We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Many conservatives, myself included, have opined that Islam’s main problem is that it has never experienced a major modernization movement comparable to Christianity’s Reformation. This appealing but admittedly simplistic theory looks good on a time line: The Reformation started about 1500 years after Christ, and Muhammed made the first pilgrimage to Mecca in 629 AD. Add 1500 years to that date, and we’re pretty close to it right now. Many people hope that the current struggle between Islam and Christianity will help push Islam into a modernization, which they assume will bring Islamic values closer to our own.

Mark Steyn offers a slightly different theory: He accepts the premise that Islam is headed for a major modernization, but he doesn’t share common assumptions about what that modernization might look like:

The Islamic “reformation” is, in a sense, the opposite of Christianity’s. The Saudis have used their vast oil enrichment to promote themselves as a kind of Holy See for Muslims, and the Wahhabization of previously low-key syncretic localized Islams in almost every corner of the planet is testament to their success. . . .

And at one level the Islamist “reformation” makes perfect sense. After all, they look at Christianity’s reformation and see that everywhere but the United States it led to the ebbing of faith and its banishment to the fringes of life. The jihadist reformation is, as they see it, a rational response to the Christian one.

Riots in the fall is becoming something of a tradition in Paris.  The emphasis this year seems to be on shotguns and injuring police officers.  Setting fire to cars, which was so fashionable in previous riots, has apparently become passe, though they did burn a police station.  Current estimates of injured police officers run around 70-80.
Some background: A generation ago, France imported massive numbers of low-skilled laborers from North Africa.  The children of those immigrants are now young adults.  They were not integrated into French society, and their unemployment rate is very high.  Around Paris, these young adults live in a series of massive bleak housing projects that ring the city.  A large percentage of them are effectively wards of the state, living entirely on generous welfare programs that leave these second-generation immigrants fed but directionless.

Socialist dogma declares that wealth-transfer payments can ensure tranquility, but human nature disagrees.  These young adults, particularly the young men, want something more than to be fed and coddled like overgrown infants.  They want meaning in their lives.  They want purpose.  And many of them found that purpose in hostility towards the government that infantilizes them.

The banlieues (suburbs) in which they live have become so lawless that they are effectively not under the control of the French government.  In some of these neighborhoods, police cannot patrol there effectively, even in force.
And now they riot.  This is, I believe, the third year of the riots, though the first year they may have also held an extra round in the spring.  This year, as I said, the goal seems to be injuring or killing as many police officers as possible, and the weapons of choice seem to be shotguns and maybe rifles.

It’s hard to get details on these riots, because the mainstream press has worked hard to suppress and confuse the story.  In previous riots, the press would refer to the rioters only as “youths”, completely ignoring the story’s complex racial and religious angles.  It was really funny for the first two years, but now it’s just a cliche, and some press outlets are conceding that many of the rioters may be of Arab and North African descent.

The story behind these riots is complicated, and the media’s ideological blinders don’t help in understanding it.  The story is partly about religious, racial, and cultural differences between the French majority and this minority.  It may also be a grim lesson about how importing large numbers of poor unskilled laborers may provide some short-term economic benefits to big business, but it also carries serious long-term costs that we all must pay.

Finally, this story may be about the beginning of the end of Socialism.  It has long been predicted that Socialism would collapse like a Ponzi scheme, where some generation must eventually decide that it is unwilling to pay exorbitant taxes to the older generations in exchange for the promise that younger generations will pay even more.  Mathematically, every Ponzi scheme must eventually run out of victims, because at its heart the scheme produces nothing of value; it just moves money around to placate the existing victims while hoping that new victims will come along to put new money into the system.

But these riots suggest that Socialism may fall long before the economic collapse.  What seems even more dangerous is absence of genuine culture that socialism demands.  A core belief of Socialism is that our minds are blank slates onto which our environments can write anything at all.  A related belief is that intellectuals leading the government are smart enough to write on that slate in such a way as to bring about nationwide peace and harmony.

These riots, along with many other stories coming out of Europe, demonstrate that both beliefs are false.  The slate is not blank, and more importantly the intellectuals aren’t nearly as smart as they thought they were.  Political Correctness is the best they could do for a culture substitute, and it has proven woefully inadequate.  It does not satisfy man’s need for meaning.

That is why Paris burns tonight.  That is why Britain’s youth are joining terrorist cells faster than its government can staff its anti-terrorism forces.  That is why a primitive version of a primitive religion is sweeping through the minds of Europe’s youth, easily overpowering government platitudes about tolerance and diversity.

A war rages in Europe between the cultural void that is Political Correctness and the primal human instincts that seek to replace it with something better, even if that something is violent Islam, or simply violence for its own sake.  It’s a war between fools, because either ideology would destroy Europe as we know it.  Socialism would bankrupt it, while the rioters would burn it down.  The Socialists have wealth and infrastructure, while the rioters have youth and demography.  Personally, I suspect that both sides will win—Europe will go bankrupt as it burns down—until some third ideology sweeps them both away.  And that third ideology is likely to be nationalism.

From The Daily Mail:

Meet the women who won’t have babies - because they’re not eco friendly

Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel a little hand slipping into hers - and a voice calling her Mummy.

But the very thought makes her shudder with horror.

Because when Toni terminated her pregnancy, she did so in the firm belief she was helping to save the planet.

Incredibly, so determined was she that the terrible “mistake” of pregnancy should never happen again, that she begged the doctor who performed the abortion to sterilise her at the same time.

He refused, but Toni - who works for an environmental charity - “relentlessly hunted down a doctor who would perform the irreversible surgery.

Finally, eight years ago, Toni got her way.

At the age of 27 this young woman at the height of her reproductive years was sterilised to “protect the planet”.

. . .

While some might think it strange to celebrate the reversal of nature and denial of motherhood, Toni relishes her decision with an almost religious zeal.

“Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet,” says Toni, 35.

“Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.”

While most parents view their children as the ultimate miracle of nature, Toni seems to see them as a sinister threat to the future.

These people are so intellectually fragile, I pity them. Just a few simple questions, taken seriously, would shatter their primitive little religion. And I don’t mean factual questions about whether the Earth is really in danger or whether those dangers are caused by mankind. You can’t think clearly about a religion without accepting its premises, arguendo.
So assuming that the planet is in dire peril and it’s all our fault, in this religion is the goal to actually save the planet, or is the goal to practice personal virtue by refusing to participate in its destruction? Those are very different goals that would dictate very different courses of action.

If the goal is to actually save the planet, then non-reproduction is a strange goal because it would reduce the number of people who share the faith and are committed to saving the planet.

Or perhaps the idea is that these women, by proudly proclaiming their commitment to non-reproduction, will inspire millions of others to do the same. Perhaps they hope to spawn a worldwide non-reproduction movement. But that doesn’t fit with the story, nor with the movement at large. When environmental zealots gain influence, their priority is to impose their will via government, not to persuade and draw in new followers.

Adoption is another way for a religion to survive despite a ban on reproduction. The Shakers used this strategy with some success for over 200 years, but it was hardly enough to build a movement strong enough to save the planet. At their zenith the Shakers numbered only about 6000, and now there are fewer than a dozen. Besides, the environmental fanatics don’t seem particularly interested in adoption. The subject comes up once in the Daily Mail article as an acceptable possibility, but there’s no evidence that our sterile heroine actually plans to do it. In this environmental religion, adoption is apparently something you can do if you really feel like it, but it’s not a serious group-survival strategy.

So I don’t think that the real point of this radical environmental religion is to actually save the planet. The point is a sense of self-righteousness, a sense of being one of the special people. And that’s not a bad thing in itself. Nearly every religion provides its followers with the comfort that they are the chosen people with the special knowledge.

Where radical environmentalism falls down as a religion is that it has no cosmology. It doesn’t explain what the point of being good is. In Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, the point of being good is to please God, and maybe get some advantage during life or after death. But since radical environmentalism doesn’t posit a God or afterlife, who is there to be pleased by the righteousness of its worshipers? If you’re a super-extra-special-good environmental fanatic like NoImpactMan, then what does any of that misery and effort get you beyond the similar psychic satisfaction that a rank-and-file believer derives from sorting his trash and watching Al Gore’s movie?

I see two answers, two alternate cosmologies than can fuel these believers.

First, it could be socialism, and I mean ’socialism’ in a very specific sense. Conservatives usually gloss over that word as a shorthand for any ideology that tends to grow government, but it has a very specific meaning and history. The etymologically curious should ask: What’s the ’social’ in ’socialism’? The answer is that the theoretical point of socialism isn’t actually to grow government for its own sake, but to give government enough power to radically reshape every level of society according to modern scientific thinking to create heaven on earth. Once upon a time people took that idea very seriously, and the big communist revolutions struggled mightily at the cost of millions of lives trying to achieve it. But it failed, and no one who knows much history can seriously argue that trying just a little harder for a little longer might have somehow created a new man for a new era of socialistic paradise.

Socialism has had its run as a major unacknowledged world religion, from the French Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall. No one really believes it any more, but they still find some comfort in reciting the old hymns, which is why you still read and hear little throwaway comments about how ‘the people’ are on the verge of rising up in violent revolution if the government doesn’t bow to socialist demands, or how we live in a Dickensian world of cold-hearted wealthy elites and downtrodden starving peasants. It’s all socialist malarkey that hasn’t changed significantly since the 1920s, just like the story about how the world would be a much, much better place if only we weren’t such bad people for not adequately celebrating diversity, being multiculturally sensitive, recycling our trash, supporting the revolution more vigorously, staying terrified of the myriad impending disasters, or whatever the crisis or sin du jour is. When the leaders promise utopia and it doesn’t appear, the blame will always fall on the followers, never on the leaders and certainly never on the religion itself.

So socialism can’t be fueling them, even if its language slips into their speech from time to time. I think that the modern environmental fanatics are fueled by something much more primitive and elemental. While the theological core of socialism was a belief in utopia on earth, core of this new religion seems to be hatred of humanity, including self-hatred. It’s a death cult: They want to die, and they want everyone else to die with them.

Fortunately, they aren’t violent about it. They’re content with death by sterility and severe government regulation. But death is still the point. Whatever the question, the answer is always fewer babies and a lower standard of living. It’s the common thread running through every aspect of their agenda, and it’s awfully hard to ignore in a newspaper article glorifying self-extinction.  So let’s call them what they are, and talk plainly about what they’re really advocating.

Imagine a race-based government.  Imagine a governmental panel set up to decide which of its citizens belong to the special race and which do not.  Imagine public schools that only special-race children can attend, and elections in which only special-race citizens can vote.

It sounds like some nightmare from the past, perhaps something from the Jim Crow South, or from some third-world hellhole, or from the distant past.  But this isn’t just our past, it may well be our future, right here in the United States of America.

Sen. Daniel Akaka has long been pushing for just such a government for native Hawaiians.  As explained here and here, the Akaka bill is coming up for a vote yet again.

It’s difficult to overstate how disastrous this bill would be, both practically and symbolically.  Suffice to say that the bill’s supporters openly admit that the bill could permit the new Hawaiian government to secede from the Union.  Didn’t we resolve that question back in 1864?

I don’t yet believe that this bill has a serious chance of succeeding, but it astonishes me that the Democrats would spend any political capital on it so close to a presidential election.  The more attention they call to this bill, the more attention they will call to just how far left they really are.

Once upon a time, the socialist utopians could pretend not to know that their experiments and revolutions would become the bloody horrors that they eventually became.  In an age of industrialization and rapid change in how people lived their lives, I can understand how people could have believed that an all-powerful government, armed with this new scientific knowledge, might have discovered the secrets to peace and prosperity.

But the modern left doesn’t have any of that.  They don’t even bother claiming it any more.  It has all been tried before, on grander scales than anyone today is willing to contemplate.  Socialists used to be like snake-oil salesmen: They would coax power from the people with elaborate and compelling stories about the wonderful modern world of universal happiness that was always just around the corner.  Today they’re just thugs who hope to scare you into giving them what they want.

And like most groups of thugs, modern liberalism is essentially a death cult.  Liberals don’t know what the future will bring, nor do they care.  They have surrendered to the primal despair that weighs on us all, the belief that life isn’t worth living.  The mild version of this despair is hedonism: We might as well have a great time before we all die.  But deeper levels of despair go beyond the hedonism into an embrace of death itself.

One’s own death isn’t enough under this death-cult mentality.  This despair’s internal logic apparently requires that the followers share the pain and suffering before they take their own lives.  Self-hatred gives them meaning, and that meaning energizes them to spread the word.

I think that the psychology is the same for jihadis, Earth liberation types, and racial separatists like Akaka.  To the outsider the movement seems bizarre because it so obviously can’t survive.  But to the believers, the certainty of doom is precisely the point.  If you’ve given up on life, then you have nothing to look forward to but a glorious, meaningful death.  The psychic satisfaction is the same whether it’s self-detonation in a crowded restaurant, laws that ensure California wildfires, or sending an entire state back into racial strife and separatism.  (If the Akaka bill passes, maybe next the Hawaiians will try to legalize slavery.)

I blame it mostly on poor theology.  We all have an urge to die.  We all feel the despair to some extent.  And our societies work best when we recognize that despair and push back against it.  But socialism has taught us otherwise.  It told us that our minds were blank slates, blobs of Silly Putty waiting to be molded into whatever shape our political masters decreed.  In truth, it was all just wishful thinking from the socialists; their utopian project wouldn’t work unless our minds were blank and malleable.

Today the trend is away from that socialist nonsense: How many people today really believe that boys would cuddle dolls and girls would play with dump trucks—and that this would be a good thing—if only we tried a little harder to reshape society?  But the collapse of socialist thinking doesn’t automatically bring back the old Christian theology that really worked.  Instead we just have a void.  We have no particular understanding of good and evil, right and wrong.  And people have tried to fill that void with searches for meaning like tattoos and piercings or inventing their own nonsensical religion on the fly.

And then there’s tribalism.  When people don’t have a mature religion to turn to, they can give themselves over to that primal instinct of group unity and hatred: We’re the good people, and all others are the bad people.  Or as a major far-left group puts it: “Para la raza, todo.  Fuera de la raza, nada.” (For the race, everything.  For those outside the race, nothing.)

It shouldn’t surprise us that large numbers of people embrace death, destruction, and chaos for their own sake.  It was always thus, and it will always be thus.  The best we can do is to see this profound despair for what it is, take power away from its followers to minimize the harm that they can do, and urge those followers to turn back towards life.

Spengler considers a love of life to be an acquired taste:

The better one gets to know the Jews, the more peculiar they appear. “Remember us unto life, O King who delights in life,” they pray on the solemn occasion of their New Year, which this year fell on September 13. Unfeigned and spontaneous delight in life is uniquely Jewish; the standard Jewish toast states, “To life!” while the most characteristic Jewish gibe admonishes, “Get a life!” We are not dealing here with so-called lust for life that involves a pile of broken dishes and a hangover the next morning. Instead, the Jews evince a liking for life as such. That is not only unusual; it is almost unnatural.

Life as such is not that likable. As Mephistopheles taunted Faust in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tragedy, life in its totality was fit only for a god, too hard a cracker for ordinary humans to digest. That seems to be the prevalent opinion across epochs and cultures. Socrates told us to despise life and instead to view death as the highest good. Buddhism teaches us to regard it as an illusion to inure ourselves from its attendant pain. From the Spartans to the Vikings, the martial cultures of the pagan world showed contempt for life, for they often fought to the death. Pagans aspired to a glorious death; I can think of not a single instance in the history of the Jews, whose wars of antiquity were frequent and ferocious, of the mention of a “glorious death”. The very notion is repulsive to Jewish sensibilities. (more…)

Mark Steyn perfectly describes Europe’s Islam problem.  He quotes Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick as saying that 9/11 “was also a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other,” and he points out that the suspects in the latest terrorist plot in Germany were named Daniel and Fritz.  And Fritz, at least, is ethnic German, converted to Islam in Germany at a multicultural center.

Then he gets to the heart of the problem:

Why do radical imams seek to convert young Canadian, British and even American men and women in their late teens and twenties? Because they understand that when you raise a generation in the great wobbling blancmange of Deval Patrick cultural relativism – nothing is any better or any worse than anything else; if people are “mean and nasty” to us, it’s only because we didn’t sing enough Barney the Dinosaur songs at them – in such a world a certain percentage of its youth will have a great gaping hole where their sense of identity should be. And into that hole you can pour something fierce and primal and implacable.

The good news is that the United States doesn’t have Europe’s demographic problems, so we have some time to close that hole and build a culture worth believing in.  The bad news is that this change of culture will probably take 20 years or so, until most of the fanatic baby boomers are packed away safely in nursing homes.  Then maybe we can get a more responsible generation in power, and they can push the culture toward something more sustainable.

Michelle Malkin reports on a new project by far-left group Iraq Veterans Against the War:

HELP END THE WAR!
BEFRIEND A RECRUITER!

Recruitment is essential for the military and politicians to carry out the war and occupation of Iraq. Recruitment levels are low thanks to “truth in recruiting” efforts, but now it is time to shut recruitment down. By flooding recruiters and recruitment centers with phone calls, appointments, questions, and smiling faces, recruiters will waste their time and resources on you. By calling and asking every question you can think off about all the false opportunities the military is offering, you are stealing away recruiters ability to do recruitment.

Like Michelle, I don’t see how this could fail to be sedition, though blogger Allah has done some research and claims that nobody could be convicted of a crime.  I’m not convinced.  Maybe you couldn’t prove a crime by the people who actually do this, but surely you could prove a crime by the people who put the web site together.  Those people are very open about their intent to disrupt the operations of the US military.  As I recall from law school, criminal conspiracy statutes are usually pretty darn broad.  The real problem is that prosecution wouldn’t politically feasible.

I sure hope that the left’s “Don’t you dare question my patriotism” line has worn itself out by now.

The good news is that their plan is pretty silly.  Rabid leftists are brave in groups, but I doubt that they could do much as individuals.  Besides, in essence they would be pitting their own resources against the US Treasury.  I would be surprised if more than a handful tried this preposterous stunt, and they would fail.  Only the fanatics would be bold enough to try it, and they would be the least capable of keeping their cool.

A Belgian political party wanted to stage a protest on 9/11 calling on the government to push back against Muslim influence in Belgium. The mayor of Brussels, Freddy Thielemans, decided that this protest would interfere with public order, and so forbade it. Some of the protestors showed up anyway:

Police arrested two leaders of a Belgian far-right party Tuesday for staging an illegal protest against the “Islamization of Europe,” six years to the day after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

Police scuffled with some of the 200 people who converged on two squares in the EU district of Brussels to protest what they perceived as the rise of Islam as a significant political force across Europe. Officers handcuffed two leaders of the far-right Flemish Interest Party, which is very critical of Muslim immigrants, and took them away in police vans.

. . .

Only 200 or so protesters showed up Tuesday for a protest lasting only 30 minutes. The demonstrators faced more than 100 police, backed up by water cannons and helicopters, who closed off streets around the EU headquarters.

“We support the goals of the demonstration to protest against the lack of freedom of expression in this country,” said Frank Vanhecke, the head of the Flemish Interest Party, before he was bundle