The lesser of two evils ...

"If you are confronted with two evils, thus the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Those who denounce the moral fallacy of this argument are usually accused of a germ-proof moralism which is alien to political circumstances, of being unwilling to dirty their hands. The weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil."

~ Hannah Arendt, from her 1964 essay 'Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,' collected in the book Responsibility And Judgment

"Evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us."

"Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it."

          ~ Ayn Rand, from 'Galt's Speech: The Sanction of the Victim'

The Banality of Evil

Image Credit: Ryohei Noda-Flickr } CC BY 2.0

If Evil comes calling, do not expect it to be stupid enough to advertise itself as such. It’s far more likely that it will look like your favourite uncle, or your sweet grandmother. Or that nice man who rules Russia. Hannah Arendt’s eyewitness assessment of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as “terribly and terrifyingly normal” took the world by surprise, but as Lawrence Reed explains in this Guest Post, her thesis delivers the ever-timely warning that evil is, above all, banal.

Hannah Arendt’s Chilling Thesis on Evil

by Lawrence Reed

Nine months after the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann died at the end of a noose in Israel, a controversial but thoughtful commentary about his trial appeared in The New Yorker. The public reaction stunned its author, the famed political theorist and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). It was February 1963.

Arendt’s eyewitness assessment of Eichmann as “terribly and terrifyingly normal” took the world by surprise. Her phrase, “the banality of evil,” entered the lexicon of social science, probably forever. It was taken for granted that Eichmann, despite his soft-spoken and avuncular demeanor, must be a monster of epic proportions to play such an important role in one of the greatest crimes of the 20th Century.

“I was only following orders,” he claimed in the colourless, matter-of-fact fashion of a typical bureaucrat. The world thought his performance a fiendishly deceptive show, but Hannah Arendt concluded that Eichmann was indeed a rather “ordinary” and “unthinking” functionary.

How callous! A betrayal of her own Jewish people! How could any thoughtful person dismiss Eichmann so cavalierly?! Arendt’s critics blasted her with such charges mercilessly, but they had missed the point. She did not condone or excuse Eichmann’s complicity in the Holocaust. She witnessed the horrors of national socialism first-hand herself, having escaped Germany in 1933 after a short stint in a Gestapo jail for “anti-state propaganda.” She did not claim that Eichmann was innocent, only that the crimes for which he was guilty did not require a “monster” to commit them.

How often have you noticed people behaving in anti-social ways because of a hope to blend in, a desire to avoid isolation as a recalcitrant, nonconforming individual? Did you ever see someone doing harm because “everybody else was doing it”? The fact that we all have observed such things, and that any one of the culprits might easily, under the right circumstances, have become an Adolf Eichmann, is a chilling realisation.

As Arendt explained, “Going along with the rest and wanting to say ‘we’ were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible.”

Eichmann was a “shallow” and “clueless” joiner, someone whose thoughts never ventured any deeper than how to become a cog in the great, historic Nazi machine. In a sense, he was a tool of Evil more than evil himself.

Commenting on Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis, philosopher Thomas White writes, “Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942) [or the singer who "shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die], who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterwards feels no remorse. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just ‘happened.’”

Perhaps Hannah Arendt underestimated Eichmann. He did, after all, attempt to conceal evidence and cover his tracks long before the Israelis nabbed him in Argentina in 1960—facts which suggest he did indeed comprehend the gravity of his offenses. It is undeniable, however, that “ordinary” people are capable of horrific crimes when possessed with power or a desire to obtain it, especially if it helps them “fit in” with the gang that already wields it.

The big lesson of her thesis, I think, is this: If Evil comes calling, do not expect it to be stupid enough to advertise itself as such. It’s far more likely that it will look like your favorite uncle or your sweet grandmother. It just might cloak itself in grandiloquent platitudes like “equality,” “social justice,” and the “common good.” It could even be a prominent member of Parliament or Congress.

Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, I suggested in a recent essay, were peas in the same pod as Eichmann—ordinary people who committed extraordinarily heinous acts.

Hannah Arendt is recognized as one of the leading political thinkers of the Twentieth Century. She was very prolific, and her books are good sellers still, nearly half a century after her death. She remains eminently quotable as well, authoring such pithy lines as “Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians,” “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution,” and “The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.”

Some of Arendt’s friends on the Left swallowed the myth that Hitler and Stalin occupied opposite ends of the political spectrum. She knew better. Both were evil collectivists and enemies of the individual (see list of suggested readings below). “Hitler never intended to defend the West against Bolshevism,” she wrote in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, “but always remained ready to join ‘the Reds’ for the destruction of the West, even in the middle of the struggle against Soviet Russia.”

To appreciate Hannah Arendt more fully, you could begin by viewing the movie based on her life (trailer above), and I offer here a few additional samples of her writings:

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

_____

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

_____

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanise them.

_____

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied—as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels—that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.

_____

Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: “Things must change—no matter how. Anything is better than what we have.” Totalitarian rulers organise this kind of mass sentiment, and by organising it they articulate it, and by articulating it they make the people somehow love it. They were told before, thou shalt not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very difficult to kill, they do it because it’s now part of the code of behaviour.

_____

The argument that we cannot judge if we were not present and involved ourselves seems to convince everyone everywhere, although it seems obvious that if it were true, neither the administration of justice nor the writing of history would ever be possible.

For Additional Information, see:

• Hannah Arendt (movie trailer)
• Why Read Hannah Arendt Now? by Richard J. Bernstein
• Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt
• What Did Hannah Arendt Really Mean by the ‘Banality of Evil’? by Thomas White
• Two Monsters of the French Revolution Who Were Consumed by Power—And Lost Their Heads on the Same Day by Lawrence W. Reed
• What the Nazis Had in Common With Every Other Collectivist Regime of the 20th Century by Lawrence W. Reed
• Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian, by George Reisman

Lawrence W. Reed is FEE's President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty, having served for nearly 11 years as FEE’s president (2008-2019). He is author of the 2020 book, Was Jesus a Socialist? as well as Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction and Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism. Follow on LinkedIn and Like his public figure page on Facebook. His website is www.lawrencewreed.com. His post first appeared at Fee.Org.

Don't blame immigration for your home-grown terrorism

 

Fortunately for those of us down here at the bottom of the South Pacific, these discussions are always about other places. But since the facts about those other places are so easily and so widely misreported – or intentionally ignored – and then used to argue for policy here, it’s important to check out the real facts.
So in that vein, explains Alan Reynolds in this still topical guest post, don’t blame immigration for homegrown terrorism.

The Bastille Day slaughter of 84 people in Nice, following the 130 killed in Paris on May 13, 2015, left France the victim of two of the largest terrorist attacks outside the Middle East.

In France—as in the U.S., Turkey and Bangladesh—such attacks have nearly all been instigated not by recent immigrants, but by home-grown terrorists. All known Paris attackers were citizens of France or Belgium. The killer in Nice, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, was a resident of France since 2005.

The New America Foundation counts 94 Americans killed in seven Islamic terrorist incidents since 9/11. Terrorists in Orlando, San Bernardino, Fort Hood, Seattle and Little Rock were born in the USA; those in Boston and Chattanooga had been citizens for decades. 

The House Homeland Security Committee reported that, “Since September 11, 2001, there have been 124 U.S. terrorist cases involving home-grown violent Jihadists.”

Yet despite the home-grown origin of Jihadist terrorism, American politics has somehow spun toward the notion that controlling terrorism is primarily a matter of controlling immigration.

As the young folk might say, this is not even wrong.

Yet Donald Trump still claims, “We’re importing radical Islamic terrorism into the West through a failed immigration system.” He first proposed to bar immigrants who identify themselves as Muslims, then to “suspend immigration from areas of the world where there’s a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies” (a definition broad enough to include France). [And subsequently, as we now know, he selected 7 countries from whom to bar entry altogether, albeit “temporarily” – Ed.]

One problem with focusing on newly-arriving Muslims is that many U.S. terrorists and sympathisers converted to Islam, like Little Rock shooter Carlos Bledsoe in 2009. Out of 87 Americans charged with ISIS-related offenses in the past three years, a George Washington University study found 38 percent were converted to Islam.

More important, if fear of foreigners is supposed to be the big hot-button issue, then immigration is almost beside the point. Why? Because immigrants account for much less than 1 percent of the foreigners who arrive in the United States each year.

Without counting immigrants or refugees, 180.5 million foreigners came to the United States in 2014, according to the Department of Homeland Security. That is more than four times larger than all the immigrants now living in the United States (42.4 million).

Nobody could possibly imagine it feasible to carefully vet or otherwise limit the millions of tourists, business travellers and students who are constantly coming to the United States. So, what accounts for all the anxiety about infinitely smaller numbers who arrive as immigrants?

In contrast with 180.5 million non-immigrants arriving in 2014, only 69,975 arrived as refugees and only 481,392 new arrivals were granted green cards.

Any foreigner who wanted to come here on a suicidal terrorist mission needn’t wait two years to be vetted as a refugee, or try to get on a long waiting list for a green card. Tourists are allowed to stay in the U.S. for 90 days, business travellers 12 months, skilled workers six years, and students stay as long as they’re enrolled.  Citizens of 38 “visa waiver” countries (including France and Belgium) don’t even need a visa.

The chances of Homeland Security missing a handful of potential terrorists among 180.5 million temporary visitors are surely much greater than the odds of missing them among a few thousand well-vetted refugees.

What about illegal immigrants? In “Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population,” Homeland Security concluded, “It is unlikely that the unauthorised immigrant population has increased since 2007.”

Political obsession with the Mexican border is also misplaced because most foreigners arrive not on foot but on airplanes or ships.

Foreign nationals have to fill out an I-94 Arrival/Departure form only if travelling by land, so we know that 105.6 million (58.5 percent) of the 180.5 million foreign visitors in 2014 came by airplane or ship. Eighty percent of the 74.9 million who instead crossed the Canadian and Mexican borders were tourists; the rest were mostly business travellers and students.

In short, refugees and immigrants add up to only a tiny fraction of the 180.5 million foreigners who come to the United States, quite legally, in a typical year, and commonly remain for months or years. And nearly all Jihadist attacks in the West have been home-grown. But even if that were not the case, it is much faster and easier to come to the United States as a legal non-immigrant than to do so as refugee or permanent resident.

The U.S. visa program may well need tighter rules and enforcement, but that is an entirely different issue than making refugees and immigrants the primary scapegoats of anti-terrorist strategy. Because resources available for domestic security are limited, “keeping us safe” requires devoting the most resources to the most probable dangers rather than turning to hypothetical long shots.

Thwarting terrorism is primarily a task for intelligence agencies and police. Combating ISIS is primarily a military issue. Immigration policy or refugee quotas may indeed be important for other reasons [or not – Ed.], but the alleged link to Jihadist/Islamist terrorism is tenuous at best.

Attempting to enforce immigration restrictions based on a person’s self-described religious preference (or apparent national origin) would not be easy or cheap. Neither would tripling the size of the current 650-mile wall on the Mexican border. Such grandiose projects inevitably require diverting limited time and money away from more-promising options—such as hiring more FBI agents or private security firms for surveillance of suspicious activities and persons.

---

Alan Reynolds, author of the 2001 study Immigration Policy as Random Rationing, is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute.
A version of his article previously appeared at Newsweek and the Cato at Liberty blog.

RELATED POSTS:

• “Sadly, however, the report’s facts will not make a blind bit of difference, because the anti-immigration argument is not based on any facts. It is based on something else.
      You could see this here recently at NOT PC when I posted the crime stats on Sweden that help explode the alleged “facts on the ground” showing “rocketing Swedish crime” in the face of increased immigration.
      The problem might be most evident in the Fact-Free Zone that is modern America, where Trump's “America First” executive orders on immigration and deportation are political solutions in need of an actual problem.
  Facts are not what motivate the anti-immigrationists – NOT PC
• “We should be under no illusions about the evil of Islam, but neither should we grant it any more power than it has: as Ayn Rand used to say, evil on its own is impotent. Evil can only achieve its values through the actions of others—by that which we let evil-doers extort from us.
      “Never has this underlying impotence been more true of any ideology than Islam…”
  And, into that vacuum stepped Islam … – NOT PC, 2015
• “’The Duke of Wellington famously said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton: and if that is the case, then the advance of the Islamic State was begun in the nice, tolerant, liberal academies of Britain and other parts of western Europe.’”
  Home-grown horror – NOT PC, 2014

.

Islam inhabits a vacuum; ignorant ISIS recruits again confirm it.

 

Recent evidence confirms that recruits to ISIS are almost wholly ignorant of the religion under whose banner they wish to fight – ordering up copies of The Koran for Dummies and Islam for Dummies to “prepare themselves for jihad.” Suggesting not just that those who devise book titles enjoy stating the obvious, but that ignorance of the religion itself is not a barrier to recruitment in its jihad, but a boon.

The jihadi employment form asked the recruits, on a scale of one to three, to rate their knowledge of Islam. And the Isis applicants, herded into a hangar somewhere at the Syria-Turkey border, turned out to be overwhelmingly ignorant.
    The extremist group could hardly have hoped for better. 

Turns out those very western recruits of whom everyone is so fearful are just idiots with empty lives seeking something seemingly meaningful to fill them. (Reflect, for example, on the comment on the would-be Garland terrorist: “He had been going down a bad path and then he found Islam.") These empty heads with empty lives are perfect fodder for an empty jihad for a religion that inhabits a vacuum – which perfectly describes their knowledge of it:

An Associated Press analysis of thousands of leaked Isis documents reveals most of its recruits from its earliest days came with only the most basic knowledge of Islam. A little more than 3,000 of these documents included the recruit's knowledge of Sharia, the system that interprets into law verses from the Quran and "hadith" — the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad.
    According to the documents … 70 per cent of recruits were listed as having just "basic" knowledge of Sharia — the lowest possible choice. Around 24 per cent were categorized as having an "intermediate" knowledge, with just five per cent considered advanced students of Islam. Five recruits were listed as having memorized the Quran.
    The findings address one of the most troubling questions about Isis recruitment in the United States and Europe: Are disaffected people who understand Sharia more prone to radicalisation? Or are those with little knowledge of Islam more susceptible to the group's radical ideas that promote violence?
    The documents suggest the latter.

So these Jihadists know even less about the Quran than you and I do. Meaning that they are not being radicalised by the teachings of Islam, within which there is precious little to be inspired by anyway, but by the bullshit of their barbaric recruiters keen to harvest warm bodies willing to sacrifice for a cause. And for these empty heads who’ve heard from every corner that the willingness to sacrifice is the mark of a full life, these recruiters are there and willing and eager to pick up their remnants. And the emptier the head, the more useful the recruit,

because [it rurns out] those who claimed advanced knowledge in Shariah on the Isis entry documents were less likely to want to become suicide bombers, according to a study by the US military's Combating Terrorism Center, an academic institution at the United States Military Academy.
    "If martyrdom is seen as the highest religious calling, then a reasonable expectation would be that the people with the most knowledge about Islamic law (Sharia) would desire to carry out these operations with greater frequency," said the report.
    However, despite the religious justification that Isis uses for suicide missions, "those with the most religious knowledge within the organisation itself are the least likely to volunteer to be suicide bombers," the study found.

Empty heads filled up with a siren song of sacrifice.

These are empty heads not running to the recruiters for love of Islam; they’re invariably kids with empty lives running away from something else. Islam itself is simply the vacuum into which they’re sucked.

Islam still inhabits a vacuum; it always has. It’s an opportunistic ideology inhabiting, like a nest of cockroaches, all the dark forgotten corners of existence. Always has; still does.

Its empire was born only from the collapse of two others, born in the vacuum created by the collapse of the Roman and Persian powers and the demise of their religions) -- its military “strength” a reflection only of those two once-mighty empires’ fading power; its “scriptures” cobbled together from what they found in the Hebrew,Zoroastrian and heretical cultural remnants of the desert towns and waadis in the vacuum between crumbling empires that its marauding bands occupied. (Read Tom Holland’s ground-breaking history In the Shadow of the Sword.)

Its subsequent historic golden age was not wholly its own work, but the result of borrowing from much earlier Greek thinkers and with remarkably few original additions—and it was stopped overnight by the Arabic philosopher Al-Ghazali, more responsible than any other for turning Islam into the thing that now occupies its own Dark Age. (Read my own post ‘The Greatest Story (Hardly) Ever Told’ and Andy Clarkson’s ‘Yes, You Can Blame This Guy For Paris’)

Even its horrors enacted today are neither self-funded nor self-armed. The oil wealth without which neither Shia not Sunni violence could continue was created by and then stolen from western companies, income from which is now almost wholly provided by the oil purchases of the west. Its weaponry is aso from elsewhere, from the stockpiles of left-behind western military matériel, and from matériel donated directly to these butchers in pursuit of mistaken western strategic aims – and its belligerent limits are imposed only by the acquiescence and appeasement of of western political and intellectual leaders.  (Read the relevant chapters of Daniel Yergin’s classic The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power and Elan Journo’s Winning the Unwinnable War.)

And its very tactic of terrorism relies not on conquest–it is never going to establish a caliphate in Paris, in Nice or anywhere else—“but through scaring us into panicking, overreacting, and changing our behaviour.” (Read, for example, a former IS hostage’s article: ‘I know Islamic State. What they fear more than bombs is unity,’ and reflect on why western cartoonists and writers—Danish cartoonists, Salman Rushdie, Charlie Hebdo--ended up in the front lines of this battle)

Face it, the only reason we talk so frequently about this double-damned religion is because from a population of 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide a few dozen terrorists and just a few thousand ISIS fighters, financed by states long known to finance terrorism but for which the west has little appetite to say so, are allowed because of that appeasement to put whole continents on the alert. (Witness if nothing else the bowing and scraping of mute westerners at airports and sports events.)

Jihadists truly are the mouse that roars militarily.

Because these fuckers can’t even send their own fighters to do their job! Astonishingly, little has been written on this highly telling fact, but reflect on this: that with only trivial exceptions all those carrying out the horrors in Europe and the US, from London to Glasgow to Madrid to Paris to Boston to New Jersey, have not been poor fighters sent on a mission from far away through some secret refugee or immigrant network but have often been prosperous and almost always homegrown. Just think about the implications of that for a moment. (And read for instance my 2014 post ‘Home-grown horror’ and Adam Taylor’s recent piece ‘The Islamic State wants you to hate refugees: And the plan may be working’.)

So it is simply not true that this evil is strong; like all evil, in itself it is impotent. Like communism, which could only survive by looting capitalists, and like all anti-life evils, it is necessarily parasitic on the good.

But as with communism, of those most opposed to it few realise the vacuum at its unbeating heart. Too few seem to realise that. So while western hipsters download zombie films in their droves, portraying artistically the perfect replica of the ISIS drone, we have allowed ourselves to be attacked by literal self-made zombies—zombies that are self-admitted death worshippers.

So how can a place that fights back by stripping down at airplane gates ever get itself off its knees to fight back? How can a civilisation bewildered by burkinis and cowed by campus millennials ever summon the resolve to defeat Islamic terrorists? Oddly enough, in the culture and on the campus may be among the places to begin fighting back. Because that’s where the corruption starts. When these awkward kids see the west’s intellectual and political leaders so brazenly apologetic about the values of their own culture, especially at a time when the contrast between life and anti-life is so stark, then why in hell (those few who are seduced must wonder) should anyone at all take these western values at all seriously?

When they see a handwringing good appeasing a morally righteous evil, why wouldn’t they start to wonder if there isn’t something to be said for a fundamentalism from the stone age – even if they know neither jot nor tittle of what it stands for apart from the virtue of sacrifice they hear western leaders themselves embrace?

Why wouldn’t they embrace meaning then where they do find it—in revolt, in sacrifice, in barbarism … ?

But remember, evil itself is impotent:

“The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser’s intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture’s dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.”
~ Ayn Rand (from ‘Altruism as Appeasement,’ The Objectivist, Jan. 1966)

By espousing the moral clarity eschewed by the appeasers in the west, even when they know nothing of the religion itself, young homegrown jihadis find something they hadn’t realised existed—and once again Islam steps into a vacuum of others’ creation.

The primary problem here of course is that westerners who are sure of their values are largely silent in defence of the values and virtues that made the west great, while pretending that a stone-age culture is in some way equal – leaving 0000the powerful moral certainty to come from the Dark Ages.  In this compromise between a handwringing good and a crusading evil, it’s astonishing only that evil has as few victories as it has. But as Daniel Pipes asks, how is that “a majority population accepts the customs and even the criminality of a poorer and weaker community? It is the result of a conquest ideology taking the measure of a civilisation that no longer values its heritage, no longer regards itself as worthy of defence.”

Sure,

some of these [homegrown killers] will simply be psychologically susceptible to the nastiness of a violent religion. But what else are they hearing? Where are the voices proclaiming the virtues of reason, individualism and liberty?  Where today will they hear these values proclaimed proudly and unashamedly? Where will they learn of the superiority of reason over religion, of freedom over tyranny?
    When Britain was exporting liberty to much of the known world, these values were unapologetically front and centre. These were the values that built western civilisation. These were values absorbed by immigrants and locally-born alike. People moved to Britain and the west because of these values [and still do!].
    What happened?
    In a word: multiculturalism.
    Multiculturalism teaching that the values of civilisation and those of barbarism are equal.
    Teaching that liberty and slavery are simply different choices.
    Teaching that if any culture should be shamed it should be western culture.
    That the west is responsible for all the world’s horrors, and the rest of the world simply a victim.
    This is the perversion now taught and promulgated in schools, in universities and in learned commentaries peddled by perfumed academics for the consumption of the self-anointed.
     So for all the decades that we’ve been told that Islamic terror is the result of ignorance and poverty, leading westerners have been silent about the superiority of  western health, wealth and freedom over a stone-age theocracy in which beheadings, clitorectomies, slavery and crucifixions still play a part.

What, then, can we do? asks Daniel Hannan.

Well, for a start, we can stop taking these losers at their own estimation. Let's treat them, not as soldiers, but as common criminals. Instead of making documentaries about powerful, shadowy terrorist networks, let's laugh at the pitiable numpties who end up in our courts. Let's mock their underpants bombs and their half Jafaican slang and their attempts to set fire to glass and steel airports by driving into them and their tendency to blow themselves up in error. Let's scour away any sense that they represent a threat to the state – the illicit thrill of which is what attracts alienated young men trawling the web from their bedrooms.
    At the same time, let's stop teaching the children of immigrants to despise the [west]. Let's stop deriding and traducing our values. Let's stop presenting our history as a hateful chronicle of racism and exploitation. Let's be proud of our achievements – not least the defence of liberty …
    The best way to defeat a bad idea is with a better one. Few ideas are as wretched as the theocracy favoured by IS; few as attractive as Anglosphere freedom.
    I'm not saying that patriotism alone will finish the jihadis. Like the urban guerrillas in the 1970s, they must be treated primarily as a security problem rather than a political one. But what ultimately did for the Red Army Faction and all the rest was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the almost universal realisation that revolutionary socialism was no alternative to Western democracy.
    It comes down, in the end, to self-belief. Not theirs; ours.

Do you have it?

Because a war of ideas is more preferable to the other kind. And even that other kind amounts in the end to ideas.

Wars are not won just by military hardware or political re-arrangements [points out Mary Kenny]. They are won by ideas. They are won by men and women who have convictions and values which give them the impetus to pursue victory…
    There's nothing wrong with tolerance and a universalist outlook: these are good things. But if a host society is craven and defeatist about its own history and traditions, then it is asking for trouble. Western societies must uphold the achievements based on our values, and do so with fortitude…
    Isis will not be defeated by drones, military action or even politics alone, but by ideas and leaders who really and truly believe in their own values and traditions. After James Foley was beheaded, it was triumphantly announced that: "The sword is mightier than the pen."
    But ideas, and the conviction to carry them, are still stronger than all else.

So let’s fight for the enlightenment—for Reason, Science, Liberty, Modernity, and Civilisation—and fill the vacuum the jihadis are so fitfully filling.

The Enlightenment is a long-term strategy.
    In fact, many westerners would have to discover the enlightenment. The Enlightenment encourages us to be reflective. But to reflect on whether we are doing the right thing, isn’t an invitation to stop doing the right thing. As a civilisation we have become paralysed by self-doubt when we should have become energised by self-reflection. As we have discovered (or as many knew all along) a moral and ideological vacuum will be filled by others – as it turns out, by savages and barbarians.

Only if we let them.

---

[Pic by Independent]

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Time for SOLO to change its name

 

Why have I posted so many recent posts opposing or explaining the odious Alt-Right movement? Because too many people I know and once valued have become infected by its virus, and intellectual hygiene demands that be acknowledged and rebutted (or an attempt at least made).

One local place that’s become a carrier for the virus is a site that’s still confusingly labelled “Objectivist,” although it’s now clearly anything but.  It should be abundantly evident now to any visitor of Lindsay Perigo’s site “for Sense-of-Life Objectivists” that it promotes neither sense-of-life nor Objectivism -- and should not be confused by anyone for an example of either. Nor of libertarianism.

I  say all this because Lindsay and I have shared stages together, and been long-term collaborators on any number of projects over many years, and any reasonable person may assume I share all his views. I don’t. And very definitely not the views he apparently harbours today.

Mr Perigo’s admirable obsession with opposing Islamist’s thuggery has now sadly morphed, as it has become more single-minded, from being just anti-Muslim to being odiously anti-human. And repellent. After not having been there for some time, here are some examples that sprang out without even needing to dig too deep:

“We need to recognise that most existing ‘humans’ are just that: humans in inverted commas—anti- and sub-human, but existing in human form.”
http://www.solopassion.com/node/9935#comment-123072

"Yes, people are, by and large, scum. That much has become irresistibly apparent to me..."
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"Humanity as a whole (my God, how OrthOists will hate that expression) is still *sub*-human. "Sub" must be circumvented and superseded  ... I cannot imagine it will come about without an intervening cataclysm wherein all sub-humans are Karmally wiped out by the effects of their own mindlessness, and we can start over.
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Humanity “as a whole” is “sub-human,” he says routinely. This from a man who once excoriated what he then called “humanity diminishers.”

“Yes, people are, by and large, scum,” he says without irony on a site that calls itself “Sense-of-Life.” (Can you see that sentiment fitting anywhere within the parameters of that pic above?)

And who you might wonder are all these “sub-humans” for whose end he so fervently hopes? Anyone who disagrees with him, it seems. Including me, who had the temerity to suggest earlier this year that he had chosen an introductory selection of classical music not from the more dramatic moments of romantic music but from the more “tepid” end of the spectrum – I received my indirect response to my riposte that very week; “my answer,” said Perigo, “to the pig-ignorant mewlings of the sub-humans who say Romantic-era music is ‘tepid’." Which was me, except it wasn’t – accuracy too [such as this partial and highly-flawed account of a recent and rare public outing] being another casualty these days of Mr Perigo’s increasingly inward focus.

And how about those he labels “OrthOists,” you ask, of whom he’s often so critical? It’s hard to know since neologising at the expense of clarity is an unfortunate Perigo fetish, but I think (this week at least) it must mean anyone who subscribes to the views espoused by Ayn Rand instead of those emanating from the fever dreams of the conspiracy theorists and worse with whom he now converses daily in his comments section of his site, where most of his site’s work is done.

So vast amounts of weirdness and worse, and not just from his regular commenters and bloggers, many of whom are expicitly white nationalists under whose influence, it appears, Mr Perigo is now…

…leaning explicitly towards eugenics…

"There is no such thing as a right to breed.  Breeding is an imposition upon the bred without the consent of the bred. It's a form of initiating force. Then, Objectimorons will tell the involuntarily bred they have a duty to stay alive simply because they've been bred. This is rational??!! Benevolent??!! In this shitty world of Peter Keatings??!! ... The most important thing as far as the survival of Western Civilisation is concerned, aside from stopping Islamofilth immigration, is stopping The Filth from proliferating. In most cases, it's the only thing The Filth knows how to do. The Filth must be thwarted."
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"Anyway, there should be a new party proposing licenses to breed and to vote, wresting education from the child-molesters, along with my Not One Muslim immigration policy. I'd like to call it something provocative like the Western Civilisation Party."
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…denying universal rights …

"We don't have a right to life just because we're alive and have a human body, though that's what the OrthOist position amounts to..."
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…expressing unrestrained support for the likes of Pauline Hanson …

"Move Over Brexit! Yoooooooge Setback for Filth in Australia!: Move over Brexit! Pauline Hanson, reviled by Filth, has just won a seat in the Australian Senate, and will possibly pick up two more once this weekend's election results become more clear... I personally delight in contemplating how horrified Obleftivists across the ditch in New Zealand will be at this advance for civilised values and human freedom.”
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…and political assassination.

“If ever Obama were to be targeted by an Omar Mateen [i.e., the mass-murderer], that would be poetic justice. I have no hesitation in saying that Obama is one ‘faggot’ whose martyrdom at the hands of the murderous bigots he has enabled would constitute Karmic justice ….”
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Lest you think any of this is intended as humour, it isn’t.

As for reason, in his view it is apparently now an impotent force in the world with none of the power the “Filth” has to move it. So reason is impotent, and evil a force in the world – and a single obsession has become a near universal reason- and humanity-diminishment.

And yet in all his years of opposing and writing about Islamic thuggery, his decade-long singular obsession, his thinking has never matured beyond “Death to Islam.” No solutions at all, zero, beyond “not one Muslim,” a policy enthusiastically embraced at the fever swamp. As if it were possible to simply ban or bar or wipe out 1.5 billion people from existence.

And a man who once cheered Ronald Reagan demanding a Soviet Premier “tear down this wall” can now be found seriously insisting that America must “build a wall” itself, and not just along its Mexican border but along its Canadian border as well !

True story.

Furthermore, Mr Perigo has explicitly repudiated Objectivism, which he now calls "Obleftivism" (whatever that means). Instead, while repudiating the philosophy that the very masthead of his site trumpets and by which he attracts unaware readers, he is now promoting something he calls "Authenticism" -- which in all the years he’s been talking about it has never bothered to fully define apart from arm-waving about most humans not possessing rights (which humans? "Filth?" sub-humans? people with whom he’s had a disagreement?) and putting humans' animal side before their human. And his own personal cultural and highly unphilosophical heroes now hail from the explicit alt-right, including internet bores Stefan Molyneux (a white nationalist known to SOLO’s visitors as “Molly”), Paul Joseph Watson (who helps runs conspiracy sites like “InfoBores” and “Pathetic Planet”) whom Perigo calls “my new hero,” and Milo Yiannopoulos etc., [Milo for President! enthuses Perigo] as too do those with whom he now converses on his website -- which wears the banner of an Objectivist site while repudiating the philosophy.

So as sense-of-life goes, yet alone commitment to reason and just basic intellectual hygiene, there’s every reason to shun the site and demand he change the name, if not yet his direction.

Because, you know, Mr Perigo is free to adopt whatever repellent views and associates he chooses. But just basic intellectual honesty demands he not label those views and the site they frequent as something they are not.

Time to change the name and just go full retard. (Or, if it’s not too late, to reconsider.)

But since, like the pic at the top of the page, this one at the bottom also represents almost everything to which the site formally known as SOLO now stands opposed (including the grin), I thought I’d finish with this:

.[Pics by ObjectivismForIntellectuals and PlanningForLiberty]

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No, don’t free Anjem Choudary

 

Free Anjem Choudary? No, let’s not.

 

Here’s how not to defend free speech: by defending the jailing of “Islamist hothead” Anjen Choudhary – that “Bin Laden without the balls.” Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill, now on a tour of Australia and often quoted here, argues that “he’s repulsive, but he shouldn’t be sent to prison.”

What Choudhary dreams of doing — smashing freedom of thought and demanding conformity to his ideology — is done by the British state to him. In seeking to solve the Choudary problem, we become like Choudary:.

This is errant nonsense.

Yes, O’Neill is right that we shouldn’t have people arrested simply because they’re odious. And he’s very right that Choudary’s arrest and conviction now is largely “a displacement activity, a legalistic performance of toughness against the problem of Islamist extremism in place of any serious ideas for how to confront the growing influence of such anti-Western, anti-liberal ideas among young Muslims, and others”:

How much easier it is to hold up the likes of Choudary as infectors of minds than it is to ask what it is about 21st-century Britain that means a significant number of our young people can be drawn to profoundly unenlightened thought. The showy conviction of Choudary, ridiculously branded ‘the most dangerous man in Britain’, is a sad stand-in for tackling the crisis of British values and liberal thought, which is so strong that we’re losing — rather than Choudary actually winning — young people to a depressing, death cult creed.

The death cult Choudary supports exists in a vacuum created by the west itself – Islam always has. Choudary’s gleeful sponging on British taxpayers is almost a metaphor for how Islam has always survived and flourished, right from when it first began. He’s a parasite, as his religion always has been. As O’Neill identifies so well, Choudary and his fellow creatures are not winning young peope to their nihilistic stone-age cause, the west is generally losing them by failing to fully uphold, defend and identify its own founding values.

We do love life as they love death, but you wouldn’t know it from all the cringing. Getting up of our own knees would be a good way to begin fighting back against the death cult.

But it’s not true anyway that Choudary was guilty only of loose lips.  Like other cowardly inciters of the suicide killings they might have done themselves but didn’t, Choudary was fully implicated in mass murder. Writes Maajid Nawaz, who has followed his career for years, this jihadi joke was in reality a terrorist mastermind:

Over the course of his 20-year jihadist freefall, Anjem’s group al-Muhajiroun and its “Sharia For…” offshoots have been deemed responsible for half of all U.K. terrorist attacks. Anjem himself has been directly linked to the RAF Lakenheath plot, to radicalising Jihadi John’s British successor Siddhartha Darr, the Anzac Day plot in Australia, the plot to behead a British soldier, the murder of drummer Lee Rigby at Woolwich in London, the Royal Wooten Basset plot, the London Stock Exchange Plot, and suicide bomber Omar Khan Sharif’s 2003 attack in Tel Aviv. Anjem has also been indirectly linked to London’s 7/7 bombings, the shoe bomber, the ricin plot, the fertilizer bomb plot, the dirty bomb plot, and the Transatlantic bomb plot.
   Around 6,000 European citizens don’t just get up out of a vacuum and leave to join the worst terrorist group of our lifetime. Anjem Choudary was a key voice responsible for cultivating what eventually became this ISIS support network in Europe. And he acted with impunity.
    No surprises, then, that police revealed his link to 500 British jihadists fighting with ISIS in Syria.

So, much more than just an evil clown then.

But evil itself is impotent – it “has no power but that which we let it extort from us.” So like the vermin he is, has survived midst the cracks and crevices of civilised life – surviving midst the self-imposed western disarmament of cultural relativism, of welfarism, and in the holes in people’s understanding of what free speech entails. The simple relevant fact about free speech here today is this: You are entitled to say anything you like. We all have that right. But you are not entitled, to borrow Raymond Chandler’s feliitous phrase, to become a killer by remote control. That right belongs to no-one.

There is one reason however not to lock him up, and one reason only. That reason, says Nawaz, is that prisons themselves have now become hotbeds of radical recruitment, so

now that Anjem is in prison, another challenge confronts us. He will be held for a while at HMP Belmarsh, previously described as a jihadist training camp. How will he be stopped from playing his wicked tune through his crooked flute in jail? This time his audience is made up of hardened criminals.

Nawaz maintains that “action to at least neutralise his recruitment efforts must certainly be considered. And any plan should form a blueprint for building such intervention to scale, globally.”

The way in which my path eventually forked from Anjem’s symbolizes the split at the heart of the civil war playing out within Muslim communities, and beyond: Islamists against secularists. Muslims with varying levels of devotion, and even non-Muslims, sit on both sides of this divide. They straddle a largely passive Muslim majority that values its religion and culture but just wants to get on in life.
    Islamist theocrats will not allow them to do so.
    A civil war has unfolded within Islam, and none of us can any longer afford to remain neutral. First and foremost, this is an ideological war. The state, private companies, and civil society must intervene on behalf of secularists.

Intervening on behalf of a terrorist mastermind to help free him would put you on the other side that civil war. Not to mention on the other side of the war against us all declared by Islamist theocrats themselves.

.

And, into that vacuum stepped Islam …

 

Let’s talk about Islam, and its evil. (Beause as we know, the only reason we’re even talking about the religion is because it is evil.)

We should be under no illusions about the evil of Islam, but neither should we grant it any more power than it has: as Ayn Rand used to say, evil on its own is impotent. Evil can only achieve its values through the actions of others—by that which we let evil-doers extort from us.

Never has this underlying impotence been more true of any ideology than Islam:

• whose allegedly heroic beginnings in historic “conquest” were less the bold display of any great martial ability than the result of occupying the vacuum that emerged after the collapse of the Roman and Persian empires—after which these illiterate marauding heroes cobbled together a religion from the mostly heretical cultural remnants of the desert towns and places they occupied. (Read Tom Holland’s ground-breaking history In the Shadow of the Sword.)
• whose historic golden age was wholly the result of borrowing from Greek thinkers, contained remarkably few original additions-- and was stopped overnight by the philosopher, Al-Ghazali, more responsible than most for turning Islam into the thing that pulled the pin on Paris (Read my own post ‘The Greatest Story (Hardly) Ever Told’ and Andy Clarkson’s ‘Yes, You Can Blame This Guy For Paris’)
• whose modern violence has been indirectly financed by the oil purchases of the west, largely armed from the stockpiles of left-behind western military materiel, and whose belligerent limits are imposed only by the acquiescence and appeasement of of western political and intellectual leaders.  (Read the relevant chapters of Daniel Yergin’s classic The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power and Elan Journo’s Winning the Unwinnable War.)
• whose very tactic of terrorism relies not on conquest–it is never going to establish a caliphate in Paris—“but through scaring us into panicking, overreacting, and changing our behaviour.” (Read, for example, a former IS hostage’s article: ‘I know Islamic State. What they fear more than bombs is unity,’ and reflect on why western cartoonists and writers—Danish cartoonists, Salman Rushdie, Charlie Hebdo--ended up in the front lines of this battle)
• whose very western recruits are frequently just idiots with empty lives seeking something seemingly meaningful to fill them. (Reflect, for example, on the comment on the would-be Garland terrorist: “He had been going down a bad path and then he found Islam.")

Face it, the only reason we are even talking about the double-damned religion is because from a population of 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide a few dozen terrorists and just a few thousand ISIS fighters, financed by states long known to finance terrorism but for which the west has little appetite to say so, are allowed because of that appeasement to put whole continents on the alert. (Read the report’s and mis-reports overnight, for example, of panic in the streets around European soccer stadiums.)

It truly is the mouse that roars militarily.

Because these fuckers can’t even send their own fighters to do their job! Astonishingly, little has been written on this highly telling fact, but reflect on this: that with only trivial exceptions all those carrying out the horrors in Europe, from London to Glasgow to Madrid to Paris, have not been fighters sent on a mission from far away but have been educated, prosperous and homegrown. (Read for instance my 2014 post Home-grown horror, and Adam Taylor’s piece yesterday The Islamic State wants you to hate refugees: And the plan may be working.)

The real failure is not that the evil is strong—it neither has been nor can be—but that the good has been weak. While western hipsters download zombie films, we have allowed ourselves to be attacked by literal self-made zombies—zombies who are self-admitted death worshippers. As a commentator said yesterday: ”Can a civilisation cowed by campus millennials summon the resolve to defeat Islamic terrorists?” Even more important question in stopping psychopaths and disaffected youngsters find value in these anti-life zombies—if these awkward kids see the west’s intellectual and political leaders so brazenly apologetic about the values of their own culture, especially when the contrast between life and anti-life is so stark, then why in hell (those few who are seduced must wonder) should anyone at all take these values at all seriously?

Why wouldn’t they wonder if there isn’t something in a fundamentalism from the stone age?

Why wouldn’t they embrace meaning where they do find it—in barbarism?

“The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser’s intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture’s dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.”
~ Ayn Rand (from ‘Altruism as Appeasement,’ The Objectivist, Jan. 1966)

By espousing the moral clarity eschewed by those they hear in the west, young homegrown jihadis find something they hadn’t realised existed—and once again Islam steps into a vacuum of others’ creation. The primary problem here of course being that the powerful cultural force they should be hearing from westerners who are sure of their values have instead been silent in defence of the values and moral certainty that make the west great, while pretending that a stone-age culture is in any way equal. As Daniel Pipes asks, how is that “a majority population accepts the customs and even the criminality of a poorer and weaker community? It is the result of a conquest ideology taking the measure of a civilisation that no longer values its heritage, no longer regards itself as worthy of defence.”

Sure,

some of these [homegrown killers] will simply be psychologically susceptible to the nastiness of a violent religion. But what else are they hearing? Where are the voices proclaiming the virtues of reason, individualism and liberty?  Where today will they hear these values proclaimed proudly and unashamedly? Where will they learn of the superiority of reason over religion, of freedom over tyranny?
When Britain was exporting liberty to much of the known world, these values were unapologetically front and centre. These were the values that built western civilisation. These were values absorbed by immigrants and locally-born alike. People  moved to Britain and the west because of these values.
What happened?
In a word: multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism taught that the values of civilisation and those of barbarism were equal.
It taught that liberty and slavery were simply different choices.
It taught that if any culture should be shamed it should be western culture. That the west is responsible for all the world’s horrors, and the rest of the world simply a victim. This is the perversion now taught and promulgated in schools, in universities and in learned commentaries peddled by perfumed academics for the consumption of the self-anointed.
So for all the decades that we’ve been told that Islamic terror is the result of ignorance and poverty, leading westerners have been silent about the superiority of  western health, wealth and freedom over a stone-age theocracy in which beheadings, clitorectomies, slavery and crucifixions still play a part.

So let’s fight for the enlightenment—for Reason, Science, Modernity, and Civilisation--and fill the vacuum.

The Enlightenment is a long-term strategy.
In fact, many westerners would have to discover the enlightenment. The Enlightenment encourages us to be reflective. But to reflect on whether we are doing the right thing, isn’t an invitation to stop doing the right thing. As a civilisation we have become paralysed by self-doubt when we should have become energised by self-reflection. As we have discovered (or as many knew all along) is that a moral and ideological vacuum will be filled by others – as it turns out savages and barbarians.

UPDATE:

Yes, as an emailer suggested to me, there’s a parallel between the impotence of Islam and the impotence of another evil ideology: communism—in that like all anti-life evils they are necessarily parasitic on the good. (Evil is an absence and a negation; evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us.)

Observe, for example, that both Marx and Lenin understood that a country could only go communist after it had a period of capitalism—because only then would there be something decent to loot. (Read Marx’s Capital, if you can, and Lenin’s ‘What Must Be Done.’)

Observe that in a country where chess is a spectator sport, stealing wealth and technology was a necessary feature of the Soviet Union, without which neither production nor progress was possible. (Read Werner Keller’s fabulous history on this, whose very title explains the relationship: East Minus West Equals Zero.)

Observe too that while conservatives focussed their anti-communism on arresting the alleged strength of the evil empire, thinkers like Ayn Rand and Ludwig Von Mises who understood that impotent ideology knew that totalitarianism is not a system that ever produces wealth, and that the Soviet Union faced inevitable economic collapse. (Read Mises’s Socialism and Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. And compare, for example, the technology-stangant dystopia in Ayn Rand’s Anthem to the technology available in either Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984—or even the films of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games.)

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Quotes of the day: On the ultimate impotence of evil

“Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us… The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default...”
”When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.
        ~ Ayn Rand, from ‘Galt’s Speech,’ in For the New Intellectual

“The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser’s intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture’s dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.”
        ~ Ayn Rand, from ‘Altruism as Appeasement,’ The Objectivist, Jan. 1966

Are we all Parisians today? [updated]

“Je suis Charlie Hebdo,” everyone said ten months ago when their offices were shot up by savages. We all spoke up for their free speech – yet Charlie’s cartoons were reprinted hardly at all, and the news now is replete with reports of politicians wanting non-warmists arrested and university campuses demanding that free speech be shut down.

“We are all Londoners today,” we all said ten years ago when London was bombed by savages. Hell, I said it myself---hoping that’s where the barbarians would be sent. Yet the savages are still bombing – and now, ten years later, there is still no sign of a decent, methodical, coordinated, fully-focussed western response to the barbarism. (And hardly a word of what I wrote then needs to change part from the Proper Nouns.)

So are we all Parisians today? If we are—and sympathy and French flags are everywhere, and Facebook is full of French avatars–it's starting to look less like a brave show of solidarity in ending this never-ending threat, and more like embracing a future of never-ending victimhood.

Do we really wish to hunt down and kill all those who just carried out these mass-murders—and to hunt down and kill those who trained them, financed them, coordinated them and supplied them (without whom the barbarians could only sing like impotent castrati)?

No, you don’t want to do that?

You don’t want that done in your name?

Then just add yourself to that list of people impotently wringing their hands while waving a banner declaring their identity to be “victim.”

"Please don’t say things like, “I stand with France,” or “Those poor French people, victims of that attack!” unless you’re prepared to say and do the following things:
    "Stop saying “Islam” is about peace and love. It’s not. It’s about submission; the people who really get this are the ones who launch these attacks in the name of their religion.
    "Stop supporting politicians like Obama, who insist that Islamic nations like Iran have our same fundamental values and can be trusted with billions of dollars in unfrozen assets (Obama’s treaty), and who don’t mean what they say when they want to wipe Israel off the map.
    "Stop saying we don’t really need a strong military and we cannot, under any circumstances, use the full might of our military arsenal to do things to stop militant Islam in its tracks, to quite literally scare the Allah out of these people.
    "Unless or until you start to rethink your stance, you have no business expressing compassion towards the victims of people in attacks whose perpetrators – knowingly or not – you aid and support via your positions.
    "The president of France calls the attacks in Paris by militant ISIS supporters an “act of war.” Excuse me? Haven’t we been at war since at least 9/11? Even going back as far as 1979, when the first openly organised Islamic government, Iran, took Americans hostage and brutalized them for a year before setting them free?
    "We’re not supposed to admit we’re at war with Islam. But Islam has been at war with everyone else for decades now. And it’s not going to stop."

It’s not going to stop by itself.

It must be stopped.

Contemplate that. Because waving flags of solidarity isn’t enough on its own.

RELATED:

• “"Thoughts and prayers won’t stop the next attack. This war against civilisation must be fought or lost." ~ Garry Kasparov
  How To Prevent The Next Paris Tragedy – Jaana Woiceshyn, CAPITALISM MAGAZINE
• “It is no coincidence that Paris is the center of Islamic attacks in recent years. The murderous Mohammedans know the value of symbolism. They know what they can win by destroying not only our existential values (World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Paris -- the Aquinian home of reason), but the philosophical and psychological root of those values -- reason itself.
  ”The choice of Paris as a continual target is no accident. The Islamic leaders know its significance and what they are doing. Do you?”
  The Consequences of The Fundamental Sin: Passivity In Thought and Action. And Why Paris Is The Target – Andy Clarkson, FACEBOOK GROUP
• “Immediately the French security services will have been confident of two things: Islamic State was likely to have been behind the attacks, and the security services had dropped the ball.”
  A discarded parking ticket in a car near the Bataclan leads detectives to Brussels – GUARDIAN
• “Indeed, many of the attacks in the West over the past 15 years have been carried out by people either born in or educated in the West. But even if the attackers have foreign passports and got into Europe via the recent influx from Syria — as one of the Paris suicide bombers allegedly did — it’s not their foreignness that is important so much as the unholy marriage that now exists between the nihilistic youths drawn to anti-modern, anti-Western death cults like ISIS and the anti-modern, anti-Western death wish of the West itself. Terrifyingly, horrifically, they are complimentary.”
  After Paris: That’s enough cultural appeasement; let’s fight for the Enlightenment. – Brendan O’Neill, SPIKED
• “Save this to your hard drive. Pull it out whenever you find yourself thinking that ISIS is merely a reaction to the West's military activities in Iraq, or that it's ‘all about oil’ etc.” ~ Paul McKeever
  What ISIS Really Wants – Graeme Wood, THE ATLANTIC
• “The world would be an infinitely safer place if the historical Mohammed had behaved more like Buddha or Jesus. But he did not and an increasing number of people — Muslim and non-Muslim — have been able to learn this for themselves in recent years."
  Will politicians finally admit that the Paris attacks had something to do with Islam? - Douglas Murray, SPECTATOR
• “The … massacre once again has politicians and the media dancing around the question of whether there might be something a little bit special about this one particular religion, Islam, that causes its adherents to go around killing people. It is not considered acceptable in polite company to entertain this possibility.”
  Why Islam Is More Violent Than Christianity: An Atheist’s Guide – Robert Tracinski, THE FEDERALIST
• “Why do so many people pretend not to know what they know about Islam and its unique role in the world today? Why do so many smear those who speak the truth about this horrendous religion and its devout followers? Why do so many ignore the fact that although other religions involve barbaric commandments, none motivates large numbers of its followers to commit atrocities the way Islam does today? ..
  “Whatever people’s motives, these facts remain: (1) To pretend not to know what one knows is to be dishonest…
  The Evil of Whitewashing Islam – Craig Biddle, OBJECTIVE STANDARD