The Paris Atrocities: Further Thoughts

     There’s no need for me to read the news to any Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch. If you care, you already know about the overnight death and destruction that has afflicted the City of Light. If you don’t, you probably aren’t reading this at all.

     Many will attribute last night’s savagery to uncontrolled immigration. It’s an easy end run around the identities and affiliations of the terrorists. The U.S. has experienced a comparable uncontrolled influx, but apart from September 11, 2001, we haven’t suffered as the Parisians just did. Our immigrants don’t slaughter wantonly or randomly; they form drug gangs that kill one another over “turf.” The victims might not care about the difference, but from a sociopolitical perspective it’s critical.

     I’ve written voluminously on this subject, so there’s no need to repeat those analyses. The questions of import are two:

• What can the Western world do about it?
• Will we do it?

     We begin.

---

     There is no possibility of “reforming” Islam, or of detoxifying the hatred its allegiants feel for the Western conception of freedom. Similarly, there is no possibility of sifting out the “extremists” who take Islam’s commands to conquer the world seriously, dealing with them, and leaving the rest alone. The typical peaceable Muslim knows that his jihadist co-religionist is the more devout and stricter in observance of their common creed. Moreover, numerous opinion surveys indicate that the majority of “peaceable” Muslims endorse the goal of the jihadists. They’re merely unwilling to pursue it personally. As has been said repeatedly, the “extremist” Muslim wants to kill you; the “moderate” Muslim wants the extremist to kill you.

     Another apostle of revolutionary violence, Mao Tse-tung, discoursed on the aphorism “the people are the sea in which the revolutionary swims:”

     Many people think it impossible for guerrillas to exist for long in the enemy's rear. Such a belief reveals lack of comprehension of the relationship that should exist between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water the latter to the fish who inhabit it. How may it be said that these two cannot exist together? It is only undisciplined troops who make the people their enemies and who, like the fish out of its native element cannot live. [On Guerilla Warfare]

     If there exists a large, like-minded but superficially peaceable community in which the revolutionary can shelter, the revolutionary is safe from any measure that seeks to spare the “innocent.” This misconception of “innocence” is the Muslim jihadist’s greatest asset.

     Therefore, the solution must be wholesale:

• Every Muslim currently residing in a Western nation must be expelled.
• No further immigration from majority-Muslim nations can be permitted.
• Every vestige of Islam that remains behind must be eliminated:
  • All mosques must be destroyed;
  • All embassies from Islam-dominated nations must be delegitimized;
  • No further “diplomatic” intercourse between the West and Islam can be permitted.

     All of this must be agreed upon by the entire First World, made a matter of law, protected against modification or “interpretation” by custard-headed regimes, and enforced with ruthless vigor. Absolutely no exceptions can be allowed.

     It sounds like a harsh prescription because it is. It’s also the only one that has a chance of working.

---

     Among the U.S.’s great disadvantages in combatting Islam-powered terrorism has been Washington’s insistence in seeing the conflict in terms of conventional warfare: two sets of armed forces, each identifiable in the field if only by the direction their guns are pointing, directed by sovereign entities with strategic goals. That model makes the use of American military prowess the logical recourse. However, the closest any aspect of the conflict comes to that model is the war against ISIS. The contributions of “non-state actors” make the model effectively unusable, even self-defeating.

     A classic short story, Christopher Anvil’s “Mission of Ignorance,” emphasizes one of the critical differences:

     "Just suppose," said the chairman, "that you were in charge of a great spaceship—perhaps belonging to a great Galactic organization (never mind about it being a benevolent organization) and let's just suppose your job was to subvert Earth and make it obedient to that great Galactic organization—what could be nicer than to get Earth totally dependent on certain technological developments that you could withdraw at will? At a mere snap of your fingers, Earth's whole technological civilization could collapse, to leave, for practical purposes, a planetful of ignorant savages with no relevant skills, whose reproduction rate could be altered at will, and, if you chose, whose main food supply could also be wiped out with a snap of your fingers. Think how cooperative such people would be once they saw what you could do. Suppose that, having delivered the necessaries to bring about this situation and having seen the fools rushing to their own destruction, you then went away to take care of other business and returned when your calculations showed the situation would be ripe.
     "Then," said the chairman, "suppose you summoned to your ship the Earth representative, planning perhaps to give him the same little demonstration we have just given here, and suppose you discovered: first, that a mere second lieutenant had been sent to deal with you; next, that in your absence, instead of dependence on computerized voice typers, a new, completely nontechnological system of rapid writing had been developed; third, that a completely nontechnological uncomputerized system of identification had come into use; fourth, that one-quarter of the Earth's land surface was in the hands of a sect which, for religious motives, rejected the gifts, and in their place was developing Earth's own technology at a fever pitch; fifth, that the sect was armed to the teeth, dug in, stocked for a long fight, seasoned in battle, and so situated that you couldn't count on striking at the nonmembers without hitting the members of the sect, or vice versa, and, sixth, to top it all off, suppose you had no way to judge whether this was all the bad news, or whether this was just the tip of the iceberg showing above the water, with a lot more underneath? If you had been in that situation, would it have jarred you?"

     Leave aside the technological features and contrasts described above. The religious sect, which Anvil styles “the Burdeenites,” is the key. As Larry Niven and Steven Barnes noted in The Descent of Anansi, religious warriors never surrender, and they don’t toddle off to find another war. They win or they die.

     Our war against “Islamic terrorism” is a war against Islam itself. It is a religious war, whether or not atheists and agnostics choose to recognize it as such. There will be no armistice. There will be no surrender, unless the West chooses to do so.

     It will be victory or death.

---

     The only war policy that has the smallest chance of working in the West’s favor is one that will only accept one of the following two outcomes:

• Quarantine: The rigid confinement of Islam within a geographical border made as impermeable as our will, skill, and technology can make it; or:
• Genocide: The extermination of every devotee of Islam on Earth.

     Quarantine is obviously preferable from a humanitarian standpoint, at least in the near term. (Islamic societies cut off from Western knowledge and expertise might revert to seventh-century savagery, but at least that wouldn’t be our fault.) However, quarantine would require more effort from us than genocide: more effort to bring it about, more effort to maintain it, and more effort to restrain ourselves after the inevitable Islamic counterattacks on Western civilian targets should occur. That makes it the less likely of the two approaches to be adopted. However, the genocide approach would require a marshaling of will and anger to a height undreamed of by Twenty-First Century Americans, though perhaps French Parisians could attain it this November morning.

     Neither approach will be adopted until certain fundamental propositions are accepted almost unanimously throughout the West:

• Islam is not a religion but a militant totalitarian ideology with some theological decorations for camouflage.
• Muslims cannot and will not assimilate to the Christian-Enlightenment / classical-liberal norms upon which the West is founded.
• As long as there are Muslim communities in the West, some fraction thereof will be “fundamentalist,” “extremist,” or “jihad-minded,” and a larger fraction will be amenable to concealing them from the authorities and enforcement agencies of the enveloping society.
• Such exclaves will enforce non-assimilation upon dissidents, and will resist penetration by forces or influences of a contrary nature.

     Until those precepts are shared by nearly everyone in the First World, the atrocities will continue. Indeed, they’re likely to scale up. But should they be accepted widely, the war that will commence will dwarf every other conflict in the history of Mankind.

     Either way, it’s us or them.