What if separation is not possible?

Mark P. writes, in response to my exchange with Dimitri:

While I agree that separation and isolation is the solution to the Muslim threat, what is the solution if such separation and isolation is not politically possible? Yes, I understand that this website is about creating better policies, but I also understand that we should be careful not to make ourselves irrelevant like the libertarians.

The Iraq war was necessary because, in the government world of second-best solutions, it represented the best that could be done. The other possible alternative was purely subversive or submissive appeasement, of the kind practiced by Carter and Clinton. Since that is an inferior solution, we should give the Iraq war credit where credit is due

What would you say is the best course of action if separation/isolation of Muslims is not an option?

LA replies:

First, if we can’t separate Muslims from the West, then there is no solution, our civilization and our freedoms are ultimately doomed.

If we can’t separate them from ourselves, then we must do whatever we can to lessen the damage and string things out as long as we can, meaning doing anything that reduces the numbers and impact and influence of Muslims as much as possible. But there is a limit to such half-way measures.

For example, if we can’t remove them, we could at least stop more of them from coming. But if we can’t stop more of them from coming either, then we can bitch and moan and call for this and that reform all we want, but the reality is that their numbers and power will keep growing, along with the inevitable consequences.

And it’s not just the Muslim issue of course, but the whole Third-Worldization of America and of the West, and the prospect of the actual end of the white majority culture. Whites will increasingly find themselves in a Third-World, Mexicanized, Negrified, Muslimized environment where even liberals will feel strange and uncomfortable. Let’s say that happens, let’s say we really do lose the country. That could happen. The only recourse then is that, as Rabbi Schiller said in his speech at the 1994 AR conference, whites become like Jews, surviving as a group by establishing closed communities in which they separate themselves from the people around them. But maybe that won’t be possible either, as the Third-World regime (assisted by treasonous whites in key positions) won’t allow it to happen. In which case whites would increasingly blend, culturally as well as physically, into the nonwhite dominant culture, and the white race comes to an end.

That’s what we’re looking at. It is a matter of existence or non-existence. Liberalism has unleashed forces that will make the white West, the white race itself, along with everything it has been and everything it has achieved, literally cease to exist. So we have to grasp what has happened, grasp the nature of the mistake we made and name it, and then with all our power resist it and seek to restore the things that liberalism destroyed.

Mark replies:

You’re right, of course. There is no way around it. Some things are so fundamental that there is no way to compromise.

KE writes from Turkey:

You are ABSOLUTELY right about the prospects of things in the West if total disengagement and separation (more like quarantine) is not achieved. It really is as simple as you put it.

Howard Sutherland writes:

Isn’t Turkey the perfect example of what is at stake? Asia Minor was at the heart of the Hellenistic world; its Western parts were part and parcel of the archaic and classical Greek world. The provinces of Asia Minor were central in the Roman Empire, from long before its permanent division around 400. Asia Minor was one of the cradles of Christianity; St. Paul began life as Saul of Tarsus, after all. Asia Minor was truly the heart of the Christian East Roman Empire; Constantinople itself was just across the Bosporus. Then, from the 11th century, Islam-inflamed Turks swept in and lands that had been part of Hellenic civilization from its beginnings and home to Christians from the very birth of the faith were overrun, devastated and utterly transformed. The crosses were torn from St. Sophia and replaced by the crescents and minarets that deface it today. Constantinople is now called Istanbul, and we now call Asia Minor “Turkey” in honor of its destroyers.

Imagine the reaction of a Roman or Byzantine resident of Asia Minor of, say, the 4th or 8th century if he were dropped down into the Ottoman Turkey of the 16th or 17th century. He would think his homeland (if he could even recognize it) had been transformed into an earthly Hell. Will Paris and London – even Rome herself – also have different names in 100 years?

KE writes:

Just to clarify something about my recent reactions: I feel no discomfort with the criticisms of Islam made on your site, not at all! That faith richly deserves all the opprobrium directed at it. The discomfort I’ve expressed had to do with “sociological” realities— not “ideological/theological” ones. [LA notes: I think KE is saying that he doesn’t like to see Westerners denying, not just the value of Islam (about which he agrees with the Islam critics), but the value of the totality of the culture and way of life of the peoples of the Muslim lands including Turkey.] The simple fact of the matter is, Islam is so averse to normal human existence in essence, that most of the folks under its rule around where I live simply ignore large portions of it in favor of the core Mosaic norms (the so-called “thou shalt nots”). Let there be no misunderstandings about that.

Also, I don’t buy one bit the idea that it may be “impossible to reverse the tide.” Put together all the might of the Islamic lands, the and U.S. and the UK—if push comes to shove—can raze that geography back to stone age in a matter of months.

All the wah-wah that “it is too late now” is false. Just 40 years ago, when the Beatles were singing “She loves you yeah yeah,” there was not an iota of all that nonsense that we have to endure these days—such as the recent “veil” incident in the UK. We’re talking 40 years, not 400.

You know what the problem is? Those people who have become oh-so-conservative lately don’t really really have their hearts in it. The idea of a traditionalist (paleo-)conservative order still scares them. They don’t really want to let go off of abortion-on-demand, for instance, or no-fault-divorce. They enjoy the rotten, poisonous fruits of liberalism too much. (French psychoanalyst Lacan—about whose Freudian world view I do not care for two cents— once said something quite ironic about his patients: “They don’t really want to be cured,” he said; “they just want to enjoy the symptoms.”)

LA replies:

It sounds to me that KE is describing neoconservatives and mainstream conservatives, not traditionalist conservatives. But there I think he is right. The neocons’ chest-beating belligerency toward our radical Islamic enemies is combined with their refusal to recognize the real nature of the Islamic threat and to deal with it seriously, because they are, at bottom, satisfied liberal denizens of the modern liberal order.

Maureen writes:

KE writes: “The simple fact of the matter is, Islam is so averse to normal human existence in essence, that most of the folks under its rule around where I live simply ignore large portions of it in favor of the core Mosaic norms (the so-called “thou shalt nots”).”

KE’s offhand reference to the Mosaic code surprised me. My impression was that the “Mosaic norms” were not respected or taught by imams in mosques, that Muslims are required to fulfill the Five Pillars and are taught to recite the Koran—period. When and how much does instruction in the Mosaic Law occur for Muslims?

I had the impression that Islam is not overly concerned with making amends or examining one’s conscience—both rooted in a profound concern with observing Mosaic Law. Au contraire, Islam even endorses lying (taquiya and kitman)—and defines “doing unto their neighbors” by defining “neighbor” differently than do Christians. Islam defines one’s “neighbors” as only members of one’s own tribe or religion.

I would be pleased to hear that I am wrong. KE?

LA replies:

I gathered (though KE can enlighten us further) that KE was talking about non-observant Muslims who follow the basic moral laws of the Decalogue, which after all, like C.S. Lewis’s Tao, are universally applicable (which is not to say that all people follow them) and not particular to Judaism. I don’t think he was referring to observant Muslims, whose permanent state of war with non-Muslims puts them in conflict with the Tao. I get the impression that he lives in a secular, Westernized environment.

KE replies to the above questions:

I’ve jotted a few things that pop into mind.

(All my observations below are based on personal experience, and they are not generalizable to any other group.)

Maureen’s guesstimate about my environment is basically true. But there are a few ethnically-specific details that may shed light here.

My reference group is the native people of the large cities of the Ottomans and the Turkish republic. That’ll be Istanbul, Izmir, Bursa, Ankara—plus a couple smaller places on the Western coast. The natives of these cities are mostly the people of the Aegean and the Balkans. Their living patterns follow very closely the southern European norms.

For example—just as a sociological/anthrolopological indicator—ethnographers and sociobiologists have observed that first-cousin marriage is very wide-spread among Muslim cultures. People simply wed their kids to their siblings’ kids, at an early age—without even getting their consent (which is a universal parental tendency: you expect your kids to do as you say). This suppresses rivalry on property issues since everything stays in the family, nothing is split and divvied up between family and newcomers as there are none. This itself explains the whole issue of “xenophobic” attitude towards the “other” that Maureen mentions—as well as failure of most Muslim countries to create “national” cultures. In contrast, my reference groups follows the patterns of the European groups: up to the seventh degree, everyone from family is considered “incest.”

The natural result is, I know no one from my extended family who has married anyone but total strangers. (In passing, I also know no one in my lineage who has ever practiced polygamy. Even the idea is repulsive to us.)

It is also no coincidence that it was us who have created the “nationalist republic” here, and practically obliterated the “ummah” based decrepit, backward, and irrational societal organization.

This is not a minor issue. Trying to understand people’s behavioral patterns by purely referencing ideological layers (and religion is one of them) disregarding racially relevant patterns is never entirely convincing. After all, we have Christian Africans, for example. But note what is going on in South Africa. The place follows the exact same patterns with most other African countries, and Christianity seems not to have done them much of anything to them (the culprit for which is not Christianity but race).

Due to these, people from my reference group have few “xenophobia” issues—if any. We have been living around here as Bosniacs, Pomacs, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, etc., for centuries. (I could give other tips such as at least four people from my immediate extended family—and not just my generation but that of my grandparents—married Europeans like Germans, Italians, etc. The Ottomans may have “conquered” these lands and given some of these groups “dhimmi” status, but life goes on, and at the everyday level people don’t give a toss about these and follow their instinctive, traditionally practiced patterns of association and valuation.)

And yes, we follow the thou-shalt-nots. Our elders always refer to the core principles of morality, and hardly any other, belligerent, expansionist ideology.

Note that this is not generalizable to groups outside of mine.

(Please remember: Bosniacs, Kurds, Yemenis, Chinese Hui, and Indonesians are all nominally “Muslim.” But they are all separate races, and one has to practice a lot of “reductionism” to convince oneself that their cultures are identical simply because they all utter the shadadah. Racial profile and identity is too strong and overriding to reduce us to ideological robots into whose memory a set of “beliefs” can be loaded, a few buttons pushed, and we’re all clones of the basic prototype controlled by its dogmatic software.)

Also, although by purist criteria my group may be considered “non-observant,” I don’t entirely mean that, either—though that it is true that we probably have the de facto largest “non-observant” ratio. (Simply because, again, it is our natural tendency to respect conscience issues as private so long as one does not commit crimes like murder, rape, theft, etc.) They consider themselves as ordinary Muslims, but the Islam they practice is hardly anything like that in say Kabul or Mecca. They only follow the basic precepts of the universal Golden rule (i.e. “do unto others … “): thou shalt not murder (nor buy any ideological arm-twisting that tries to justify that God’s creatures—of any faith, nationality, or race—deserves being murdered; I know for fact that we were taught that it is “sin” to even consider that); thou shalt not steal (nor consider plundering the property of other nations justifiable); thou shalt not bear false witness (unqualified); thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife (even if she’s Anna Nicole Smith ;-] [just a joke]), etc.

This is the reality of my social environment. I’m afraid as I’ve mentioned earlier, purely “ideological” references and sources cannot verify it.

KE continues:

By the way, I felt a need to emphasize something after I’ve sent my comments.

I frequently feel that whenever I go in the direction of explaining the sociological reality of my environment, I end up hijacking the topic on your site which isn’t about that really. Same thing with this one: the issue was: what if separation is not possible? Your analysis and answer was that that way lies destruction and extinction for the West. And my assessment is also a resounding yes, period. So no need to let this drag on further. (Westerners should not be concerned whether members of my group are cuddly darlings or not. They should be only concerned with rescuing what is left of their great civilization.)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 23, 2006 06:28 AM | Send