You hopefully know Unthethered's Dennis Dale for his Repo Man meets Nabokov memoirs of growing up in LA's suburban wasteland. Having seen the global projection of American military might up close, he's also a political thinker of some power:
One reason why a democracy cannot survive empire, and why empires are increasingly short-lived things, is that citizens of conquered and occupied nations, and cultures, half a world away, thereby become people to whom the leadership of the imperial power is answerable, in one way or another:
“The Americans know everything, they can do everything, they can repair the space shuttle without touching it, why do they let these things happen here in Iraq?” said Abu Muhammad, 55, one of the custodians of the bombed Khalani Mosque.
Good question, and one for which the man has the right to an answer. Mr., or Mrs., (future) President, meet one of your constituents. He has a few problems he'd like to bring to your attention.
He expands upon the philosophy of invade the world, invite the world here at greater length.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
You'd think if they can put astronauts in space they could keep a Mexican laborer out of Douglas, Arizona.
ReplyDeleteNaah.
Dale is an idiot because he can't recognize what is going on. He's as trapped by his own pre-conceived, outmoded mental models as Liberals are talking about diversity.
ReplyDeleteThe rise of global trade and accelerated technology development brings peoples together at unheard of rates. Our problem in the West with Muslims is not colonialism or imperialism. It is global trade and communications.
Colonialism and Imperialism leads to occupation armies of varying sizes extracting raw material and/or labor for the benefit of the home country. Jamaica's sugar plantations, Mexico's silver mines, and India's cotton plantations.
Consider the importation of labor by Saudis to run their oil fields and infrastructure, oil at $70 a barrel, the use of American military forces to protect the House of Saud from threats via Saddam or Iran or the Soviets.
That doesn't match. The US is hardly imperialist, rather that of the usual power-proxy patron against other great powers.
Meanwhile formerly closed societies like the Saudi or Pakistani or Egyptian societies have satellite TV, the internet, and other means to fracture the glass-like Islamic societies.
What Muslims from Sayid Qutb, Hassan-al-Banr, Ayatollah Khomeni, Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahari, and Ahmadinejad have all said is that Islam and Muslim society cannot co-exist or survive the seduction of individualism and individualist orientation found in everything in Western Society.
Even SPIDER-MAN is destructive to Islam. "With Great Power comes Great Responsibility?" THAT is a message of profound individualism which is completely and totally destructive to Islam's message of absolute and total submission to God into collectivism.
No, Americans cannot secure Baghdad from bombs, but can fix the Space Shuttle. Fixing the Space Shuttle requires only resources and technical know-how. It does not require navigating through politically correct restrictions on the troops. Who they can shoot at, catch-and-release for terrorists, no shooting at people holed up and sniping at them from Mosques, etc.
Far more than lack of resources, political correctness stemming from GWB's JFK-style liberalism, mandated by the Press, clueless Davos-elites, and DC insiders, has left the energetic captains and non-coms stymied in killing the bad guys who they know well by this point. Catch-and-release means the terrorists just come back.
Moreover the Islamists from Qutb right down to bin Laden have a plan: cause chaos, break down order and nations, insert Islamists into society to build up region by region the Caliphate.
Biggest reason why Dale can't recognize the obvious in front of his face: Islamists REJECT the Nation State. If there was Imperialism, the remedy for that is Nationalism. There is no nationalism in Iraq. Instead there is Islamism. Or actually, two. Cooperating and competing: the Sunni AQ model and the Shia Khomeni model.
We are not fighting people seeking an independent and nationalist Iraq. We are fighting people seeking a world-wide Caliphate. Under either a bin Laden style Sunni Sheik or a Khomeni style Imam.
Dale may be a fine writer but as a thinker he can't even see the obvious. This isn't 1960. We are not in a Capitalist-Marxist conflict. We face a fundamental clash of civilizations over individuality (the West) or God-driven collectivism (Islam). It's that simple.
The neo-con anonymous post is the same that is on Dale's blog.
ReplyDeleteThe paleo-con post above mine has it exactly right: Muslims are NOT assmilating. If anything, by their higher birthrates, they are slowly taking over Europe as we speak. They are assimilating NOWHERE. Their cultural model allows for HIGH birthrates, while ours allows for replacement rates as a damn-near best case scenario. They will use our welfare benefits to pay for them to breed until they can vote themselves whatever they want.
If the Saudi's were overthrown, it would just be by OTHER Muslims, not another group of people, for not being Islamic ENOUGH.
Dale is NOT an idiot. The neo-con is a huge, stupendous idiot who thinks he can out-think common sense. They (muslims) are GAINING, we are losing. Only 15% of babies born on this planet are white now. There are a billion Muslims, having basically as many kids as they can. A couple of generations down the pike, they'll be able to democratically TAKE over Europe and add it to a Euro-middle-eastern-Indonesian swath all throughout the world. Theirs is the only culture that allows presently for a ridiculously high brithrate. Does this neo-con IDIOT think that SPIDERMAN!!!!!!!!!???????will change that?
Does he think legalizing tons of poor Mexicans to staff our military so it can fight adventures to counter Islam all over the planet (wont work) is something that can be done ad infinitum? We'd end up having to nuke them in the long run, and have a global government in the bargain.
No thanks. Go back to AIPAC and dream up some more b.s. arguments.
It's more like 1.5 billion Muslims, officially. Likely an undercount anyway since their numbers are increasing so rapidly.
ReplyDeleteMr Neocon above has one point sort-of correct in that the Muslims do indeed hate western individualism (here in London, as in Bali, nightclubs are a priority target), but comment above is correct that western individualism is certainly not an existential threat to them on current performance.
Dennis Dale is absolutely right on target.
ReplyDeleteI hope the rest of the readers are aware that the attitude of the quoted Iraqi towards the allegedly "omniscient" America is nothing untypical towards any center of power in those lands. They are traditional/paternalistic tribal societies where "daddy" knows best, and gummint is just a synonym for Big Daddy.
This cannot be overemphasized. It's not only you break it, you own it. It's more like, if you can break what they consider Allah's unbreakable Muslims will, then you've gotta be the Biggest Daddy so why isn't the gummint doing something about... well, anything -- hernia or the price of cologne included.
Let me add, also, that the neo-con calling Dennis Dale an idiot is himself a typical example of the supreme (and incurable) arrogance of that lot. They just change their wordings but say the same thing over and over: "They hate our freedoms;" "They support the things we hate;" Ergo: They are guilty by association.
Daniel Larison brilliantly spotted the primitive associative thinking behind this in one (two, actually) of his reviews of Jonah Goldberg's recent book:
http://larison.org/2007/06/27/the-absolute-organic/
Also here (Don't forget to click the link to the competition for a subtitle for Goldberg's book; my favorite is: "The Totalitarian Temptation from Lucretius to Ludacris.")
http://larison.org/2007/06/29/the-totalitarian-temptation-from-ockham-to-oneida/
John Derbyshire called this the "argumentum Hitlerum" fallacy:
- Hitler was a vegetarian
- Hitler was a Nazi
- Ergo: vegetarians are crypto-Nazis.
So, the thinking goes, anybody who doesn't hug and kiss the joys of modernity (impeccably embodied in "individualism") is a "collectivist." Hitler was a collectivist, ergo bin Ladin is a Nazi.
We should be able to assert the exact opposite:
- Hitler said 2x2=4
- Hitler was a Nazi
- Ergo: 2x2=4, whether Hitler or not. (Or, in even more elegant academic language: Why the fuck is Hitler relevant, at all?)
JD
There isn't much threat of an Islamic caliphate being established. There aren't enough Muslims in the West do so through democratic means, and with rational immigration policies, there won't be. Islamists are too weak to overthrow secular Arab dictatorships, let alone Western democracies. Plus, as information technology spreads (cell phone video, blogs, etc.), any grassroots support for Islamic theocracies withers. How many Muslims really want to live in an Iranian-style theocracy when they see what's going on there? Gas rationing in a country with the world's second-largest oil reserves -- because the government wastes time building nuclear reactors instead of gas refineries?
ReplyDeleteThe logical response to the threat of radical Islam is:
1) Stop importing them.
2) Get out of their countries.
3) Use profiling to limit their opportunities to commit terrorism.
4) Prevent any more Muslim countries from getting nukes.
Good essay by Dennis Dale.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, if any of you are fans of really good front-line war reporting, I highly recommend Michael Yon's dispatches. Here is an example.
Yes Dale is an idiot.
ReplyDeleteYou can go to the CIA World Factbook and look up the fertility rate of women in Tunisia, Turkey, Algeria, and Iran.
All below replacement rate. A stunning indication of the challenge of Western Modernity. Individualism and absolute, unquestioning, submission to Allah can't co-exist on the same planet.
Not when the internet, satellite TV, and DVDs push the message of individuality onto the previously isolated Muslim heartland. Which then radicalizes the Muslim diaspora in the West.
Dale is an idiot because he can't explain the Muslim native born bombers of 7/7 and 7/21 in the UK. Nor the most recent ones, among whom were reportedly Doctors. Dale is an idiot because he ignores what Muslims do and say, both in the West and outside it: demands for Sharia (40% of UK Muslims). Dale is an idiot because (and yeah, I'm the one who posted on his site because he deserved to hear it from me direct) he ignores the civilizational conflict.
Muslims have been at war with the West since the errupted out of the Arabian peninsula back in the 7th Century. Muslims are at war with the Thais (over who will rule, Muslims or Budhhists?) Muslims are at war with the Russians (same), the Serbs, the Indians, and so on.
When Nicholas Sarkozy debated "assimilated" Tariq Ramadan on French TV, he point-blank asked Ramadan if he would condemn stoning to death of women for adultery. Ramadan would not do that, told Sakorzy that his attitude was "regressive" and the best France could hope for was perhaps a temporary "moratorium" on the practice.
Islam demands: female genital mutilation, honor killings, forced/arranged marriages, the burqua, bans on pork and alcohol, amputations of body parts for criminals, stoning to death of adulterers, killings of gays, second class "dhimmi" status for non-Muslims. And Islam simply is not compatible with modern Western individuality.
Arranged (mostly cousin marriages) are a central pillar of Islam. I need hardly point out that individual romantic choice is the CENTRAL point of Western civilization. Western men and women can choose their own mates. Muslims do not and can not.
I find it astonishing that people who can correctly point out La Raza's Reconquista racialist agenda can't figure out that Muslims have a religious/cultural one as well. One far more deadly. Instead the stupid and intellectually stunting search for scapegoats (Jews aka neo-cons) etc.
Sailer pointed out that while a classmate of his was far more intellectually gifted (and might or might not be in actuality, who knows) his ideology blinded him to the obvious.
Ideology blinds most of the paleocons and in particular Dale to the obvious: Muslims have always been a threat to the US (they seized American merchant seamen as slaves/hostages until Madison finally shot up their ports). Remember "shores of Tripoli?"
If Dale is right you'd expect to see Muslims peacefully assimilate in places like Thailand, the Philippines, XianXing Province China, Kashmir, etc. Given that those places are characterized by Muslim terror intent on instituting Sharia Rule I'd say the evidence shows conclusively Dale is wrong.
3:36 Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteI wish to quote you and comment. You wrote:
"Dale is an idiot because he can't explain the Muslim native born bombers of 7/7 and 7/21 in the UK. Nor the most recent ones, among whom were reportedly Doctors. Dale is an idiot because he ignores what Muslims do and say, both in the West and outside it: demands for Sharia (40% of UK Muslims). Dale is an idiot because (and yeah, I'm the one who posted on his site because he deserved to hear it from me direct) he ignores the civilizational conflict."
Anonymous 3:36, Dale would be one of the paleos who simply would have proscribed NO MUSLIM IMMIGRATION INTO EUROPE IN THE FIRST PLACE, hence no bombers physically present to commit atrocities. He would most likely be very much against any muslim immigration here also. SO everything you wrote above is moot. If we had followed Dale's ideas, there would have been no muslims in the U.S. to commit 9/11 in the first place.
Now for ol' Mile's REALLY ugly comment: Ive noticed that George Bush has allowed many former Iraqis into America after we have successfully wrecked much of their nation, and killed many of their relatives and friends. So we have Muslims here now who will definitely be appalled by our way of life here and already probably have grudges against us. Do you think this group is more or less likely to commit acts of terror than Minnessotain blonde frat-boys? Yup me too.
I'll never forget something that was posted by a neo-con on a Freeper message board after the Repubs lost congress in the last election: "maybe we need to get hit again". It hit me like a ton of bricks. The son-of-a-bitches actually pine for a domestic terror attack to "blame" on Iran so we can go make war with them also. Well, Bush has made that much more likely by importing muslims here, despite the rest of the Repulic NOT wanting them HERE.
Invade the world, Invite the world.
I think I'll take the paleo-con prescription of just "lets seperate" and you live behind your wall, and I'll live behind mine and we will see whose culture slowly (over a couple of hundred years Mr. Impatience) secularizes and "makes peaceful" the other.
If we stay on our present course, invade and fight Iran, we will have to deal with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, all the "stans", and the much-more advanced Indonesians and have to endure mucho terror here and in Euro-Russia over the next 100 years, and they are not going to stop having 3-5 kids either, not when they are HERE and have our WELFARE to pay for them. Tha paleo-con idea is much better. We would end up having to NUKE them long term, and I dont want to do that, do you? M
Dale is an idiot because he can't explain the Muslim native born bombers of 7/7 and 7/21 in the UK. Nor the most recent ones, among whom were reportedly Doctors. Dale is an idiot because he ignores what Muslims do and say, both in the West and outside it: demands for Sharia (40% of UK Muslims). Dale is an idiot because (and yeah, I'm the one who posted on his site because he deserved to hear it from me direct) he ignores the civilizational conflict.
ReplyDeleteIs Dale an advocate of Muslim immigration to the West? You may have him confused with GWB or anyone from New Labour or the Dems.
Yes according to a PBS documentary on LBJ stayed in Vietnam because he would have felt bad about leaving his allies in the South Vietnamese Government to possible death at the hands of the Vietcong. When I think of GW Bush’s actions in Iraq, entering in the first place perhaps because Sadaam killed the Shia uprising that the USA encouraged after the gulf war and then staying after winning the war and even capturing Sadaam , I wonder if he is staying because does not want to see his allies killed as collaborators. Maybe it is because of his loyalty to his new friends in Iraq.
ReplyDelete