For twenty years, our rulers have propagandized us with two contradictory claims. First, that the West is locked in an existential conflict with Islam, justifying any spending, any killing, and any erasure of our ancient liberties. And second, that no Muslim, as a Muslim, is any threat to anybody whatsoever. Resolving the contradiction is not hard, but why bother, because what American cares about global Islam now? As the American empire collapses inward and America’s divisions are elucidated ever more clearly, our internal conflicts have superseded any conflict with Islam. Still, maybe conflict will return when the West is reborn, or replaced, and as always we can learn a lot from studying the past that may yet be useful in the future.
The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam is a longitudinal historical analysis of how Islam has dealt with other religions where Islam has conquered. This book also illuminates, or acts as a jumping-off point, for two other topics that interest me—why modern Eastern Christians often irrationally pander to Islam, and why Europe, Western Europe at least, is probably entirely lost and should be left to sink beneath the waves of history. Ye’or makes clear up front her book is not about Islam, but rather about the peoples subjugated by Islam. Nonetheless, we get a lot of history of Islam, because it’s necessary to understand the institution of dhimmitude. And actually, the title is misleading—Eastern Christianity is not really the focus, because Jews, also dhimmis, are covered nearly as much as Christians.
The author, Gisèle Littman, who uses the pen name Bat Ye’or, has written several books about Islam’s always-troubled relationship with its neighbors. Unlike the Johnny-come-latelies who swarmed out of the woodwork in 2001, she has made this topic her academic focus for decades (she is now eighty-eight, and lives in Switzerland). In this she fits along with Samuel P. Huntington, who accurately predicted in the 1990s that Islam’s “bloody borders” would be an ongoing problem for the modern world. When Saudi-backed Muslims managed to pull off the September 11th attacks, what Ye’or had been saying for some time, of how Islam has always viewed areas not controlled by Islam as the House of War (dar al-harb), to be moved into the sphere of Muslim domination, the House of Islam (dar al-Islam), where Islam rules, forever, seemed to be both proven and imminently relevant.
As it turned out, though, Islam did not really threaten America, nor did various tinpot dictators of the Islamic world, such as Saddam Hussein, or violent groupings of Muslim traditionalists, such as ISIS. Rather, our globalist overlords used fear whipped up by propaganda to extend their dominion over us, and to line their pockets while leaving hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocents in other countries dead. We got in return not more security, but a totalitarian (yet clownish) surveillance state now turned against dissent by the common man. The connected in our elites profited hugely—not from oil, the seizing of which to repay our expenditures would at least make sense, but from unnecessary and corrupt government spending bloated to incomprehensible proportions. The poor and idealistic volunteered for our military; they were sent to Afghanistan and Iraq to get their legs blown off in pursuit of the insane quest of George W. Bush (God rot him) to impose liberal democracy on the entire Middle East, which morphed into the ruling classes’ insane quest to impose globohomo on the entire Middle East. And now we have been driven, covered in humiliation, from Afghanistan, with our rainbow flags flung after us as we ran for the exit—yet those same ruling classes now import to America hundreds of thousands of alien Afghans, not to their neighborhoods, but to the towns and neighborhoods of the hated deplorables, using them as yet another weapon against their domestic enemies. The past twenty years sure haven’t worked out so well for most of America.
Ye’or didn’t claim Islam threatened America, however. Her constant focus has always been not the United States, but Europe. She was the first to give a name, “Eurabia,” to the projected end result of the invasion and transformation of Western Europe by Muslim multitudes invited, welcomed, and cossetted by rotten elites, the only elites in history who actually hate their own civilization. Thirty years ago, the advent of Eurabia seemed inevitable; less so now. Naturally, for her honesty and clear thinking Ye’or has long been subject to vicious attacks, both by those Europeans she criticizes for betraying their people, and by the Left generally, which views Muslims as a victim class in need of emancipation (and Muslims return the favor by voting for the Left, completing the cycle of civilizational destruction).
We will get to Europe, but to be sure, Islam does existentially threaten the Jews and Israel, though the idea that our wars in the Middle East over the past twenty years have been conducted to benefit Israel is silly. Ye’or correctly notes that Israel is responsible neither for the resurgence of traditional (i.e., “radical”) Islam, nor for the always-present division of the world into the House of Islam and the House of War. Yet too many on the Right still peddle stories about the nefarious Eternal Jew, when the reality is that despite occasional friction, Israel is far better for Christians in the Middle East than any Muslim regime (except perhaps that of Bashar al-Assad, and he’s not really a Muslim). Regardless, Israel seems more than capable of taking care of itself.
None of this is to criticize this excellent book. The foreword is by Jacques Ellul, whose books The Technological Society and Propaganda have of late returned to notice (and the latter of which I am currently reading). Ellul notes, writing in 1991, the early existence of two pieces of lying propaganda that became ubiquitous in the West after 9/11—the pretense that jihad is a mere spiritual struggle, and that Islam has mostly spread and expanded through peaceful means. The first is actually a minor variation on the core meaning of jihad, which is violent struggle against non-Muslims. The second is simply a lie. Expansion by violence is in the nature of Islam and it has always driven growth primarily by the sword. Islam is, and always has been, a triumphalist religion, in which Islam must permanently dominate in any area where there are Muslims, and struggle mightily until this is achieved.
Ye’or’s primary goal here, however, is not to complain about Islam, but to document the relationship between Muslim rulers and non-Muslim ruled, across both time and space. Once a geographic area becomes part of the House of Islam, the goal of the new rulers is not conversion. In fact, as seen again and again in this book, conversion is frequently discouraged. Islam originated, and is still in some ways organized as, a booty-collecting warrior culture. Conversion reduces the tax base, because Muslims are exempt from many of the taxes imposed on non-Muslims. The solution is that non-Muslims are assigned dhimmi status, a well-developed status that has been applied very differently in various times and places. The core of being a dhimmi is that one formally acknowledges Muslim rulership and superiority, and pays money extorted as “protection”—and in return receives protection of variable effectiveness, but is not (usually) harassed to convert.
As with everything in Islam, the rules of dhimmitude, historically accurately or not, are traced back by Muslims to what Muhammad is said to have done, such as confiscating the land of Jews (those he did not kill) and then permitting them, upon submission, to maintain possession, without retaining ownership, subject at any time to abrogation by the Muslim ruler in charge at the time. Really, the law of dhimmitude is mostly a codified way of dealing with the standard early Muslim practice of raids for booty, which was simply a continuation of the usual ways of the Arab tribes. Thus, organizationally, dhimmitude is in many ways preferable to the alternative, which is merely constant slaughter and looting—Muhammad was wise to see that this was not the path to grow a new civilization.
Key to the success of this system was that the new Muslim rulers needed the locals to maintain the tax base, and therefore aggressively put down not only destructive and short-term-profitable freelance Muslim raiding, but also other forms of Arabization, such as land seizure, that destroyed the tax base (then as now Arab men didn’t like to actually work). They needed the locals not only for the tax base, but to maintain all elements of higher civilization, from administration to art, of which the new Muslim invaders were ignorant. Thus, the new rulers had strong incentives to maintain the existing structures, merely redirected to their benefit. The institution of the dhimmi was crucial to this project. (It is false, although it is often said, that dhimmis are “minorities”; for centuries, in most Muslim countries, Muslims were the minority.) A variety of ad hoc rules to address local conditions, combined with adopting elements of Byzantine and Persian taxation, ultimately resulted in the so-called Pact of Umar, which codified the basic rules of dhimmitude—even though the actual rules ascribed to Umar developed long after his rule.
One fact that emerges very clearly from these pages (which include about 250 pages of translated source documents) is the great diversity of Eastern Christianity, and how this contributed to Muslim success in conquering new territory. We tend to see Christianity prior to the Protestant Reformation as largely unitary, or, for the better informed, involving a split between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, the latter centered in Constantinople. But once, before the catastrophe of Islam, the East was filled many other Christian churches, mostly split along the lines of earlier Christological debates. Monophysites, Jacobites, Copts, Nestorians, Syriacs, and others felt, and often were, oppressed by the Byzantines and the Persians and thus were usually not unhappy when Islam arrived. It was, famously, initially viewed as just another Christian heresy (the Qur’an was only reduced to writing later, and it is obvious that early Muslim belief was often very different than it later evolved to be), and Muslim raids didn’t necessarily seem a harbinger of the invaders actually taking over. The Muslims not infrequently lowered taxes, or simply made it unnecessary to pay taxes to the Persians or the Byzantines. Moreover, the Muslims, needing to administer their new conquests, often used the hierarchs of the oppressed churches, enhancing their power and prestige after centuries of oppression. This resulted, early on, in a type of symbiosis, in which non-Muslims were not obviously, or not always, worse off than they would have been otherwise.
The history of the next twelve hundred years, as covered by Ye’or, is one of gradual total Islamization in most areas dominated by Islam. Elites slowly converted, due to some combination of persecution, restrictions imposed on dhimmis, and the desire to retain and enhance elite status. The peasantry similarly mostly converted over time. This summation covers a vast divergence of history and practice across time and place, of course. Ye’or goes into exhaustive detail from original documents, to narrate not only the theoretical practice, but the actual practice, of dhimmitude. Taxation was only part of it—other elements of dhimmitude, less related to money and more related to Muslim domination, included civil debilities, such as disallowing judicial testimony by dhimmis, even in their own defense, and forbidding dhimmis from holding any civil office with authority over any Muslim. Along with this went limitations on, destruction of, and forbidding any repair of, Christian churches and Jewish synagogues. In some times and places, forced conversions were common, along with other religious fanaticism, often whipped up by local rulers to distract the populace from some other problem, or by local religious leaders to enhance their prestige and power. Enslavement of dhimmis was also frequent—usually generic chattel slavery, of which Muslims have always been by far the greatest global practitioners (and, because slavery is fully approved-of by Islam, a practice that continues today in some Muslim countries), but also various forms of military slavery, of which the most notable examples are the Mamluks, who seized Egypt from their masters, and the janissaries, Christian children stolen by the Ottomans.
Thus Islamization went hand-in-glove with dhimmitude. This is no surprise; it is the obvious path of gradual civilizational ascendancy over a conquered society. Quite a few pictures are sprinkled through the book, showing places, costumes, and other items of interest; the saddest ones are churches and monasteries in the East abandoned for a thousand years. I have to be honest, though—my objection to Islam’s ascendance to total control through the dhimmi system isn’t that it violates some principle of religious self-determination, it’s that it’s Islam doing the dominating. No doubt a strong society will impose some set of debilities on those who worship the wrong God. This is both inevitable and good. I just think it should be Christians doing it, what I have elsewhere discussed as “pluralism lite.” I have also discussed elsewhere the possibilities for a future mass conversion of Muslim nations to Christianity—unlikely, but not impossible, especially if coupled with arms. A lot would have to change before any of this became possible, however.
The dhimmi system survived into the modern era. As Western power increased, in those Muslim countries that received the benefits of colonialism, Western functionaries extended protection to dhimmis, eroding the worst effects of the system. At the same time, a return to strict orthodoxy by many Muslims as a reaction to the unfathomable loss of Muslim power, and an increase in nationalism, combined with modern technology, led Muslims in some areas to engage in mass slaughter of Christians, something that had not generally featured in Muslim-Christian interactions in the past. The most notable example is the Armenian genocide, but other examples also show up in this book. Of course, the increase in nationalism also gave the dhimmis a new sense of purpose and a new set of goals, in those areas such as the Balkans and Greece where large numbers of Christians still lived, resulting in a spiral of violence, as the Muslims tried to retain control and the benefits of the tribute system.
Ye’or says that a new nationalist, bourgeois set of dhimmis cooperated with their declining Muslim overlords to largely erase the memory of centuries of dhimmitude, and then to adopt a pan-Arab philosophy in the twentieth century, further erasing the memory. Western states, eager for oil and influence, likewise had every reason to forget past oppression of Christians and Jews, and many Westerners saw in Islam itself an oppressed group, and assigned the dhimmis the status of foreigners in their own lands. And today? Certainly, in parts of Europe, Muslim invaders purport to impose certain aspects of dhimmitude—notably sexual violence against dhimmis, abetted as in England by Englishmen, or covered-up as in Germany, or dealt with ineffectively as in Sweden. But these are mostly just crimes committed by shiftless young men who have nothing but contempt for the societies that have unwisely invited them in; Islam doesn’t control Europe, even if it has grossly excessive influence. We are a long way from a new caliphate.
Ye’or’s Eurabia hypothesis has thus proven only partially correct, so far. But even if it does prove wholly correct, what of it? None of the countries of Western Europe deserve to survive. When you will not fight for your nation and culture; when you spend your days in the pursuit of transitory delight and the hysterical avoidance of any thought of death; when you abandon the faith of your fathers; when you refuse to have, and often kill, your own children so that you may not be hindered in your pleasures—you deserve what you get. Just this week, for example, first Austria and then other European nations adopted an insane, hateful, and stupid regime where those who have not gotten the dubiously-effective shot forced on everyone for the Wuhan Plague are locked in their houses—without armed revolt of, or even much murmur from, the populace. Whoever permanently destroys such nations does mankind a favor. Yes, it is sad that a thousand years of grandeur will perish. But it is crucial to recognize that culture, that civilization, of Christendom, is already dead and gone. The Left killed it, replacing it with an ephemeral, doomed culture, clothed in the skin of the civilization it had slain. Nobody should mourn when Europe disappears—even if it’s replaced by an inferior, extractive, Muslim culture.
Oh, maybe this is too pessimistic. Maybe, like Abraham in his argument with God, we should consider whether Europe still has a substantial minority of righteous men, who with decisive action could rescue and renew their civilization. I doubt it. But I don’t actually know—and I do know that such a minority most definitely exists in America, so perhaps I should not rule it out so quickly in Europe. At the end of the day, it is not my conflict, yet I wish those men well, however many there are.
Moreover, it seems entirely possible Islam will soon crest in Europe. Islam is more susceptible than people realize to the poison of the Left; birthrates of Muslims are falling, just like everyone else’s. More likely than Ye’or’s original vision of Eurabia, swarms of Africans (some Muslims, true) will take over, as they already have in parts of southern Europe, reducing what was Europe (although not Eastern Europe, if they have the will to fight) to Lagos writ large, an open sewer of no accomplishment and civilizational incompetence. Or, perhaps, a new empire, of arms and ideas, will arise from that same south. Maybe the Ethiopians will unveil the Ark of the Covenant and sweep across the lands that once were Europe, raising up the New Empire of Aksum in the name of Saint Kaleb the King. Stranger things have happened, though not many, and in this case, unfortunately, past performance probably is a strong indicator of future results.
Ye’or only touches briefly on another subject I find of great interest—why is it that the Christian churches of the East tend to aggressively oppose the Jews and Israel, when it is obvious their real enemy is Islam, and has been for well over a thousand years? She ascribes it both to traditional “Judeophobia” of Eastern Christians and to Arab nationalism. As to the first, true, low-level conflict among Jews and Christians under Islam was endemic. This is not surprising, given that Jews and Christians traded abuse in the East when each was in power, and thereafter Muslim rulers often dexterously further encouraged such schisms in order to divide and conquer—easy to do, given the wholly justified complaints of both Christians and Jews, in which each stored up centuries of wrongs, great and small. And as to the second, in more modern times, the dead end of pan-Arab nationalism, wherein there was an embedded conflict with Israel, seemed to attract “Arab” Christians.
But that does not explain why non-Arab Christians, such as the Greek Orthodox, kowtow to Islam and pretend it is anything but their mortal enemy. Certainly the Ecumenical Patriarch, head of my own church, is sadly under the thumb of the Turks, perhaps explaining why he focuses on third-order issues such as environmentalism, rather than the existential threats facing all Christians today. And let’s not forget that George W. Bush is single-handedly responsible for the total destruction of the Christians of Iraq by Muslims—something Eastern Christian leaders say little or nothing about. I’m hardly an expert in the various threads among today’s Eastern Christians, to be sure, or who is an Arab (how can it be that most Eastern Christians are Arabs, any more than Turks are Arabs?), or many other relevant matters. Maybe it’s just as simple as that Eastern Christians who live in Muslim countries are relentlessly bombarded with propaganda, and they know that any swimming against the tide is both difficult and dangerous—most of all for Eastern Christian hierarchs, who hold themselves responsible for the safety of their flocks.
So here we are today, in a world that Ye’or could not have predicted, where the West has hurtled into the pit by its own choice, and Islam is not our main problem. It is utterly bizarre to me, for example, that today the Taliban are far more worthy to rule than our own current ruling class—not that I want to be ruled by the Taliban, but it’d be a close run between being ruled by the Taliban and Joe Biden’s puppeteers. But here we are.
“Invade the world invite the world” explains the contradiction. Muslims in America and Europe are not a threat to globalists, but a bonus. Muslims in the Middle East are a threat to Israel though.
Re Eastern Christians and their relations with the Jews. It has been noted that Ethnic Germans of the North Eastern and Eastern peripheries (you know the Baltics, and off into the wilds of ‘Saxon’ Transylvania and divers similar weird and wonderful places) were the most virulent anti-Semites during the Late Unpleasantness.
The standard dogmatically correct psychobabble explanation for this is that said Diaspora Germans felt threatened that their identities were fragmenting amongst all this ‘Otherness’ and therefore lashed out. No prizes for guessing the intellectual genesis of these trains of thought. There’s also a grain of truth in this argument. However, what’s never mentioned in these discussions is where our Learned Doctor William of Occam gets his say: “The Diaspora Germans lived alongside large Jewish communities and knew them best. Germans in the homeland did not.”
This probably goes, too for Christians of the East. One might expect the Greeks of pre-WWII Thessalonica to have stronger opinions about their numerous Sephardic neighbours than about the Turks — even pre-Independence given that the Turkish garrison and tax collection would have had little daily impact on the lives of the Greeks.
Things complicated, too in the East under the Milet System because you had the Armenians in the mix as well. Unlike in the West, where nobody but nobody out-trades an Ashkenazi, in the Ottoman lands, it was widely held that the Armenians and Sephardim were evenly-matched and perhaps even thought that the Armenians were more slippery characters. Then you had the Phanariot Greeks who know plenty about wheeling and dealing and geopolitics. Turks played them all off against each other. Recall that when the Turks hanged the Patriarch during the Greek Revolt, he ordered the Kosher Butchers to drag the corpse down to the harbour and throw it in. Subtle not.
Rambling response, but while some of us are not interested in a Milet System, I think it has potential. The big thing is to Be the Turk.
Waiting for Charles to become a serious thinker. This one wasn’t really it.
Maybe getting into more dialogue with wider scene will help.
Sigh. Why is it that people feel that making conclusory statements, that of necessity must be based on facts and reasoning, is fine without any facts or reasoning? Don’t they know that makes them look either stupid or lazy (or both)? I mean, this might be true, and if there is some argument it’s true, I’m curious to learn more about it. But as it stands, it’s just a moronic comment.
Chaz? Is that you Chaz?
Ummm . . . no.
There are three ideologies I see prevailing for dominance: American Liberty, Islam and Marxism’s many misbegotten children. I’m certainly not happy about how American Liberty has proceeded from the onset (corruption, erosion, etc.), but without it I suspect the other two would have swallowed the world by now. Always glad for more material to consider the history
As a tangent, I have considered the idea of taking the Constitution blockchain after reforming it to get rid of or clarify certain amendments. Tie your token to your gene sequence and keep the rest of the parameters from Bitcoin.
I greatly look forward to your review of Ellul’s Propaganda. I recently finished it and found it insightful and timely. Recognizing and understanding propaganda is, in my view, one of the most important skills one can have today. Many of the things we see today make no sense as ideologies or coherent belief systems, yet make perfect sense as propaganda. Propaganda has been ubiquitous for so long, at least since Woodrow Wilson and his CPI, that we hardly see it anymore. It is the water and we are the fish. If there is such a thing as toxicity due to long term exposure to propaganda we surely suffer from it.
One other point I would make is that the early writers on propaganda such as Bernays understood it to include advertising and public relations. Many today think propaganda is only political propaganda. This is a mistake. Click-bait is a form of propaganda as are all the commercials we see every day. Editorials in mainstream newspapers and news shows are more prop-eds than op-eds.
My apologies for the off-topic comment.
Gurdjieff on our weakness for propaganda:
“Besides this chief particularity of their common
psyche, there are completely crystallized in them and there
unfailingly become a part of their common presences—regardless
of where they may arise and exist—functions
which exist under the names ‘egoism,’ ‘self-love,’ Vanity,’
’pride,’ ‘self-conceit,’ ‘credulity,’ ‘suggestibility,’ and many
other properties quite abnormal and quite unbecoming to
the essence of any three-brained beings whatsoever.
“Of these abnormal being-particularities, the particularity
of their psyche the most terrible for them personally
is that which is called ‘suggestibility.’
No need to apologize! Yeah, Ellul’s book is very insightful. On the other hand, at some point, we need less analysis and more doing.
One of the most frustrating things is how the West’s odious leaders insist on importing the problems of Islam, helping them invade Christian lands again. It’s not just the well publicized wrongs of that gremlin Merkel, but the Biden administration too. It has not been publicized but the executive branch recently used the military to airlift tens of thousands of Afghans to the US, where they will be provided everything with zero expectation of conforming to American standards. Our troops were made to clean up the literal shit that the Afghans left everywhere but the toilets they were provided in the refugee camps. Our troops were also told to ignore the constant rape, assaults, and general criminality of the Afghans, ON US SOIL.
Yes, but when will they be held accountable, and how? That’s the question.
Only under a completely different government.
Have you ever heard of Henri Bergson? In the interwar years, he came up with some interesting insights on liberalism.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/the-open-society-prophets
Yes, although mostly in the context of something overall unimportant to his work, I think–his belief that the brain is, or may be, merely an antenna. Fascinating article, although the conclusion does not follow from it, and Bergson (in this telling) grossly overstates the degree to which non-liberal societies are “closed.” Thinking was done much more before the Enlightenment, and infinitely more than today.
Thank you for the review, Charles. I’ve never heard of Gisèle Littman, and this sounds like an interesting book to read — I will look into ordering it.
Concerning the reasons why, as you mention, Eastern Christians kowtow to Islam, perhaps it is not so much about Eastern Christians and Islam as it is a reflection of the rather complex relationship between the Eastern Orthodox Church and Western Christianity. It was the (Christian) crusaders who looted Constantinople in 1204, after all. But that’s just conjecture on my part. (Like you, I am also Eastern Orthodox, by the way, at least nominally.)
I was left perplexed by the lack of any visible resistance on the part of unvaccinated Austrians. There are some 2 million unvaccinated Austrians — quite an army. They should be out in the streets defenestrating their feckless leaders. Nobody is willing to protest or fight anymore; there’s no more spirit left. We are looking at the embers of a spent civilization. That said, I don’t want it to be replaced by a rising China or the Taliban — we simply wouldn’t fare well in this kind of configuration.
Yeah, but that Orthodox have a beef with the Romans from long ago doesn’t explain the Stockholm Syndrome. I mean, it’s not like Pope Francis is killing people or oppressing anyone, except faithful Romans.
I’ve said it repeatedly before, but in the United States, there’s plenty of spirit left, which will show up very rapidly when people feel they can improve their situation by taking action. That seems less true in Europe, but what do I know?
P.S. Really enjoyed your last podcast (the one with Tommy Salmons)! These podcasts are getting better and better.
Thank you!
When Saudi-backed Muslims managed to pull off the September 11th attacks
This might amuse you: as a steady reader here I just “assumed” you were with the high-IQ Ron Unz contingent (e.g. 911 was Mossad engineered). It’s funny, since I read Unz, ZMan, Sailer, Haywood, Sabrosky very religiously, but y’all sure don’t read each other.
BTW as the only religious of the above group (I’m trad RC) all your hard work is appreciated…hell, do you guys ever sleep?
Ah, interesting. I did not put that in to signal my opposition to theories about Mossad (though I certainly don’t think much of such theories, and obviously am philo-Jewish). I do read Z-Man, pretty often; I tend to view things not very much through a lens of racial determinism, but our enemies sure seem set on making me change my mind on that one. Unz and Sailer I am aware of and have agreements and disagreements, more on emphasis than substance, but again am not in opposition. Never heard of Sabrosky, so now I must go look him up!
I’ve written a few comments on the role of Jews in Western society, to the basic point that friction is inevitable but that the idea that the Joooozzzz are running things is silly.
I suppose we get our meaning out of trying to help out the world a little–just like other people amuse themselves in other ways!
There are many associations which may make some (in my view, weaker) minds drift toward dogmatic antisemitism. The deconstruction of American and Western society are replete with names such as… the Frankfurt School, Hollywood, the Russian oligarchs, Magnus Hirschfield, Emma Goldman, Milton Wolff, Betty Friedan, Heidi Beirich, Bernardino Dohrn, the Morgenthaus, the Lehman family, Ronald Dworkin, Andrea Dworkin, Irving Kristol, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Abbie Hoffman, George Soros, Barney Frank, Adam Schiff… names large and small, and the list could go on. A disproportionately high number of certain names do seem to appear like clockwork when our dispossession and sometimes degeneration advance.
However, I ultimately agree with you. The association of such names does not prove any larger causal connection. To the contrary, it is at most concomitant. While there may or may not be a higher susceptibility to being seduced to evil ideas by those coming from certain theological/cultural backgrounds, that in no way makes them the root thereof. And certainly not innate.
If our civilization fails, it will be our own damn fault.
Why single out Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, though? Both were very talented writers, and though their writings could be smutty (certainly Roth’s), they were hardly smuttier than those of John Updike, Charles Bukowski, and Henry Miller, none of whom had anything to do with Jews.
Unz & Sabrosky are both Jewish (I’m not but have no emotional context to Jews pro or con) and neither Unz or Sab could be considered “antisemitic” (whatever that means). They are just well read and highly intelligent (esp Unz, IQ 160+, I’m bright but a prob a SD below Unz). Both are also calm, logical, and non-ideological, and have completely changed my mind on dozens of issues (rare at my age). So read with caution…you might end up like me! Thanks again for the output, a joy to listen to.
Very interesting as always.
However, your comment regrading Eastern Christians pandering to Islam is puzzling to me. All of the Eastern Christians I have ever met personally, or by extension (thinking of Sedna Trifkovic at Chronicles), have appeared very Islam-unfriendly, particularly as compared with Westerners. Memories of Balkan domination, of Russo-Turkic conflicts, of the Greek-Turkic “population exchange” haven’t seemed to have faded. Perhaps you are noticing something that I have not?
Also, the idea that Western Europe is dead, while America is alive, is also difficult for me to square with my experiences. The birth rates of nativist Americans and of Western Europeans seem comparably dismal. On the other hand, the overt resistance evident in France just a few years ago to homosexual “marriage” in comparison to the squib response in the U.S. would indicate just the opposite. And it is frankly notorious (to some) that European youth (at least in the non-elite classes) have swerved Right in comparison to American youth (though this may be changing). True, Americans win hands-down in the Libertarian aspects, but I don’t see much else. So what am I missing?
Well, I am willing to believe the Serbs are anti-Muslim. The Serbs are contentious by nature, and they have a lot to complain about from the Turks, obviously. But I’m curious what the Serbs think about, say, the Israeli situation. I suppose I am thinking primarily of Eastern Christians who have some immediate tie to the Holy Land, or the areas directly surrounding.
It could be that there is virtue left in Europe. But I think there are large swathes of America, not covered in the news, where people may not be saints, but entirely reject much of globohomo. There’s little evidence of that in Europe, and wide acceptance of Wuhan Plague tyranny in Europe based on fear is a very strong indicator of a fatal sickness. We are long past the point where violence is entirely justified in response to Covid tyranny, in Europe and Australia, and not just modest violence like throwing a few rocks, but actual rebellion and overthrow of the government, along with severe, Nuremberg-type punishment of all the leaders who have brought Western countries to this pass. But that’s inconceivable. It’s not inconceivable in America.
After all, what did the French do after their marches? Nothing. Although perhaps an election of Zemmour, like a fresh election of Trump, would be enough to fatally fracture France, and both reveal and resolve the situation.