All wars
are wars of equals.
That’s
true in the sense that each side attacks the other in terms of how it defines
itself as an entity. States try to destroy other states. Religions fight other
religions. Ethnic groups and races engage in genocide. They do this even when
the other side does not see itself in the same terms.
The
United States tried to fight guerrillas and terrorists as if they were modern
states with their own industrial military organizations protecting their industrial
core. This tactic made no sense in Vietnam or even Iraq because that wasn’t the
enemy we were facing. But states are built to fight other states. Tribes are
built to fight other tribes. Religions are built to fight other religions.
The
modern multicultural super-tolerant western state of this century takes stock
of its strongest point, and decides that it’s not the old industrial machine,
which destroys the environment, its traditional heritage, which is problematic,
or its problem solving skills, which are too technical, but its values of
super-tolerant multiculturalism. And so it wages war on those insane terms.
The old
Western model of war was brutal and efficient. Protect the industrial plant.
Use it to churn out more military hardware. Smash the enemy. The new Western
model of war is protect social harmony. Create more diversity. And the enemy
will eventually be drawn into our global harmony.
When
liberals take every terror attack as an opportunity to lecture us on the vital
importance of not losing “our values”, they are in their own warped and useless
way waging war. In the
20th century, war was distilled down to an industrial core. In the 21st
century, the anti-industrial rebels who want to de-industrialize manufacturing
while industrializing society, have distilled all that matters down to their
values. In their confused world order, the terrorists are attacking “our
values” and we in turn must attack “their values” with our superior “values”.
Barely
half the country accepts their construct of what “our values” are and they have
no idea whatsoever what “their values” are, but they assume that just as our
values are “our values” so too “their values” are also “our values”. This is
the sort of thing you do if you’re an ideologue.
And also
it’s a natural human shortcut. It’s human nature to assume that people
different from you are just dumber, nastier versions of yourself who have the
same basic goals and organization as you do.
Ideologues
are most likely to assume that everyone agrees with their premises, but just
hasn’t been shown the right textbooks. And these days ideologues and their
textbooks dominate everything.
To the
left, Islam is an inefficient sort of Socialism dependent on medieval
superstition and lacking modern idea. To Muslims, the left is an inefficient
sort of Islam that’s missing Allah, Mohammed and the Koran. It’s all just a
problem of explanations and textbooks.
The left
plans to defeat ISIS with “our values” by which it means showing how effective
our social harmony is, which it isn’t, by refusing to actually fight Islamic
terrorism. Eventually the Jihadists will give up their reactionary ways as the
ordinary Muslims realizes that he has the same interests as the rest of the
great rainbow coalition does. This hasn’t even worked too well in Europe.
The left
is a purely ideological entity and so it has reduced our countries and cultures
to the transportable “our values”. Despite Islam’s ideological reach, it’s not
purely an ideological entity.
At the
ground floor, Islam is tribal. The Iraqis viewed us as the American Tribe.
Tribes raid each other. Their members lash out and kill each other over
insults. They count coup on each other. They steal and humiliate each other’s
women. Tribes are nomadic and they are concerned with honor.
Tribes
from Iraq, Syria and North Africa can come to Europe, set up their own
territories, pile up loot and then humiliate the native women for New Year’s
Eve. And then laugh at the impotence of the European tribal authorities.
The
Islamic no-go zones are seen primarily as religious, but they are also tribal.
Islam incorporates both. Islamic migration also expands tribal territories.
It’s always been that way.
And this
is also how Muslims fight us on a tribal level. They attack the honor of the European
tribes. But it’s not as if the Merkel government or any of the other European
Socialist governments have any concept of honor anyway.
While
European Socialists attempt to integrate them with “our values”, the ungrateful
integratees show that the systems have no honor on a tribal level and are not
worth taking seriously.
Beyond
the tribal, is the religious. In Islam, religion remains limited to the most
primitive level of “My tribal deity Allah is stronger than your deity because
we beat you up.” This is literally what Allahu Akbar means.
To the
representatives of the secular West, religion is identical with “our values”,
which is to say that it contains nothing religious about it, certainly no
claims which require divine validation or unique truths. Their religion is a
spiritual background noise which affirms the essential position that we should
be nice to each other while providing support for any leftist position of the
moment.
No
meaningful dialogue is possible between Allahu Akbar and “Our values” because
the two are not speaking the same language except in one sense, both insist on
absolute submission. But the left’s demand for submission is based on the
absolute moral superiority of “Our values”. Islam literally means submission,
but its moral superiority is a revealed truth based on Islam’s military
victories. Islam is right, because it won. It won, because it’s right. There’s
your cycle of violence in a nutshell.
Islam
sanctified the tribal raid as a religious act and turned the dead into martyrs.
That’s Jihad. Terrorism incorporates both the tribal and the religious. Islamic
missionary activity in the West also targets dissatisfied minorities, potential
fifth columns, in the same manner as the original Arab Islamic conquests did.
Even here, Islam unites tribal and religious tactics.
The final
element of the tribal war is organizational. It is here that Islam attacks “Our
values”.
Tribes
are forever quarreling. They are weakest at their points of mutual association.
This is how Mohammed originally got his start. Islam expanded initially more
through clever games of divide and conquer than military strategy.
To the
Muslim mind, we are a series of fragile tribal associations. That is also how
we appear to the “Our values” left. The “Our values” crowd thinks of the threat
in terms of “radicalization”, but the real threat is “integration”.
Mohammed
did some of his best work by undermining from within. To undermine a tribal
association, you have to be a part of it. Then you have to raise grievances,
find other dissatisfied allies and eventually promise them better treatment
under Islam. That’s what Mohammed did. It’s what his followers are doing today.
This is where groups like the Muslim Brotherhood play the long game while ISIS
plays the short game.
The
left’s multicultural vision made this mess possible. It’s also making it worse.
The left despises tribal thinking and yet its entire political infrastructure
is built on rewarding it. All Islamic organizations have had to do is built on
the left’s own work, joining its coalitions as Islamic groups, and then working
to hijack them. The growing takeover of Black Lives Matter by Muslim groups is
one example of the phenomenon.
Our
enemies are not states and they will not fight us as states. To the extent that
they are tribal, they will fight us as tribes. To the extent that they are
religious, in a primitive sort of way, they will attack us that way. But the
real problem is that we are no longer states either. Instead we are in the grip
of a mystical deluded cult that squawks of “Our values” while tribalizing and
dividing us to push through discredited economic and social policies. They have
opened the gates to a cruel, backward enemy. And in doing so, they have brought
a tribal war into our own homelands.
Follow Daniel Greenfield’s daily blog Sultan Knish.
Follow Daniel Greenfield’s daily blog Sultan Knish.
No comments:
Post a Comment