Can Eastern Europeans’ prejudice against Muslims help defend the West?

Vincent C. writes:

In the discussion on “Phillips on Phillips,” your readers and you had informed opinions as to why Eastern Europeans appear to have an innate prejudice against Muslims. Allow me to make two points:

1. Italy, like Britain, has become a refuge of itinerant Eastern Europeans, especially Poles and Romanians looking for work. From my experience, they, too, share the predisposition to dislike and distrust Muslims, considering them, among other things, shiftless and unreliable. (BTW, my sense is that Muslims tend to think of Eastern Europeans as dipsomaniacs.) One could extrapolate and say that the Eastern European anti-Muslim phenomenon does not only apply to Britain. Still, why does this sentiment strike the Eastern, rather than the Western, European, more forcefully?

2. Here I believe that history is your answer: the East dealt with the Muslims (Ottomans) longer and under much greater repression than in the West, and that period is still part of the Eastern European psyche. It is not for nothing that Serge Trifkovic has been writing for years about the Muslim menace in the former Yugoslavia spreading its poisonous tentacles, but he had few takers in the West. Trifkovic, of Serbian ancestry, believes, and recent statements by the DHS back this up, that al-Qaeda operatives are already in the U.S., having crossed the Rio Grande and slipped into the country. I think he—and I—would agree that the question is not “if” they will strike, it is “when.”

Finally, when I read that the British Home Office today announced that further entry of Bulgarians, Romanians and other Eastern Europeans will not be permitted, I wondered if such a move was calculated to avoid a future confrontation.

LA replies:

If the Eastern Europeans’ dislike of Muslims adds up to nothing more than regarding them as shiftless and unreliable, I don’t see that as a stand against Islam and Muslims that can be of significant help to the West. It sounds more like a garden variety ethnic prejudice or dislike, which would not be grounded in anything solid and which would be impotent to oppose a serious Islamic challenge. If their dislike of Muslims were truly based in the terrible history of the Muslim domination of the Balkans, then their dislike would be more intelligent—would involve recognizing Islam as the age-old foe, not merely as people who are shiftless and unreliable.

It’s analogous perhaps to Italian-Americans’ well known (how shall I put it?) lack of liberal sentimentality about blacks. This is certainly a useful and admirable trait. But it’s only effective at the local, neighborhood level in keeping down black underclass disorder. It doesn’t add anything useful at the intellectual/political level in helping conservatives resist the black and minority-rights revolutions.

Prejudice or dislike against outsiders is an unprincipled exception to liberalism, meaning that it is a non-liberal attitude not based on any non-liberal principle. In a traditional society, such prejudice might be enough to protect the society from an invasion of outsiders. In our radical liberal society, it is not enough, because, not being based on any non-liberal principle, it will inevitably be swept aside by the prevailing, consistently applied, liberal ideology which says that discrimination is always wrong. In order to dissuade people from the liberal idea that discrimination is always wrong, we must have a true, non-liberal idea showing the falsity of the liberal idea.

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Dimitri K. writes:

As an ex-Eastern-European and ex-Soviet, I just want to mention that many Eastern-Europeans are very well aware of Muslims. Russians fought Muslims through all their history, and not so long ago. Russia fought with Turkey in the mid-nineteenth century, not taking into account wars with Chechens and in Afghanistan. The Balkans were liberated from the Turks, if I am not mistaken, only about hundred years ago. The Austrian empire fought with Turks, or at least was quite aware of their existence until its end in 1918. There are also Kipriot Greeks, Serbs and some small forgotten Christian nations like Armenia Georgia or Osetia (home of Beslan) , who have problems with Muslims right now. The present and former opponents of Islam constitute most of Eastern Europe, excluding maybe a few northern countries.

Michael T. writes:

You wrote: “If their dislike of Muslims were truly based in the terrible history of the Muslim domination of the Balkans, then their dislike would be more intelligent—would involve recognizing Islam as the age-old foe, not merely as people who are shiftless and unreliable.”

In my opinion, it very much is. The religious divide in the Balkans is widely regarded as unbridgeable, even by non-religious people (i.e. it’s not a “Christian thing”). Muslims of Serbian or Bulgarian ethnicity are considered “not really” Serbian/Bulgarian. In Bulgaria, during the Communist government’s policy of “Bulgarizing” the Turkish minority (instituted at a remarkably late date, 1985), which caused hundreds of thousands to flee the country, the president, Todor Zhivkov, gave a speech in which he demanded Turkey open its borders to Bulgarian Muslims, not simply Bulgarian Turks. So deeply rooted is opposition to Islam qua Islam in the Balkans that it is a defining aspect of peoplehood, of self-identity. Those peoples are not only Bulgarians, Greeks or Serbs, they are also not-Muslims. Despite often deeply embedded grievances between Balkans peoples, their historical struggle against Islam and their identity as not-Muslim grants them a sense of unity that one simply does not encounter in the West. For example, a Greek will find satisfaction in rationalizing his daughter’s marriage to a Bulgarian on this basis to an extent simply not possible were she to marry, say, an Albanian or a Turk.

LA replies:

Ok, but I still say that unless this Balkan/Christian view of Muslims as completely Other is to help Europe and the West stand against Islam, it has got to have articulated, intellectual content. We know that Balkan Christian peoples dislike and fear Muslims, because of the centuries of Ottoman oppression (as strongly suggested by the quote from Jovan Cvijic). We hear from Michael T. that Balkan Christians have a powerful sense of identity as non-Muslims. Fine. However, neither of those two things by themselves can wake up Western Europeans to the reality of Islam. To do that, there must be articulated knowledge and information about Islam. When I see Balkan people telling Western Europeans what Islam really is, and snapping them out of their liberal delusions, then I’ll believe that they can help us. Until then, they’re just another ethnic immigrant group.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 11, 2006 01:01 PM | Send