Europe
has many fine traditions. Its newest tradition is the burning car. Why burn
cars? Because, as George Mallory once said of mountains, they’re there. There
are lots of cars around and if you’re a member of a perpetually unemployed
tribe that wandered up north and forages on social services, you might as well
do something to pass the time.
Burning
houses is a lot of work and house fires spread. Car fires are simpler. In a
welfare state everyone has houses but not everyone has cars. Burning cars is a
way to stick it to those who work for a living. It’s also a way to drive off
the members of the sickly Swedish tribe and claim the area for your own. And
it’s also fun.
Either
you have a plan for buying a car or for burning a car. Considering the Muslim
unemployment rates in Sweden, France and everywhere else, it’s safe to say the
car burners don’t have future plans that involve saving up for a car or taking
out a loan for a car or finding work. Cars are things that they steal, either
the usual way or by defrauding social services. They might get a car by dealing
drugs, but those cars are disposable. One day they’ll have to burn them anyway.
If
you’re the product of an industrialized culture, then you think of a car as a
product of work. You realize that it’s the product of countless raw materials,
that the metals had to be dug out of the earth, that the machines that make it
had to be assembled and that men had to stand around putting that into place.
And you might be one of those men. And if you aren’t, then you might know
someone who is.
But
if you come from a pre-industrial culture which may have factories, PhDs and
cars, but no sense of the connection between product, innovation and effort,
then why not burn a car or a city? Things fall into the category of that which
you and your family own… and that which they do not. Anything in the latter
category may be stolen or vandalized because it has no value.
The
notion of a painting in a museum or a scientific principle or an eagle soaring
over a lake having value is an abstract notion to you. Value to you is your own
identity. A painting is valuable if you own it. If it sits in a museum, then
you can either steal it or burn down the museum. The principle is worthless
unless you can cash in on it. The eagle is worthless unless you can kill it or
identify with it.
Some
people would call that savagery, but that sort of talk is politically
incorrect. And we all know that there are no such things as savages. The true
savages are the people who use scientific principles to make cars and then use
the money to commission paintings of soaring eagles for museums because they
are greedy exploiters of the planet. On the other hand, the noble savages whose
herds of sheep and goats turn fertile land into desert, who burned the great
libraries of civilization and who believe that the hair of women emits rays
that passing airplanes have to be protected from are close to nature.
A car
is just a metaphor. You drive it to work because you work somewhere. You drive
it on family vacations because you don’t get to spend enough time with your
family because you and they are all doing things. You’re not sitting around
your house with your two wives and eleven kids plotting new ways to scam social
services. You go places because you’re still the product of a culture that
likes the idea of new frontiers. Your car isn’t exactly Columbus’ flagship, but
it takes you places. It’s a sign of progress. That’s why you own cars, instead
of burning them.
Civilization
is not a product, it’s a process. You can’t export it. You can ship a bunch of
cars to Somalia, but you can’t ship the process that makes a culture build a
car. You can hand out PhD’s to them based on knowledge and test taking skills,
but you can’t endow them with a respect for ideas.
You
can set up democratic elections in Afghanistan and Egypt, but you can’t export
the process that explains why the elections shouldn’t be abolished after the
side with the most guns wins.
That’s
just as true of a lot of the second and third generation immigrants who are no
more Swedes than the South Africans became Africans or the English settlers of
the American Colonies became Indians. They may own iPhones, dye their hair and
listen to the same music that you do, but they often don’t have the same
assumptions. They bought the product, but not the process. They can drive cars
and when they get bored, they can burn them, because they aren’t their cars.
They’re your cars.
And
the hair dye and the music and the democratic elections aren’t theirs either.
Those are things they took from you and if they get bored with them, they’ll
put on Hijabs, ban music and go back to tyranny, because what they have is a
product, not a process. They walked into the movie in the middle and they like
some of it, but it’s confusing and they don’t understand why the hero doesn’t
just shoot the villain in the head, take his woman and then raise a dozen
children in his lair.
After
the riots die down and the fires are put out, there will be more talk about
integrating them, but what are they being integrated into; a culture that
doesn’t resist when their cars are torched? Why would they want to join a
culture that leaves you unable to protect what is yours? Why would anyone join
a culture that makes you so weak and impotent that anyone can come and take
what belongs to you?
It’s
a movie that makes sense if you were there back in the 19th, but not if you
suddenly walked in around 1965 or 1995. It’s the outcome of a historical
process that is hard to explain to people who were never part of the process.
They know how the story came out, but not why it matters. And even if they
could, their priorities are different. They didn’t come here to meld into some
gelatinous brotherhood of man but to make life better for their clans.
Most
people plan for the future, they just do it in different ways. In Sweden, they
plan to buy a car. In Iraq or Somalia, they plan to have eight kids. In Sweden,
there isn’t supposed to be a biological tribe anymore. Everyone is meant to
belong to the progressive transnational tribe which lets you have the good
things in life so long as you make some kind of vague commitment to pay more
and share them with others. But the savages of Stockholm already have a tribe.
And their tribe isn’t big on sharing and is a lot more useful in a tight spot.
While
the Swedes save up for cars, the Iraqis scam social services for their eight
kids. And the demographics suggest that eight kids and no cars beats two cars
and one child. Keep multiplying those numbers and the future will have fewer
Swedes and fewer cars and a lot more bored Iraqi kids running through what used
to be genteel suburbs looking for Swedes or cars to burn.
The
native multiculturalists are post-tribal, but the multiple cultures settling
there aren’t. It’s a war that can’t be discussed except with the usual
accusations of xenophobia and oppression. But those are useless crutches of
dogma. They don’t do much to restore a burned Audi. This is a conflict between
cultures that make things and cultures that take them, between cultures that
live for the moment and cultures that live for the next thousand years of
manifest destiny.
The
Western ideal has been reduced to a personal technocratic utopia built on
efficiency and it has collided in the night with an Eastern ideal of the clan
and a theocratic utopia built on total purity. That is the kind of conflict
that the creed of good fences for good neighbors was meant for, but there are
no fences tall enough to work it out within a single nation.
Both
West and East have their own processes. And both
processes
are colliding. The Swedes bring their cars and the savages bring their flames.
The burning cars are a metaphor for the impact of Muslim immigration on Sweden
and the West.
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