When Will It Be Enough?

First, a critical snippet from a recent, brilliant novel:

    ”Do you know why we band together into nations, girl?”
    The question seemed so totally out of the blue that Maricel didn’t really even comprehend it. She shook her head, a gesture that meant, in this case, I don’t understand.
    Aida took it wrongly, assuming the girl meant that she didn’t know why. She answered the question herself. Pointing toward the flames, she said, “We band into nations for just that reason. In the real world, little tribes like TCS are destroyed. They can’t compete against determined bands of raiders. It takes more power than that to defend yourself against people like yourself, people with no law above themselves.”...
    “It’s the flaw in some utopian schemes,” the woman continued....“Never mind; here’s the truth, a truth I’ve been trying to find for the last...well, for a good long while. People band into nations, real nations—not travesties like TCS, gangs that fancy themselves nations—to defend themselves. It requires an emotional commitment. The limits of nations are not how far their borders can reach, but how far their hearts can. People with tiny hearts, people like TCS, can never reach very far, can never gather enough similar hearts together to defend themselves. Only real people, and real countries or causes, can do that. That’s why TCS is going to die tonight.”

Aida Farellon, the character delivering that illumination, is a semi-retired policewoman watching the military extinction of a savage band of criminals which had established a pseudo-nation – in reality, more of a “no go zone” of the sort now infesting various European states – inside the national borders of the Philippines. That band had kidnapped four members of an elite mercenary force, demanded ransom for them, and had hanged one of them because the ransom hadn’t been paid within a week. The mercenaries decided, in the author’s classic phrase, that that atrocity would be “repaid with usury.” The climax of that high-speed mass execution comes when the leader of the mercenaries announces by bullhorn:

    “Before you cocksuckers decide to hang somebody, you really need to find out first just exactly who his friends are.”

Indeed.

Who are Charlie Hebdo’s friends, Gentle Reader? Who will wreak wholesale, uncompromising vengeance upon the Islamic world for daring to produce and send forth the three savages that murdered twelve peaceable Frenchmen just yesterday?

For that matter, who are ours?

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Aida Farellon’s assessment of the reason we form nations raises other questions, of course. For example, everything that exists has a nature that dictates, among other things, the smallest and the largest it can be and remain viable. This is surely true of nations, though determining those minimum and maximum sizes analytically is beyond Man’s current understanding. But there’s another aspect to the thing that’s implied inescapably by this statement:

“The limits of nations are not how far their borders can reach, but how far their hearts can.”

What lives in the heart that enables it to “reach” others – to commit to others’ defense, and to be confident that others are reciprocally committed? Values. A nation must be founded on either values or violence – and in either case, it must be capable of marshaling sufficient violence to defend itself and to punish those who have attacked it when the occasion demands it. But there are few values that can elicit that degree of willing commitment.

The United States is the very first nation ever to be founded explicitly on values: in the words of the preamble to the Constitution, to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Had there been a shortage of men willing to stake “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” on the overriding importance of those values, the nation would never have come into existence. Should there ever be such a shortage, the nation will cease to exist, for the nations and pseudo-nations of the world founded on violence will forever cast a covetous eye on what we have built for ourselves.

An assemblage of persons who share a firm conviction in a set of ethical values – principles -- constitutes a political culture. A political culture can coexist with other cultural subvarieties, for instance artistic and culinary cultures, but never with a political culture whose principles are opposed to its own. If two such political cultures aren’t kept separate from one another, one or the other will die.

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Islam calls itself a religion. It is not. It’s the fusion of three cultural subvarieties:

1. Theological: the statements in the Koran about Allah and Man’s relation to him;
2. Sociological: the Koran’s decrees concerning men’s relations with one another;
3. Political: the demand that Islam rule the entire world, under the legal code called sharia.

It should be plain from the previous material that Islam’s political culture cannot coexist with any other. Whenever the Islamic world has rubbed up against another political culture, it has waged war against it. Moreover, such wars have the worst characteristic of all religious wars: Islam’s warriors never admit defeat. They win, or they retreat and regroup, or they die. Yet Western nations have unanimously decided that Islam is a “religion” entitled to protection under the First Amendment, and that Muslim immigrants should be admitted to the West on an equal basis with any others.

There has never been a folly comparable to this in the history of Mankind. Yet the United States has embraced it as fully as every other nation of the First World. We call it “multiculturalism.”

The great Mark Steyn has called multiculturalism “societal Stockholm syndrome.” Indeed, the willingness of a nation to admit to its shores persons who explicitly cleave to a creed that demands that nation’s destruction is exactly parallel to the behavior of a kidnap victim that falls under the spell of his kidnappers. Now that irrefutable evidence has accumulated to a mountain that makes Everest look like a pimple, men of good will are finally massing to oppose it, particularly in Britain and France. They demand that their governments put an immediate halt to the Islamization of their nations – a process driven almost entirely by immigration from Africa and the Middle East.

The responses (and non-responses) of those governments make it clear that no such stemming of the Islamic tide is in prospect.

Why?

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“The State is based on threat.” – Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus!

I’ve written many times, including quite recently, about the importance of fear to the maintenance of political control. Our political masters, who have recently begun to feel a weakening of their grip on the U.S., need us to fear...and to turn to them for our protection.

But have another look at that list in the cited essay:

• Islamism on the march.
• Russia remilitarizing as it absorbs Ukraine and eyes the Baltics.
• China preparing its long-awaited invasion of Taiwan.
• Israel beleaguered by Middle Eastern Muslims, principally through their "Palestinian" cat's-paws.
• Hordes of illegal aliens swarming across America's southern border.
• The accelerating rise of the inflation-driven cost of living.
• The jobless "recovery."
• The surging tide of government dependency.
• Federal and state harassment of political adversaries.
• Economic strangulation by regulation.
• Judicial assaults on freedom of religion and expression.
• Vote fraud and voter intimidation.
• Resurgent union militancy.
• Rising black-on-white violence.
• The use of the "Justice" Department to prevent the prosecution of injustice.
• Deliberate weakening of our military and alienation of our allies.
• Unceasing deceit from the circles of power and their media annexes.
• Refusal to close our borders against Ebola.

Every one of those fears is either a direct and intended product of our political class’s machinations, or is something our masters have facilitated, perhaps even encouraged. Consciousness of this conspiracy against us inside the halls of power is slowly rising. Should it peak, the existing order will undergo a convulsion whose magnitude will dwarf anything in recorded history...but that assumes that it will be allowed to peak without interference from those engineering our fears.

Islam is massively useful to our political class. The powers that be are grateful for the threat it presents, and for the repeated evidences of that threat it provides. It serves to justify all manner of intrusions on Americans’ rights, and all manner of incursions upon our privacy. Thus, to expect that the State will ever act against Islam, regardless of how its atrocities proliferate, is a foolish notion.

Whether the tide of anti-Islamic sentiment in France has peaked high enough to compel the French government to close its borders, at least, to further immigration from Islamic lands will soon become clear. But it’s clear already that insufficient pressure exists in America to bring that about – never mind bringing about the degree of watchfulness over Muslims and their institutions that their savage creed deserves. What it will take to get us there is unclear...as is whether our masters would prefer to suppress us – predominantly Caucasian, predominantly Christian and Jewish Americans – rather than surrender a tool of fear they’ve found so useful in extending and consolidating their power over us.

We shall see.