September 22, 2006

When was the last time a Muslim country invaded a Christian country?

A reader asked me this question and I've had a hard time coming up with a good answer. He suggested Indonesia's occupation of the ex-Portuguese colony of East Timor in 1975, which I guess would be a reasonable answer, but the scale was pretty small.

Perhaps the 1990s war between Muslim Eritrea and semi-Christian Ethiopia out in the Ogaden desert? Who invaded whom?

There have lots of civil wars with a Muslim vs. Christian angle, such as Lebanon or, to a less vivid extent, the 1967-1970 Nigerian civil war, but they took place within recognized national boundaries.

The Ottoman Turks used to kick Southeastern Europe around pretty hard, twice threatening Vienna, but later the Sultanate was the Sick Man of Europe for centuries. The Turks were fighting most of the time from 1908 to 1922, but they were mostly on the defensive. Armenia was not independent in 1915, so I don't think that would quite qualify.

Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a small war in the early 1990s over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave within Azerbaijan, with Armenia mostly winning, but to find out whether Azerbaijan ever invaded Armenia, I'd have to read the single longest Wikipedia article I've ever seen. Judging from the effort put into this essay, I'd guess that this war still evinces a lot of passions, so (for once in my life) I'm not going to open that particular can of worms.

There are lots of examples of irregular Muslim raids on Christendom. For example, the Barbary pirates kidnapped something like one million Christians into slavery, even raiding Iceland apparently, before being put down by the Royal Navy the year after Waterloo. But it's hard to say whether that would qualify as an invasion.

The point is not that Muslims didn't want to invade Christian countries, but that for various reasons, Muslim countries (other than the Turks) tended not to be able to get their act together enough to carry out their aggressive urges, unlike Christian states, which long found preying on Muslim states fairly easy.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Low Asian birthrates

A reader who lived in three East Asian countries for a decade writes from China:

As with the rest of the world, young people are deserting the farms to go live in the cities. The young men who remain on the family farm cannot find wife in their home country (Japan, Korea, Taiwan). So, they go for mail order brides from China, Vietnam, and Thailand. However, China is no good anymore because China also has bride shortage as well. This leaves Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. Indonesia is out because it is Muslim.

However, the birth rate is rapidly declining even in Thailand and Vietnam as well as the rest of South East Asia.

The 800 lbs explanation that Mark Steyn overlooks for the decline of Asian birthrates is because it is now expensive to raise kids in Asia (except in the poor parts of S.E. Asia). This is partly due to urbanization, but also to the great expectations required to properly raise kids in Asia, mainly high education. Schools (primary, secondary, and university) are even more expensive, relative to mean income, than they are in the U.S. Housing is also more expensive (relative to income) than in the U.S.

(Medical care is cheaper. That's because it is less regulated and bureaucratized than in the U.S.)

Housing in Asia does not mean single family detached housing in leafy suburbs, as it does in the U.S. Rather, it refers to the luxury 3 bedroom condominium in the fashionable high-rise. Compared to U.S. suburbs, urban high-rise living is not conducive to having kids.

The reason why even the poor people in Asia are no longer having kids is because, in Asia, it is great shame to have kids and not provide decent upbringing to them. To have kids without being financially prepared for them marks one as being "low class" and is a source of shame.

Lastly, fewer people are having kids because, in the high-rise urban environment, there is lots of fun to be had by traveling and partying a lot.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 21, 2006

Mexican-American racial admixture differences by class

One of the important issues for understanding the future of American society is the correlation between assimilation and racial ancestry among Hispanics, especially Mexican-Americans. Several readers have pointed me toward the following study, which suggests that there is relationship. Here is the the abstract, but it doesn't say what the actual numbers are.

Can anybody find the original online and send it to me?

Relationship of prevalence of non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus to Amerindian admixture in the Mexican Americans of San Antonio, Texas

Dr. Ranajit Chakraborty, Robert E. Ferrell, Michael P. Stern, Steven M. Haffner, Helen P. Hazuda, Marc Rosenthal, D. C. Rao

Abstract A genetic and epidemiological survey of non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM) was conducted among the Mexican Americans residing in three socio-economically distinct areas of San Antonio, Texas: a low socioeconomic (SES) traditional area (barrio), a middle SES, ethnically balanced area (transitional), and a high SES, predominantly Anglo area (suburb). Seventeen polymorphic markers were used to relate the prevalences of NIDDM with the extent of Amerindian ancestry of 1,237 Mexican Americans of these three residential areas. While only the RH and haptoglobin loci showed evidence of association with NIDDM, an admixture analysis of the combined allele frequency data revealed a pattern of decreasing NIDDM prevalence with increasing socioeconomic status (as approximated by neighborhood of residence) and a parallel decrease in Amerindian ancestry. The rank-order correlation between NIDDM prevalence and Amerindian admixture is 0.943 (P < .001) for the crude prevalence rate and 0.829 (P < .02) for the age-adjusted rate. Nested gene diversity analysis revealed that the heterogeneity of allele frequencies is more pronounced when individuals were classified by their NIDDM disease status as compared to the classification by neighborhood. Estimation of Amerindian ancestry of each individual did not reveal any significant change in the shape of the distributions of individual admixture proportions in diabetics as compared to the controls. Nevertheless, the results suggest that genetic factors partially explain the differences in NIDDM prevalence observed between the Mexican American and Anglo populations in the southwestern United States.

Received: 21 April 1986; Accepted: 17 July 1986

You'll note that this paper is over 20 years old. Ancestral admixture techniques have improved dramatically since then. Has anybody bothered to redo this study, or is this just one of the many things we'd rather not know?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

16 Volts silenced by his university

The brilliant Finnish-Canadian computer science professor / blogger Ilkka Kokkarinen has taken down his popular blog, presumably to keep his job after his campus newspaper noticed his heterodox views. His skepticism about the intellectual consistency of lesbian-feminist theory and practice would appear to have been his biggest crime. The Ryerson campus newspaper reported:

CS instructor in need of sensitivity training: Chair

Ryerson computer science instructor, Ilkka Kokkarinen, is under fire after making what are being called sexist and homophobic comments on his blog, Sixteen Volts.

After being alerted by The Ryersonian, computer science chair, Alireza Sadeghian said the department neither accepts nor condones Kokkarinen’s views.

“I will personally suggest to Dr. Kokkarinen that he enrol [sic] and participate in appropriate seminars to obtain a proper understanding of human rights and discrimination,” said Sadeghian in an e-mail.

“I will arrange appropriate educational workshops, seminars or training sessions with the help of the discrimination and harassment prevention office at Ryerson.”

Groups on campus have seen Kokkarinen’s comments on his blog, and are concerned. Mandy Ridley, a RyePride co-ordinator, found his comments to be harmful.

“He’s clearly promoting hate upon women and queer-identified women.”

On April 1, Kokkarinen wrote in his blog: “The female overrepresentation is heavily concentrated on the fluff fields that ... which makes these fields suit the female mind better…basically all fields that don’t require any mathematics or logical and analytical thinking beyond the elementary school level.”

An anonymous American student alerted the Women’s Centre, mentioning that she is a computer science student and software engineer and that she had stumbled across Kokkarinen’s blog and was concerned.

The Women’s Centre responded by posting her note outside its office...

Students in his classes describe Kokkarinen as nice, helpful and intelligent.

“By far the best prof I’ve had,” said one student posting anonymously on the website, RateMyProfessors.com, that allows for students to post instructor feedback.

“I consider this guy a good prof,” said another. “Very clear, friendly, good marker and definitely loves his field.”

Is Canada still a free country? Is anywhere going to be a free country in another decade?

Will all the bloggers who are denouncing (rightfully) the Muslim threat to free speech take up Dr. Kokkarinen's case?

Clearly, Professor Kokkarinen was naive to use his own name when he switched his blog from Finnish to English, but considering how much of his writing was based on details of his daily life, it would have been child's play for the witch hunters to track him down and crush him even if he had used a pseudonym.

Perhaps this suggests that the survival of freedom of speech in the West rests with the Finnish language. Maybe we should start studying Finnish to use as a secret language for the discussion of ideas forbidden to be mentioned in English?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Norwegian Bachelor Farmers of South Korea

Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion has made a running joke out of the quite real difficulties Minnesota farmers have in finding wives. Since the 1970s, at least, Minnesota farm girls have moved to Minneapolis to be Mary Tyler Moore, leaving a lot of lonely farmers behind.

Similarly, in the Coen Bros.' "Big Lebowski," Bunny Lebowski (Tara Reid), formerly Fawn Gunderson, the straying hooker wife of an elderly Southern California millionaire, is being searched for by a detective hired by her parents in Minnesota who want her to come home. The snoop pulls out a black and white photograph to show The Dude:


Private Eye: "The Gundersons told me to show her this when I found her. The family farm."


A bleak farmhouse and silo are the only features on a flat snow-swept landscape.


Private eye: "Outside of Moorhead, Minnesota. They think it'll make her homesick."


In South Korea, the problem is even worse, due to extremely low birth rates (a total fertility rate of 1.1) and aborting girl babies. From Barbara Demick in the Los Angeles Times:


Jeong Ha-gi, 46, flew to Vietnam on a tour organized for South Korean bachelors. He was looking for a wife who would be tough enough to withstand the rigors of life on a rice farm. Trying to distinguish among all the women with the numbers pinned to their shirts, he decided the one with a bad complexion might be made of sturdy stuff. They were married three days later.

Today, they live together in sullen silence, a chasm of cultural differences between them. She speaks no Korean, he no Vietnamese. They communicate — barely — with a well-thumbed phrase book. Nguyen Thu Dong, who turned out to be only 20, doesn't like getting up at 5 a.m. to do the farm chores. She turns up her nose at kimchi.

"We have a lot of issues between us," said the burly Jeong, who in his undershirt resembles a Korean version of the young Marlon Brando. "Our age difference, our culture, our food. But I wanted a wife and she is who I got."


John Derbyshire writes to me:

I couldn't help but think of the archetypal New England farmer whose wife died after 50 yrs of marriage. A neighbor went over to offer condolences.

"Guess you'll be missing her after all them years, Zeke."

"Can't really say so. Never did get to like her much."

The LA Times article goes on:

Despite the obvious pitfalls, South Korean men increasingly are going abroad to find wives. They have little choice in the matter unless they want to remain bachelors for life.

The marriage market in Asia is becoming rapidly globalized, and just in time for tens of thousands of single-but-looking South Korean men, most of them in the countryside where marriageable women are in scant supply. With little hope of finding wives of their own nationality and producing children to take over the farm, the men are pooling their family's resources to raise up to $20,000 to find a spouse abroad.

The phenomenon has become so widespread that last year 13% of South Korean marriages were to foreigners. More than a third of the rural men who married last year have foreign wives, most of them Vietnamese, Chinese and Philippine. That's a huge change in a country once among the most homogenous in the world.


Mark Steyn goes on and on about how the low birthrate of Europe is caused by socialism, long vacations, and general decadent Eurowimpery, but how does that explain the even lower birthrate of South Korean farmers?

By the way, there's a widespread assumption that the high sex ratio of males to females in Asia will lead to massive violence by frustrated males. Yet, if we look at the most violent regions of America, the black inner cities, we see a very low ratio of males to females, due to so many males being in prison or dead. In the ghettoes, men don't have to behave like good prospective husbands to get women because there is so little competition. So, perhaps the assumption about East Asia is dubious?



The globalized wife market: A reader who lives in Japan writes:

I'm just back from the Philippines where there is no shortage of children. It's catholic and mostly poor, so people have not picked up modern values. After being the source of cheap workers for the world for decades, it now the source of cheap wives. They are exported to Japan and other Asian countries as wives for farmers. Lots of Filipinas also come to Japan to make good money working as hostesses in bars. They have a good reputation. They are fairly cute and don't make trouble. A fair number end up snagging a Japanese husband. But, the Philippines is crawling with middle aged or older men married to young Filipinas. Unattractive, divorced white men with nominal pensions can live there quite comfortably. There are also oodles of older Japanese men, who may or may not be divorced, pumping cash into the economy thru young female companions.

For some reason the Philippines is now also very popular with young Koreans. Well, it is close, cheap, and they can tell their parents they are studying English, although it looks like they are majoring in computer games. There are lots of stores and restaurants with hangul characters on the outside. The Koreans are young and don't seem to be "dating" Filipinas very much yet. There is the inevitable language barrier and there seem to be a lot of young Korean women hanging around too. Probably these are city kids, not farmers.

***

Low Asian birthrates: A reader who lived in three East Asian countries for a decade writes from China:

As with the rest of the world, young people are deserting the farms to go live in the cities. The young men who remain on the family farm cannot find wife in their home country (Japan, Korea, Taiwan). So, they go for mail order brides from China, Vietnam, and Thailand. However, China is no good anymore because China also has bride shortage as well. This leaves Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. Indonesia is out because it is Muslim.

However, the birth rate is rapidly declining even in Thailand and Vietnam as well as the rest of South East Asia.

The 800 lbs explanation that Mark Steyn overlooks for the decline of Asian birthrates is because it is now expensive to raise kids in Asia (except in the poor parts of S.E. Asia). This is partly due to urbanization, but also to the great expectations required to properly raise kids in Asia, mainly high education. Schools (primary, secondary, and university) are even more expensive, relative to mean income, than they are in the U.S. Housing is also more expensive (relative to income) than in the U.S.

(Medical care is cheaper. That's because it is less regulated and bureaucratized than in the U.S.)

Housing in Asia does not mean single family detached housing in leafy suburbs, as it does in the U.S. Rather, it refers to the luxury 3 bedroom condominium in the fashionable high-rise. Compared to U.S. suburbs, urban high-rise living is not conducive to having kids.

The reason why even the poor people in Asia are no longer having kids is because, in Asia, it is great shame to have kids and not provide decent upbringing to them. To have kids without being financially prepared for them marks one as being "low class" and is a source of shame.

Lastly, fewer people are having kids because, in the high-rise urban environment, there is lots of fun to be had by traveling and partying a lot.

***Permalink***


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Norwegian Bachelor Farmers of South Korea

Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion has made a running joke out of the quite real difficulties Minnesota farmers have in finding wives. Since the 1970s, at least, Minnesota farm girls have moved to Minneapolis to be Mary Tyler Moore, leaving a lot of lonely farmers behind.

Similarly, in the Coen Bros.' "Big Lebowski," Bunny Lebowski (Tara Reid), formerly Fawn Gunderson, the straying hooker wife of an elderly Southern California millionaire, is being searched for by a detective hired by her parents in Minnesota who want her to come home. The snoop pulls out a black and white photograph to show The Dude:

Private Eye: "The Gundersons told me to show her this when I found her. The family farm."

A bleak farmhouse and silo are the only features on a flat snow-swept landscape.

Private eye: "Outside of Moorhead, Minnesota. They think it'll make her homesick."

In South Korea, the problem is even worse, due to extremely low birth rates (a total fertility rate of 1.1) and aborting girl babies. From Barbara Demick in the Los Angeles Times:

Jeong Ha-gi, 46, flew to Vietnam on a tour organized for South Korean bachelors. He was looking for a wife who would be tough enough to withstand the rigors of life on a rice farm. Trying to distinguish among all the women with the numbers pinned to their shirts, he decided the one with a bad complexion might be made of sturdy stuff. They were married three days later.

Today, they live together in sullen silence, a chasm of cultural differences between them. She speaks no Korean, he no Vietnamese. They communicate — barely — with a well-thumbed phrase book. Nguyen Thu Dong, who turned out to be only 20, doesn't like getting up at 5 a.m. to do the farm chores. She turns up her nose at kimchi.

"We have a lot of issues between us," said the burly Jeong, who in his undershirt resembles a Korean version of the young Marlon Brando. "Our age difference, our culture, our food. But I wanted a wife and she is who I got."

Despite the obvious pitfalls, South Korean men increasingly are going abroad to find wives. They have little choice in the matter unless they want to remain bachelors for life.

The marriage market in Asia is becoming rapidly globalized, and just in time for tens of thousands of single-but-looking South Korean men, most of them in the countryside where marriageable women are in scant supply. With little hope of finding wives of their own nationality and producing children to take over the farm, the men are pooling their family's resources to raise up to $20,000 to find a spouse abroad.

The phenomenon has become so widespread that last year 13% of South Korean marriages were to foreigners. More than a third of the rural men who married last year have foreign wives, most of them Vietnamese, Chinese and Philippine. That's a huge change in a country once among the most homogenous in the world.

Mark Steyn goes on and on about how the low birthrate of Europe is caused by socialism, long vacations, and general decadent Eurowimpery, but how does that explain the even lower birthrate of South Korean farmers?

By the way, there's a widespread assumption that the high sex ratio of males to females in Asia will lead to massive violence by frustrated males. Yet, if we look at the most violent regions of America, the black inner cities, we see a very low ratio of males to females, due to so many males being in prison or dead. In the ghettoes, men don't have to behave like good prospective husbands to get women because there is so little competition. So, perhaps the assumption about East Asia is dubious?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 20, 2006

Discuss amongst yourselves

As you no doubt know, Muslim fanatics have decided that, in quoting the Emperor Manuel, Pope Benedict wounded their amour propre. So, they've busied themselves killing a nun, burning down Greek Orthodox churches, setting fire to the the Collected Poetry of Pope, defiling the grave of Benedict Arnold, declaring a fatwa on Manuel Noriega, and generally being lowbrow pests. In response, the usual chowderheads in the West, such as E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post, have announced that "We Need a Real Dialogue."

No, we don't.

Instead, we should follow the lead of Linda Richman of Coffee Talk. Whenever she became verklepmt, she'd say, "Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic."

Here's a topic I'd like to give the one billion Muslims of the Islamic world to discuss amongst themselves:


"Why we like living here and would never ever move anywhere else."


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

How much does illegal immigration save in labor costs?

A reader summarizes the Seattle Times article: "Low-paid illegal work force has little impact on prices:"

It is part of a series of articles about immigration. I've ignored or skimmed most of them but the headline of this one caught my attention and I read the whole thing this morning.

I haven't read or heard this before - I've only heard that illegal immigration has a small impact, if any, on wages but surely drives prices down so everyone wins! I didn't expect to read the opposite in a major daily.

"You might assume that the plentiful supply of low-wage illegal workers would translate into significantly lower prices for the goods and services they produce. In fact, their impact on consumer prices - call it the "illegal-worker discount" - is surprisingly small.

The bag of Washington state apples you bought last weekend? Probably a few cents cheaper than it otherwise would have been, economists estimate. That steak dinner at a downtown restaurant? Maybe a buck off. Your new house in Subdivision Estates? Hard to say, but perhaps a few thousand dollars less expensive.

The underlying reason, economists say, is that for most goods the labor - whether legal or illegal, native- or foreign-born - represents only a sliver of the retail price."

Or course, they can't help but end by trying to argue that illegal immigration is good, despite the entire article to that point: "Of course, the "illegal-immigrant discount" affects different layers of society differently.

The more often you eat out, stay in hotels or get your yard trimmed, the more you benefit from the illegal-immigrant discount.

And by increasing the supply of low-skilled labor relative to high-skilled labor, illegal immigration effectively boosts the purchasing power of the better-educated, more-skilled - and richer - portion of society.

The MIT study, by researcher Patricia Cortes, estimated that the low-skilled immigration wave of the 1990s - much of it outside the bounds of immigration law - raised the "real wages" of college graduates by 0.71 percent, and of high-school graduates and people with some college by 0.59 percent.

High-school dropouts? No discount for them: Cortes estimated that their real wages were cut by 2.66 percent. But since most adult Americans have at least a high-school diploma, Cortes concluded that most people benefited from low-skilled immigration - at least a little."

I'd love to see what the Seattle Times had to say if that argument came from a conservative in support of, say, tax cuts.

No mention of all the increased costs illegal immigration brings, of course.

The PDF accompanying the article with graphs is quite interesting: "Construction wages decline even during housing boom."


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 18, 2006

Steve Sailer film reviews from early 2006

Here are some of my 2006 movie reviews from The American Conservative that have never been online before:

Munich -- Steven Spielberg drama about Mossad agents - 7
Glory Road
-- Josh Lucas basketball coach movie - 6
Match Point -- Woody Allen's erotic thriller - 7
Something New -- Black-white romantic comedy - 8
Night Watch -- Russian cops & vampires movie -- 6
Thank You For Smoking -- Christopher Buckley satire - 7
V for Vendetta -- Wachowski Siblings comic book - 3

I've given them numbers on a 1-10 scale, with 5.5 being fair to middlin'. Of course, my opinion isn't that interesting, but I expect you'll find something in the reviews that is interesting.

My 2001 to 2005 reviews are here.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The Science of Sleep:"

One of the best movies of the year opens Friday in limited release. From my review in the 9/25 issue of The American Conserivative:


"The Science of Sleep," a surrealist romantic comedy by famed music video director Michel Gondry, is a manic but sweet-tempered reverie about why no woman in her right mind should fall in love with a truly imaginative artist, such as, say, Michel Gondry.

The young Mexican leading man, Gael García Bernal, freed from the portentousness of playing Che Guevara in "The Motorcycle Diaries," is sublimely charming as Gondry's alter ego, shy and self-absorbed Stephane, a childlike graphic designer whose inability to tell his waking life from his outlandish, ever-mutating dreams beguiles and exasperates the girl next door, Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg).

The boyish Gondry, whose video biography is aptly entitled "I've Been Twelve Forever," may strike some viewers as terminally twee, but many will find his "Science of Sleep" a funny, sad, and dazzling slice of the Ambien Age. (It opens Sept. 22.)

The profundity of dreams has been overrated from the Old Testament through Freud (whose now-fading renown was launched by The Interpretation of Dreams). Gondry sides instead with Vladimir Nabokov, who complained of dreams' "mental mediocrity."


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Steve Sailer Panhandling Drive Is Back!

The Internet Age is a reader's dream, but it can also be a writer's nightmare because it is so hard to get paid in an era when everybody expects "content" to magically appear for free. Moreover, my blogging and more formal articles are never going to support a lucrative amount of advertising since my natural audience is quite select. (As Fry explained on Futurama, the economics of mass media are: "Clever things make people feel stupid and unexpected things make them feel scared.") Nor are enough of the big money boys enthusiastic about supporting an independent thinker who isn't a team player.

I want to make this a semi-annual event, and it's been 6.5 months since the last time I hit you all up for money,

If tax deductibility isn't relevant to you (e.g., you live outside the U.S.), you might find it simpler to donate directly to me. You don't need to have a PayPal or Amazon account already to donate, just a credit card. (Or you can E-mail me and I'll send you my P.O. Box number.)

Click Here to Pay Learn MoreAmazon Honor SystemPaypal and Amazon charge $0.30 per transaction and 2.9% of the total, so I only get to keep 41% of a $1 donation, but 96.8% of a $100 donation!

Now, if you've been thinking, gee, I just have too much income this year for tax purposes, do we ever have a deal for you! Peter Brimelow writes:


SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT FOR STEVE SAILER FANS: Our regular Sunday night columnist Steve Sailer is one of the jewels of contemporary science journalism and it’s a mystery to me (and to him) why he’s not been stolen from VDARE.COM by the Mainstream Media. Well, actually, it’s not a mystery. Steve pushes the envelope too much. That’s why we’re here at VDARE.COM—and why we have to develop our own funding sources a.k.a you.


We want to commission Steve to begin a major project, separate from his columns, the results of which will be published in longer pieces, working towards a possible book. The topic: the implications of modern discoveries in the human biodiversity area for the survival and success of the American nation. Donations to this project will be tax-deductible. You can make credit card contributions here; or fax credit card details here; you can snail mail checks made out to "Lexington Research Institute" and marked on the memo line (lower left corner) “Biodiversity/ National Project” to the usual address:

Lexington Research Institute
P.O. Box 1195
Washington CT 06793


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 17, 2006

The logic of exterminationism

Part 1: The Western Way of War: A reader writes:


Military historian John Keegan wrote some interesting immediate reactions to 9-11 that were along the lines of your bloggie. If memory serves, he said there were two styles (ie anthropological traditions) of warfare evident and relevant here: [Irregular vs. Regular war]. The Arab way of war had been that of the tribal raider and Al Qaeda was the latest incarnation. The western way of war had its roots in the Greek city state and their tradition of citizen soldiers. The citizen soldiers had farms and businesses to return to so were keen for campaigns to be decisive and terminal for the enemy.


(Keegan, by the way, relies on Victor Davis Hanson's work on archaic Greece.)

Two great adventure movies illuminate the contrast between irregular warfare, with its raids and retreats, and regular warfare, with its drilling and decisive battles.

In David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia," the British high command wants Lawrence to talk the Bedouin Arabs into incorporating their desert raiders as foot soldiers into the British Army currently bogged down in trench warfare with the Turkish regulars on the Palestine front. Lawrence insubordinately rejects this order and instead devises a more "culturally appropriate" strategy for the Arabs to harass the Turkish railway to Mecca with quick camel-borne raids, but to stay out of pitched battles with the Turks that the Arabs would be sure to lose, and, indeed, wouldn't even bother to show up for in the first place, not being as crazy about self-sacrifice as Europeans were during 1914-1918.

In 1917, this worked well, but in 1918 the Turks responded by obtaining more armored cars and airplanes from their German allies, negating some of the Arab advantage in mobility and elusiveness.

(This was the beginning of a general pattern. During the 20th Century, it turned out that cultures that were good at regular warfare, like the Germans, Russians, and Americans, were also much better at building the tanks and planes that could give regular armies the mobility of irregular warriors than were the cultures that preferred irregular warfare, which tended to be weak at organizing vast tank and plane factories. So, due to the introduction of tanks and planes, the desert, which as recently as 1917 could be dominated by irregular warriors on camels, turned into the terrain most easily dominated by regular armies. Meanwhile, irregulars held on in jungles, due to greater cover, and may have strengthened in cities due to increasing regard for civilians among nations with regular armies.)


John Huston's movie version of Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King" illustrates the difference further. In a long essay on the film I wrote in September 2001, in which I predicted the U.S. would succeed at conquering Afghanistan, but fail at nation-building there, I noted:


A second insight into the difficulties faced by the Taliban at waging modern war - beyond their small and rusty arsenal - is implicit in Daniel's explanation to Kipling of their strategy for becoming Kings of Kafiristan. "In any place where they fight, a man who knows how to drill men can always be a King," Connery's character expounds. "We shall go to those parts and say to any King we find - 'D'you want to vanquish your foes?' and we will show him how to drill men; for that we know better than anything else. Then we will subvert that King and seize his Throne and establish a Dynasty."

Daniel's confidence in the might of properly drilled men goes to the heart of the difference between irregular and regular armies. For tens of thousands of years, men have been waging irregular war - shoot-from-behind-a-rock style raiding. If you assume, like many Afghans, that war sputters on forever - that it is the natural state of human relations - then sniping is the sensible fighting method for clans willing to lose some young warriors but not risk everything on one battle. Ambushes allow your men to slip away into wild country if the enemy proves too strong.

But nation-states long ago developed a more formidable style intended to win wars. The ancient Greeks discovered that trained, disciplined armies could maneuver to win decisive battles. Alexander the Great used this Greek breakthrough to conquer Afghanistan, among much else. (Kipling asserted that Alexander then married a Kafir princess named Roxanne and had a son.)

The famed military historian John Keegan wrote in "A History of Warfare," "It is a general rule that primitives lose to regulars over the long run; harassment is an effective means of waging a defensive war, but wars are ultimately won by offensives…"

Indeed, when Daniel and Peachey arrive at Er-Heb, their first Kafir village, headman Ootah, familiar only with irregular war, offers them two goats for each of his Bashkai neighbors that they will kill for him. Peachey, the embodiment of regular soldiering, replies suavely, "A handsome offer, but rather than knocking them over one at a time, we'll do the whole thing in one fell swoop: storm Bashkai and give you a proper victory."

The next morning drill instructor Daniel starts teaching the men of Er-Heb to march in ordered ranks like British soldiers. "When we're done with you," he roars at the recruits, "You'll be able to stand up and slaughter your enemies like civilized men!"

Daniel explains to his uncomprehending boot privates, "Good soldiers don't think. They just obey. Do you think that if a man thought twice, he'd give his life for Queen and country? Not bloody likely!" Noticing an Er-Heb man with an extremely small head, Daniel remarks, "Him there with the five and a half hat size has the makings of a bloody hero."

Indeed, their drilled army, stiffened by twenty smuggled rifles, quickly goes from victory to victory. And their pinheaded rifleman distinguishes himself for loyalty.

*


Part 2: The seductive logic of exterminationism: My reader continues:


Thus the Arab way of war is essentially opportunist where the western way of war is exterminationist. He was very pessimistic about the current situation more or less concluding that Arab terrorists will eventually use nuclear weapons against western targets, that would however reap a terrible revenge for which the neither the terrorists or their popular supporters have yet any glimmer of understanding.


Western regular warfare is by no means inherently exterminationist, as the careers of, say, the Duke of Wellington and Robert E. Lee attest. What it is, however, is more consciously logical, with tendencies toward radical rationalism.

The unfortunate continental European tradition in recent centuries has been to follow particular lines of logic too far, to convert logic into ideology.

Unfortunately, contemporary U.S. intellectuals have become ever more obsessed with Hitler and his exterminationist logic, even as the years since Hitler's demise have lengthened. Kevin Michael Grace remarked to me once that if space aliens had been hiding in the asteroid belt, monitoring our television broadcasts for the last ten years. the first thing they would say upon landing on Earth is "Take me to your Hitler," because the assumption that Hitler is the most important man in the world today, rather than a loser who has been dead for 61 years, would be the natural outcome of watching too much television.

All this obsessing over Hitler's exterminationist logic leads to two tendencies among more than a few modern American thinkers. The first is to see the threat of exterminationism where it doesn't exist. Muslims, for all their obnoxiousness, are simply too incompetent to be an existential threat to America.

Just because it says to wage holy war in the Koran doesn't mean Muslims would or could wage holy war in a broadly effective fashion upon America (unless we let them), just as Christians mostly don't give away to the poor all you own and come follow Me. (I doubt if Muslims are much of an existential threat to Israel, either, but the tendency among more than a few American intellectuals to get Israel confused with America exacerbates this tendency.)

Similarly, the President of Mexico staged 30 terrorist invasions of Texas under the genocidal Plan of San Diego in 1915-16, but, ultimately, it wasn't all that big of a deal -- we're talking about Mexico threatening genocide, not Germany.

The second tendency stemming from dwelling so much on Hitler's exterminationist logic is to begin to absorb it and to start thinking like Hitler himself, to say to oneself:


Well, while it wouldn't do to come out and quite say it publicly, it's simple logic that if we can't democratize the Muslims (which looks increasingly implausible), we'd better do unto them before they do unto us: exterminate them.


That way of thought leads toward a war of nuclear genocide that would be as unnecessary as it is criminal.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Gary Brecher and John Dolan

One of the most popular candidates for the secret identity of the War Nerd is eXile editor John Dolan. The latest issue of the Moscow alternative paper has essays by both and they make an interesting contrast. The Irish-American Dolan writes passionately about his favorite topic, perfidious Albion and the horrors of the British Empire, in a review of a book about the bloody repression by the British of the Kikuyu rebellion in colonial Kenya after WWII. As Dolan points out, Anglophilia is rampant in American intellectual life, so saying harsh things about the British Empire is not the royal road to professional success.

Meanwhile, Brecher writes about the Hindu-Buddhist civil war in Sri Lanka and its origin in the British Empire's labor policies of transplanting hard-working Hindus around the globe to supplant shiftless locals. Dolan and Brecher don't disagree all that much in their negative evaluation of the British Empire, but Brecher, oddly enough, is a lot more suave and good-tempered about it.

If Brecher is a character made up by Dolan, then Dolan is playing an interesting game by creating a fictitious character who is more prudently moderate about the single most unpopular thing that Dolan cares deeply about. It would make more sense to do the opposite: be less Anglophobic under your own name while creating a pen name under which you would vent your passions against the English. But then interesting writers don't always do what's in their own best interests, career-wise.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer