Islamogenic Terrorism

The Paris terrorist attack of November 13  is finished.  Police action in both St Denis and Molenbeek have disrupted the ISIS network which was immediately responsible. According to French security officials another 11,000 ISIS sympathisers could still be in France. The EU’s Schengen Treaty may not survive. The EU may not survive. Europe, of course, will survive despite what the enemies of Western Culture hope.

The World Climate meeting which is currently gathered in Paris includes many people who will speak to the question of “anthropogenic climate change”.  When it comes to the physical environment in which we live there is no question at all about whether ideas have consequences. Of course they do. There is also no doubt in the minds of climate activists that the general good, the welfare of humanity into the future, demands that the correct ideas about how to view the natural world and how to manage our interactions with it.  We can’t assume the “bounty of nature” will be inexhaustible. Conservation, sustainability, and showing respect for the natural world are high values.  To live appropriately is to live “gently on the land” and to “leave it as you found it”. To live in harmony with nature is to accept the obvious fact that each ecosystem is unique and the celebration of true diversity means to keep apart those species which do not belong together.  All intelligent and educated people in the West endorse these ideas. Whether they truly believe that “climate change” is primarily due to human influences or mostly natural processes the ideals of living gently with the environment, of not polluting, of “sustainability” and of not wasting natural resources are seen as good in their own right.

How different it is when the same people come to terms with the preservation of human societies.  They split into two groups. One group sees the primary importance the protection of the physical ecosystem within which we all live. The other is concerned about the preservation of Western Civilisation which is to many observers the best culture humanity has ever produced.

In fact there are not really two groups. Those who see Western Culture as humanity’s best arrangement so far are not averse to protecting the physical environment. On the other hand, those who place the protection of Gaia at the focal point of their concerns are filled with criticisms of Western Societies and are correspondingly muted about the others.

Which brings us back to the question of what is the cause of the terrorist attacks we see not just in Paris, not just in Nairobi, not just in Madrid, not just in London, and not just in Mali, but Ankara, Syria, Iraq, Cairo, and scores of other places.

If we are able to discuss “anthropogenic climate change” then why is it we never hear a sustained discussion of “islamogenic terrorism”?  Is it just an odd coincidence that so many of the world’s present terrorist organisations claim to be acting in accordance with Islamic teaching, tirelessly quoting the Koran and the Hadith, and otherwise informing us that Mohammad was the world’s most perfect human being?

A week after the Paris terrorist attacks of Friday 13, 2015, we saw a crowd of 30 Moslems protesting against the terrorist violence done in the name of Islam. One crowd. Once. Elsewhere we were told of numerous demonstrations by concerned people who wanted to opposed the “islamophobic racism” (somewhere in the middle of the last 10 years the concept of “race” has been conflated with the idea of “culture” but that inquiry must wait).  In a football match in Turkey two days after the Paris attacks the announcer called for a minute of silence out of respect for those who died. Many in the crowd were no doubt respectful. There were others, however, who shouted “Allahu Akbar” and other jijadi slogans.

Hillary Clinton has energetically insisted that “Islam” has nothing to do with “ISIS”. Mrs Clinton, we are to suppose, understands Islam in a better and more nuanced fashion than does Abubakr Al Baghdadi who is the leader of ISIS.  After all, Al Baghdadi justifies everything he decrees and all of the actions of his ISIS fighters with verses from the Koran, the Hadith or other Islamic sources.

Mrs Clinton is apparently putting herself forward as a more insightful expert on the nature of ISIS than

There are crypto-marxist attempts to locate the “root causes” of Islamic terrorism not in Islam  but in the conditions of material deprivation or racial discrimination. Since the people who live in Moldebeek are marginalised from the mainstream of society it is that marginalisation and not the worldview of Islam which sends them off to maim, behead, stone, and immolate others in Syria and then to bring back those actions to Paris, London, Madrid, and other Western cities.

If this “material deprivation” psychology were correct we would expect to see the desperately poor of Latin America travelling hundreds or thousands of miles to join drug cartels.

Why don’t the native populations of North America and Australia form themselves into terror groups and wage jihad on the dominant culture?

The Marxist analysis, in its emphasis on mere materialism, is at the very least culturally dismissive and much more likely to be rooted in outright racism.

The closest parallels linking terrorism to culture we can find are in the Eta separatists of Spain, the IRA of the UK, and the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka. These groups, of course, grounded their actions not in the soaring prose of Das Kapital but in the ideals of cultural identity and cultural preservation.

The IRA, Eta, and other such “nativist” groups for all their unpleasantness rooted their identity in a geographic region of the world. The IRA, for example, laid no claims to Scotland let alone Iceland or Madagascar.

Islam, in contrast, seeks to dominate the entirety of the human race. The ideology of Islam is world conquest.

Immediately there are those who will object and say this is also true of Christianity.

The  difference, and it is important, between the Christian quest for universal acceptance and that of Islam lies in the nature of the two beliefs themselves.  After all, even Mrs Clinton believes that the eventual acceptance of *some* ideas is inevitable.  She expresses this confidence when she speaks of “the right side of history” with reference to the unavoidability of her concept of acceptance for those of various sexual orientations. So confident was she in this inevitability that she and the Obama administration withheld foreign aid from African countries which did not remove their “homophobic” laws.

Islamists, Marxists, and progressives more generally seem to believe that since the world they envisage is inevitable then it cannot be morally wrong to use force and the threat of force to bring it about more quickly.

If the Ends are Just, the Means are Justifiable.

So much for the “Rule of Law” and the accompanying idea of “Due Process”.

The current strain of Political Correctness is an odd fusion of the relentlessly reductionist materialism of Frederick Engels’ “Scientific Socialism” lead by intellectuals and technocrats and the “Utopian Socialism” of Charles Fourier which was lead by a “morally pure elite”. 

Fourier, we should also note, was the man who coined the word “feminism” in 1837. One could even call him, along with J.J. Bachofen,  one of “The Founding Fathers of Feminism”.

In both cases there was an “elite” group which either because of the endless hours of intense ideological study or some other more ethereal reason, was able to “know” what path the human race should and eventually would follow.  Joseph Schumpeter regarded the idea of “scientific socialism” as little more than the attempt to establish a secular priesthood of those who for whatever reason wanted to rule society under the aegis of the legitimising mantle of science.  Christopher Lasch went further and saw the elites not as seeking to bring about a better world for everyone because such a dream would eventually hold the members of the elite group up to the standard of actually achieving the promised “better world”.

Instead, the new breed of “cultural marxists” (and I note in passing that this term is now considered to be politically incorrect by Wikipedia which brands it as a “conspiracy theory”  (here) so an alternative interpretation of the concept is also available (here) and more pointed analysis is here for those who wish to make the comparison. In any case one of the central works in this canon is The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno.

Those who read this book will discover a writing style which is forever following the “critical project” of first starting to build an coherent worldview and then tearing it down again because of some or other internal flaw. The only allowable society is one which is perfect (at least in the estimation of the authors of the book) and by the end of it the reader is left bewildered and unsure where to turn for leadership. In some ways it is a guided tour on how to “divide” – in preparation for cultural conquest – any society’s concept of order and justice.

What Lasch understood in The Revolt of the Elites was the agenda of the new, post-modern, “cultural marxist” elites differed substantially from the agenda of the old “materialist marxist” elites.  The new agenda is not to build heaven on earth at all. It is simply to keep the rest of the population sufficiently divided, demoralised, and confused that they would not be able to remove the existing elites from their dominance or even, in most cases, know who they were at all. The Cultural Marxist project is solely to protect the hegemony of the Cultural Marxist elite. 

Demoralisation was initially one of the key stages of general communist subversion during the period of the USSR.  A key source in the revelation of this material was Yuri Bezmenov – the Edward Snowden of his day – except that his revelations exposed the plans of the the KGB, not the CIA.

How else can we explain the recent decision of Mount Holyoke College (a women’s college) to ban the play “The Vagina Monologues” because it discriminates against women who don’t have vaginas? Or a mother who discovers she hates the race of her own son?

Another two  facts for the “Stuff Nobody Could Make Up” file.

All of reality is a social construction. Reality is entirely  due to “ideas” and this belief extends so far as to impinge on basic biology.

On the other hand, it is entirely untrue that the ideas of Islam can have anything at all to do with Terrorism.

Ideas are totally responsible for the way the world works. Except when they are not.

And how do we know the difference?

Our Ruling Elites will tell us.

When those who arrive in the materially prosperous West from corrupt and violent societies in the Islamic world come into direct contact not just with opulence but also with a society run by elites (media, academic, legal, political, and financial) who are apparently unwilling to acknowledge the biological reality of “sex”  — which apparently arose through evolutionary processes about 565 million years ago — and instead insist that all meaning concepts in life are “socially constructed”.

To flee a politically and economically incoherent society in search of a better life is normal. To recoil against a society which cannot tell the difference between reality and delusion is almost certain to force the newcomers back into their own cultural roots.  Sharia law may be harsh but it is to a large degree predictable and stable.

What causes the retreat of these young newcomers into the deep recesses of Wahhabi extremism – ISIS is after all Wahhabi Islam in uniform – is not the material deprivations they encounter in the West. It is the utter moral and cultural incoherence of the world they have entered. Those of us who were born and raised in the West can retreat into our own cultural roots. Those who are newly arrived from radically different cultural traditions have no such redoubt. They must look for cultural certainty and stability elsewhere.

The grand deracination project of contemporary educational curricula has done incalculable damage but has not yet rooted out the culture fully.

Anyone who seriously studies Islam knows its essence is world domination through conquest. Anyone who tries to find a moral and intellectual alternative to this worldview in the modern politically correct West will be deeply disappointed.  The contemporary West is consumed with concern for “microaggressions” which put strangers at risk for offenses not actually committed but merely imagined in the minds of people who belong to certain groups understood to be in one way or another the “victims” of Western Culture. And when The Atlantic magazine notices this phenomenon it is not a mere fantasy of conspiracy theorists.

With cultural commentators in the West so cowed by the fear of fabricated accusations coming from any and all quarters it is no wonder the silence is everywhere. Silence and withdrawal from the public sphere are classic symptoms of those subjected to (yes, victims of) psychological abuse.

Is the terrorism of ISIS (or Daesch as it known in the Islamic world) Islamic? Obviously. It draws inspiration and legitimacy from the most primordial roots of the Islamic worldview, the Koran and the Hadith, as well as the constant retellings of the glories of Islamic culture and the sins of the Christian Crusaders of the West.

Islamic terrorism is indeed Islamic but it is amplified by the absolute failure of the West to respond with anything other than military attacks on the one hand and exhibitions of craven capitulation on the other.

We need to accept that the roots of Islamic Terrorism draw considerable nourishment from the decay and rot of the West as brought on by Cultural Marxism. Causes have causes.

At no point whatever do the voices of the West offer to those who are newly arrived the intellectual, moral,  and religious factors responsible for Western Uniqueness.  To understand how these points can be made one can read many books. Two of interest: Ricardo Duchesne’s “The Uniqueness of Western Civilisation” and Roger Scruton’s “The West and the Rest.”

When Western Elites stop hating Western Culture those elsewhere in the world may stop hating it as well.

Rachel and Caitlyn. Subjectivity and Objectivity. Individuals and Groups. Trust and Justice.

By now everyone has learned more than they really cared to learn about Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner. The formerly male Olympic gold medalist is now female.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caitlyn_Jenner

Just as this was fading in the news cycle we are given another name to conjure: Rachel Dolezal. Rachel is a professor African American Studies in East Washington University (Spokane) and describes herself as an “African American woman”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal

Her parents claim she is white. They have provided photos of her revealing her to be a blue-eyed blonde.

Rachel resigned as the head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP on June 15 (the 800th Anniversary of Magna Carta) and is reported to be in seclusion at this writing. In the next few days and perhaps weeks the media will be relentlessly picking apart Rachel’s life and spreading it out before anyone who cares to look. In all likelihood the focus will be on the individuals and their unique social circumstances. The “rationalities” that will be sought in these dissections will all be one way or the other “local”.

There are three pairs of rationalities which are illustrated in these two cases. Subjectivity and Objectivity, Individuals and Groups, Trust and Justice. These three dimensions and the focal points we choose to take along each of them determines for us how we will experience “identity” in many of life’s situations. The complexities of the first two dictate to some extent who we trust and how we experience or define justice in our social dealings.

In terms of objectivity, we have some fairly good evidence to support calling Bruce Jenner biologically male and Rachel Dolezal biologically white. Rachel’s case is a bit more difficult because the male/female distinction is usually determined by a few physical attributes and the XX or XY chromosome difference. Race, while being “observable” and so to some extent “objective” is on a number of sliding scales. Both sex and race designations make predictions (challenged or not) about attitudes, beliefs, and abilities.

The social constructivist school regards almost all differences as the result of ‘nurture’ and not ‘nature’, of the social roles we play and not our biology.

From this perspective, the (white?) woman known as Caitlyn Jenner came into social existence in June of 2015. I’m assuming Caitlyn is white. I may be wrong on this.

Rachel Dolezal’s arrival as a black woman took place about 20 years ago. In terms of “time in role” it is possible to argue Rachel is “more black” than Caitlyn is “female”.

But maybe “time in role” is not important. Maybe it’s how each of us “feels” that is important. Maybe, too, the facility with which we play the roles is the crucial factor. If the role does not require any specifically biological attribute (such as are given by genitalia or the need for SPF 50 in winter) then we could possibly argue that the way the role is played is more important than anything else.

If we take this seriously then we have a problem with the designation of certain “visible” (that is “objective”) criteria for affirmative action considerations. In some settings now applicants are asked to “self-identify” as it relates to their racial, sexual, gender, orientational, or other category. Could able-bodied people “self-identify” as disabled in order to get better parking spots?

Caitlyn did not in all probability emerge from Bruce because some affirmative action employment advantage was available. Did Rachel find in her early school career a strong interest in “African American studies” and come to the conclusion her employment opportunities would be substantially enhanced if her “birth race” were otherwise?

If the categories of race and sex and gender are used as visible proxies for assumed lacks of opportunities are hardships in early life then are these policies not making a huge problem? What about the “hidden injuries” of poverty, homelessness, and simple isolation from networks and resources that are taken for granted by the children of privilege?

In 1972, British author Richard Sennett wrote “The Hidden Injuries of Class”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sennett

Will President Obama’s daughters ever be asked to check theirs?

The children of the relatively disadvantaged: those who grow up in poor parts of town and attend inferior schools and do not have well-connected and stimulating friends, they are all reminded of one fact of life when they are growing up.

Poor people have little if any margin for error. The smaller your margin for error, the more you will rely on the predictability of the rules of the game to be able to plan for an honest and successful life. It’s not enough for the system to be fair or the playing field to be level. They need to be stable. Stability is even more important than fairness or levelness as long as these two are not too extreme.

The honest disadvantaged people in this world need to trust that the rules won’t change. Nobody really expects perfectly fair rules. At least not once they get to be seven or eight years old. What they do want is for the rules to be stable. Cheating is “breaking the rules” much more than it is “getting a lucky break in life” because of who our parents are or the country in which we were born.

When we decide as “individuals” we want to think of ourselves as male or female or oriental or occidental that’s one thing. When we take these “self-designations” into a biased context which will assign selective advantage to some choices more than to others then charges of “cheating” may arise.

Cheating brings up the idea of “local rationality”. Some CEOs define their corporate actions as “rational” from the point of view of “increasing shareholder value”. Moving the frame of reference a bit it may be possible to see that putting 50,000 people out of work by closing a profitable but marginal facility does not so much “increase shareholder value” as much as cost the wider community far more money because of the increased need for social service expenditures and these costs will be passed on to taxpayers. Increasing shareholder value may be another way of phrasing “redistributing wealth to the benefit of those who are already wealthy”.

Rachel may be just as subjectively sure of her identity as being that of a “black” person as Caitlyn is of her identity as a “female” person.

The larger social problems begin when the subjectivity of these assignments is applied to categories which have group or collective impact. What would happen to the Affirmative Action or Positive Discrimination policies of companies and government agencies if all applicants just decided to “self-identify” as African American Lesbians?

Are we going to wind up having to enunciate our own variants of the Nuremberg Laws? Are the now abandoned Apartheid Laws of South African going to appear to future generations as models of simplicity and clarity? What does it mean to be “black” in America? In 1961, the white southern male John Howard Griffin wrote “Black Like Me”. He used walnut oil to make his skin dark, he shaved his head, and he set off to live like a black man in the southern states of the US in 1959.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Like_Me

These questions lurk just below the surface of the coverage of the Jenner and Dolezal diversions. If we look more closely at the underlying social context of these events and pay less attention to the personal factors involved in each we can ask better questions.

What do we mean by “identity” and how do we determine what “objective” collective policies should be when all of the identity categories to which they apply are “subjective”?

Societies, like physical structures, cannot progress to their next level of development until the already existing levels are stable. It is this stability which gives people the degree of trust they need to make informed choices in the present because of what they anticipate will result in the future. When these factors are damaged or destroyed the first people to suffer are those who are honest and hard working and just coincidentally come from modest backgrounds.

The difficulties do not stop there. Collective trust and predictability are the psychological equivalent of glue. Societies are stable only to the degree people can predict one-another’s actions and trust one-another’s motives and intentions. This is one reason why now, as the global order is under so much pressure to change, we see the unmistakable rise of ethnic and tribal loyalties. These are loyalties which are assumed to be more stable and more enduring than contractual obligations defined by written documents and interpreted by members of one or another group of intelligentsia.

This brings us to the context of this comment. Followers of George Lakoff will call it “framing” while Jürgen Habermas enthusiasts will detect “systematically distorted communication”.

The focus can either be “individual” or “group”, the interpretative dimension can be either “subjective” or “objective” and the trajectory of the narrative can either be directed towards the goal of “people feeling good about themselves” or “maintaining a social order which fosters trust and stability”.

Is there an opportunity here to open up a conversation examining the potential conflict in a society which celebrates local short-term rationality so much its own collective long-term rationality is being called into question?

We can only hope the pundits and sages can find a little time, in between segments picking apart the childhood difficulties of the temporarily famous, to ask themselves if they are contributing positively to making the world a bit more stable and predictable for those who need it most.