Controlling Muslims in China
It appears that China has an understanding of and a will to resist Islam that are lacking in the West. The
New York Times reports:
To be a practicing Muslim in the vast autonomous region of northwestern China called Xinjiang is to live under an intricate series of laws and regulations intended to control the spread and practice of Islam, the predominant religion among the Uighurs, a Turkic people uneasy with Chinese rule.
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Sage McLaughlin writes:
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to be seen holding up China’s treatment of the Uyghurs as an exemplar of sane Islam policy. Do you mean to say that China’s treatment of its native Muslim population is basically sensible? Or that its way of dealing with Islam—through Byzantine regulations and suffocating restrictions—is closer to the right model than the West’s present cravenness? I believe I know your way of thinking well enough to know that you don’t actually endorse China’s approach to personal and religious freedom in all its aspects. But choosing China as an example seems to surrender to the left’s absurd claim that we have only a choice between liberalism and the severest repression and inhumanity.
I think the problem is that the sort of individual and political liberty enjoyed by the peoples of the West is so unprecedented, and because liberalism has so totally overtaken the West, that looking outside it for sources of enlightened policy can lead us to some decidedly unpleasant places. If you want to go looking for a non-liberal country in search of some counterexample to liberalism, you have to go fishing around outside the West, in places where Eastern despotism and all manner of non-Christian barbarism predominate. So it is easy for liberals to claim that what makes the West humane—inasmuch as they are willing to concede this at all—is precisely its liberalism. Because the boundaries of political liberalism overlap so neatly with those of Christendom, people can lose sight of the fact that a just form of political organization is possible in a non-liberal context.
Nobody in the West wants to live as the Chinese do, and yet, their approach to immigration and to the spread of alien religions is much more well-grounded in reality. Liberalism’s grotesque distortions of the uniquely humane political traditions of the Western world would seem to present us with a false dichotomy. In the end, the Chinese may be right about the danger Islam poses when it begins to spread within a non-Muslim territory. But this is because the Chinese are not liberals, so it’s a matter of a stopped watch being right twice daily.
LA replies:
You thought about it more deeply than I did. I was simply reacting to the fact that China sees that Islam is a problem and does something to restrict it. I wasn’t endorsing any particulars and of course there’s nothing about China that I would emulate.
Sage M. replies:
I figured as much. I know someone who wandered onto the site today and had a bad reaction to it, so I figured it might be worth discussing.
Gintas writes:
“It appears that China has an understanding of and a will to resist Islam that are lacking in the West.”
China has a streak of ruthlessness that suits her survival. The problem the West has is that our ruthlessness has been refined out of us by Christianity (that’s a good thing), but we’ve also left our Christianity, so we don’t get the benefit of God’s defense, such as was embodied in the Polish “Winged Hussars” who trumped repeatedly over large odds (I’m painting with a very broad brush).
So we’re not ruthless, and we don’t have our Captain leading and defending us, so a minority of Eurocrats sweeps the field clean and we run like a rabble of craven cowards … There are no Winged Hussars to reclaim the field in a Gideon-esque way.
I think this also gets at why the anti-Christian white nationalists long for the pre-Christian days—they want that ruthless streak back, thinking that’s the answer. But enough of us still know better than to make such a deal with the devil. To embrace ruthlessness would be a deal with the devil, and it wouldn’t be a civilization for us to live in.
Remember the discussion on your site a few years ago about wrecking Islam by turning their women into feminists, injecting MTV and other such trash, and thereby turning the Islamic lands into something Western-liberal? That was ruthlessness, and you rightly rejected it.
I hear that Christianity is spreading fast in China. I hope and pray it’s not Western liberal “Christianity,” and they don’t chase after the gods of economic prosperity.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 20, 2008 08:56 AM | Send