Judging by the liberal’s own actions, it seems that liberal morality is too much of a fair-weather ideology to demand the kind of “destruction of the self” speculated upon in this thread.

Of course, liberals may also be mistaken of what they think their second-class status would mean, given how loaded with fantasy liberal ideology is. In this case, is it truly that difficult to disabuse them of this fantasy? After all, liberals have a particular demographic profile. Might it be easy to facilitate a threat in some semi-controlled way to give them a taste of what this new American order would look like? Maybe government-sanctioned mass immigration into liberal blue-state cities and all the attendant problems such immigration creates is just the formula needed to change substantially a large percentage of attitudes? Maybe unvarnished saber-rattling by a large, militant cadres of angry foreigners screaming death to their cushy lifestyles would give many pause? Maybe a decade or three under a right-wing national security state (or the threat of one) is just the whiff of grapeshot needed to finally put the nail into the coffin of liberalism? I’d predict that few liberals outside of True Believers would tolerate these circumstances for long.

I think the reader somewhat mistates the issue. It is not that liberals think consciously to themselves, “Our liberal principles require that we sacrifice ourselves to Islam,” and then hypocritically fail to follow through on that. Rather it is a matter of their having an instinctive repulsion toward their own white Christian majority society and a tropism toward its nemesis, the ultimate end of which, not consciously realized by the liberals, but creeping up on them step by step, is actual Muslim rule and their own submission to it, an event which under certain circumstances they may welcome once it happens.

Second, they would not necessarily lose all their perks. The new regime would need their talents, just as the “glories of the Islamic Golden Age” were largely built on the talents of converted or dhimmi Jews and Christians.

However, I do agree that the only hope that Westerners may renounce their liberalism that is so deeply imbued in them and that is leading them toward ultimate submission is that they receive major shocks and suffering resulting from Islam’s increasing power. I expect many more surrenders by the West (such as the U.S. government’s attack on the European newspapers that are standing up to Muslim intimidation), before there is any chance that the West turn around in a decisive way, if it ever does. The more frightening Islam shows itself to be, thus shattering liberals’ ideal of a glorious return to the “culturally rich and pluralistic Caliphate of Andalusia,” the more chance there is that liberals may give up their liberalism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 02, 2006 02:10 AM | Send