history – Page 57

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto III

This reading carries on from here.

In this section (pages c. 90-200), Breivik details the history of relations between the West and Islam. In his analysis here, there is nothing peaceful – Islam has been attempting to conquer the West since its inception, and would have succeeded already if not repelled at either Tours or Vienna, or other places.

The destruction of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War One, Breivik claims, is how the West has earned some breathing space against this relentless assault. The Caliphate was shattered after the Battle of Megido in 1917, and only because of this has Islam been unable to attack Europe in recent decades.

With sentences such as “the Islamic sources make clear that engaging in violence against non-Muslims is a central and indispensable principle to Islam,” and “Those cultures and individuals who do not submit to Islamic governance exist in an ipso facto state of rebellion with Allah and must be forcibly brought into submission,” a particular kind of Nordic bleakness shines through in this document.

It’s a kind of bleakness that has resigned itself to violence as a grim but inevitable outcome of the play of natural forces. They are attacking us is Breivik’s message. They always have been attacking us and they always will be.

Perhaps the following paragraph summarises this section of the document best:

The spectacular acts of Islamic terrorism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are but the most recent manifestation of a global war of conquest that Islam has been waging since the days of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th Century AD and that continues apace today. This is the simple, glaring truth that is staring the world today in the face — and which has stared it in the face numerous times in the past — but which it seems few today are willing to contemplate.

In this section Breivik continues to emphasise the point that no reformation of Islam is possible, for the reason that would-be reformers are unable to refer to any scriptural injunctions towards peace with non-believers. The example set by Muhammad himself was an example of war and of violence, so anyone with a will to reform is snookered from the beginning.

Essentially, anyone trying to move Islam away from violence has to work against the scriptures. Therefore, Islam cannot be used as a civilising force in the same way that Christianity could; no-one could discover through serendipity a message of peace and tolerance in their study of the Koran.

From reading this section there are two elements of Breivik’s reasoning that seem objectionable.

The first is that, although the list of historical atrocities by Muslims and modern apologies for these atrocities by Muslims is long, there are over a billion Muslims and Islam stretches back to the seventh century. As an inevitable consequence of existing for that long on a planet as violent as Earth, a cherry-picked list of bad things committed by or in the name of a group that large and old is going to be lengthy.

There’s no doubt, for example, that one could compile a hundred pages of grossly supremacist and chauvinistic admonitions to violence from a number of nationalities, including the Spanish, the French, the Germans, the British, the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mongols, Huns, Persians and others, not to mention every other major Abrahamic sect.

Breivik may well have a point that most Westerners are not taught a deep general historical knowledge of Islam, but this only reveals a kind of autism on his part – after all, most people couldn’t care less about history full stop, let alone someone else’s.

The second obvious point of objection is that, although Breivik is correct in many ways when he criticises the unwillingness of Western historians, historical educators, or politicians to write or speak honestly about Islam, he doesn’t say much about an alternative.

If his contentions about the warlike nature of Muhammad and of Islam are accurate, and that they intend to subjugate the entire rest of the world, then there is a very good reason to not acknowledge this: doing so would be tantamount to an immediate declaration of war.

If Western leaders chose to go on television and say that the Prophet Muhammad was a pedophile and that the history of Islam was one of bloodshed, it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy in short order.

They appear to be gambling on the idea that, if left for long enough without provocation, Islam could reform itself. In this they stand in complete opposition to Breivik.

However, a wiser head might make the claim that if faced with an apocalyptic war today, just about any alternative is preferable, and therefore if there’s any doubt about the willingness of Islam to subjugate the world we should accommodate that doubt in our conversations with them.

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto II

This reading carries on from here.

The first part of the document proper is devoted to the “falsified history” of the West and “other Marxist propaganda”. It begins with a review of the history of Islam, in which Islam is declared responsible for the murder of over 300,000,000 non-Muslims throughout history.

It also lists, at length, the historical crimes of Islam. This exhaustive list of genocides, coupled with lines like “more than 95% of today’s Journalists, editors, publishers are pro-Eurabians” makes it easy to get the impression that Breivik has a particularly paranoid Weltanschauung.

He catalogues in detail the strategies that he considers the Islamic “theofascists” and Marxists to be using to manipulate the popular opinion of the religion in the West. Most of these strategies boil down to either lying or intimidation.

Curiously, despite that he describes himself as a Christian, he nonetheless is able to correctly point out that the vast historical crimes of Christianity are mostly inspired by religious features that are shared by all the Abrahamisms.

Without irony, Breivik describes a supposed rule of the Islamic theofascist propagandists: “If people ignore or refute your distorted version of history, accuse them of distortion and political abuse of history.”

It is taken for granted that his own understanding of history is complete and accurate.

Breivik doesn’t seem to have much time for the idea that there could be many different reasons to believe in different accounts of history. The history of Islam is one of evil, and any attempt to paint a more positive picture can only be part of a campaign of deliberate misinformation.

A noticeable pattern is that Breivik is very selective in what he cites as evidence. At one point he cites a Danish literature student who “concludes that Islamic texts encourage terror and fighting to a far greater degree than the original texts of other religions.”

There is nothing objectionable about this in isolation, but in the context of a determined attack on the legitimacy of the university system – with the attack itself centering on the degenerative effect that subjective textual analysis has had on the truth – it seems a bit contradictory.

However, the criticisms made of the content of the Koran and the Hadith cannot simply be dismissed. The plain facts are that the document calls for the killing and/or subjugation of non-believers at dozens of different points.

In fact, Breivik’s criticism of Islam raises some questions that, although deeply uncomfortable, are also unavoidable if one wishes to honestly evaluate the likely outcomes of Muslim culture expanding into the West.

If Muhammad was the perfect man who all Muslims should emulate, what do we make of the hadith that describes him as consummating his marriage to a nine-year old? Likewise, what do we make of his admonitions to kill adulterers and apostates? Or his decree to have a poet killed for mocking Islam?

“The entire Islamic moral universe devolves solely from the life and teachings of Muhammad,” Breivik contends.

So what do we do about the fact that some of these actions, believed by Muslims to have been undertaken by the perfect man in total accordance with the Will of God, are grossly incompatible with what Western culture considers to be good order?

Surrounding these very pertinent questions are long, paranoid expositions about the supposed Islamic sanctioning of lying and deceit, especially when speaking to unbelievers. Breivik certainly appears to believe that lying to non-believers is an inherent part of the Islamic religion and culture.

In some ways, the general criticisms of the unwillingness of Muslims to peacefully coexist sound entirely plausible, because we know of the history of the previous waves of Abrahamism to Europe. Christians also came to Europe professing a desire to live in peace, and they nevertheless found plenty of scriptural support for their efforts to terrorise the locals for centuries.

In other ways, things are less clear. It’s obvious that the other Abrahamisms – in particular Judaism and Christianity – are no longer as mindlessly bound in ancient tradition as they once were, but is this true of Islam? And if so, to what extent?

Breivik would evidently answer in the negative. He would have it that Islam has not changed at all since those early days of caravan raiding, and that even if it has, it’s liable to regress back into violence on account of the precedent set by Muhammad himself.

It’s certainly a very dark and dire perspective – but is it wrong?

The VJMP Reads column will continue with Part III of Anders Breivik’s manifesto.

Cannabis Prohibition is a Pakeha Law With No Place in Aotearoa

The Maoris’ lack of historical exposure to alcohol meant that, for British settlers, the drug had a similar effect to a targeted bioweapon

Maoris are severely disadvantaged by the laws around recreational drugs for biological reasons. The Pakeha that introduced these laws knew about these biological reasons, and so they created a set of drug laws specifically designed to keep Maoris down. This essay looks at how.

Human use of alcohol dates back into prehistory. It is believed that civilisations in the Fertile Crescent were brewing a simple form of mead as far back as 8,000 B.C., and we’ve never stopped brewing it. After all, the effects of alcohol make some of the unpleasant aspects of life much easier to deal with.

Not every culture adopted alcohol at the same time, however. Use of it spread from the Fertile Crescent to nearby cultures, and then further afield, until it was introduced to Maoris in the late 18th century.

Alcohol is everywhere now, but, as any cosmopolitan worthy of the name could tell you, the various people of the world behave in different ways to the drug.

The basic rule is this: the greater the length of time that an individual’s ancestors have been exposed to alcohol, the greater the opportunity there has been for genes that lead to poor outcomes from alcohol use (in particular, violence and/or physically reckless behaviour, and alcoholism) to have been eliminated from that individual’s gene pool.

Middle Easterners tend to behave the best on alcohol, for the reason that they have been exposed to it for maybe 10,000 years. This means that, for a hundred centuries, anyone carrying genes that led them to go crazy on alcohol would have died at a significantly higher rate than their fellows.

Southern Europeans and Northern Africans are the next best behaved, because they were next to be introduced to the drug, and Northern Europeans, especially the British from which the majority of Kiwis descend, have themselves had between 2,500 and 5,000 years of exposure.

The Maoris, by contrast, have had 200 years of exposure to alcohol. Although trading rum for various goods and services was basically how interracial relations began in New Zealand, two centuries is not very long in evolutionary terms.

What that means, in practice, is that Maoris carrying genes that lead them to go crazy on alcohol, although they certainly die at a significantly higher rate than their fellows, have not done so for long enough for Maoris as a whole to have built up the genetic resistance to the drug that Kiwis of British ancestry have.

This explains why, if you put half a dozen standard drinks into 100 Maoris and 100 Pakeha, the Maoris would have significantly worse outcomes. It’s not a question of willpower or lack of mental discipline or fortitude, any more than the higher rate of skin cancer among Pakeha is a question of those things. Both are matters of explicable biology.

The fact is that alcohol has literally been used as a bioweapon against Maoris.

The logic about genetic resistance was understood by British colonialists well before anyone was aware of such things as genes. By the time the Empire had made it as far as New Zealand, it had had two hundred years of observing the effects of the drug on the natives of Africa, the Americas and Australia, and it had noted that in almost every case the social structure of those natives was obliterated by exposure to it.

They therefore knew full well what was going to happen when they introduced the Maoris to rum, and outcomes like Kororareka – “The Hellhole of the South Pacific” – were inevitable.

It was known that exposure to alcohol was going to cause the Maoris to fight each other and kill themselves, because there had been ample opportunity to see that happen elsewhere.

This genetic vulnerability to alcohol explains why Maori culture has taken so eagerly to cannabis. The majority of Maoris have tried cannabis at some point in their lives, and many of those prefer it to alcohol, for the straightforward biological reasons explained above.

For many Maoris, smoking cannabis is a way of getting the benefits of easy sociability and euphoria that one would get from alcohol, but without the drastically negative consequences that naturally befall anyone without an ancestral exposure to the drug. So cannabis prohibition has a massively disproportionate effect on Maoris.

Understood like this, it appears almost sadistic that a Parliament full of people of European descent would forbid, on pain of time spent locked in a prison cage, a recreational alternative to a drug that only they can safely use.

This could fairly said to be terrorism in the form of bioweapons.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

The Four Great Masculine Motivations

Figuring out how to get laid motivates almost the entirety of the behaviour of men, whether directly or indirectly

As everyone familiar with men knows, there is really only one masculine motivation: the sexual impulse to attract and to reproduce with women. Fortunately for us in the 21st century, things are a bit more subtle and nuanced than they were in prehistory. This essay looks at how the sexual impulse manifests in the behaviour of men today.

The first of the four great masculine motivations is the unconscious sexual drive, which man shares with the lower animals. This corresponds to the state of clay in elementalism.

At this level, men are barely thinking at all. This is the mindset that a drunk is in when someone spills his drink and he tries to start a fight. He doesn’t know that the reason why he wants to fight is because of his sexually inspired desire to establish dominance over a given territory for the sake of controlling the resources within it.

Much less does he appreciate that this sexually inspired desire has been repressed by his culture, nor that this repression is reversed under the effect of alcohol.

Although this level is the one at which all activity began, women tend to avoid men that are here to the degree that those women are intelligent. The obvious reason for this is that any man at this level of thinking is liable to go and chase some other woman as soon as the first one is pregnant.

The second is the conscious sexual drive, which the majority of man share with each other. This corresponds to the state of iron in elementalism.

This is as far as most men ever get, and the characteristic of this stage is the development of the capacity to get laid by scheming. Here a man will use his higher cognitive functions to plan and execute a plan to get laid.

It might sound primitive to some, but over the course of human history a colossal amount of energy has been sunk into enterprises at this level by men, and it’s historically where much of the joy and flavour of life comes from.

It was also at this level that many of the patriarchal elements of human society and interaction were established. Marriage and the cultural norms surrounding it are, ultimately, little more than male attempts to establish the certitude of their paternity.

The third is the unconscious sublimation of the sexual drive into a creative endeavour, which man shares with the more intelligent of his kind. This corresponds to the state of silver in elementalism, and most men do not ever reach this level, at least not meaningfully.

This stage is characterised by the production of art. Probably the first ever expression of it was music, perhaps something as simple as a man drumming a tune on a hollow log to amuse a woman.

Developing over time, this impulse found expression in all manner of great works of architecture, literature, music, sculpture and painting.

This stage is not easy to distinguish from the second stage, because it isn’t clear where the border between art for art’s sake and art specifically for the sake of attracting women is. Perhaps the best way to distinguish them is that acts made in the second stage do not produce much else apart from an orgasm.

The fourth is the conscious sublimation of the sexual drive into a creative endeavour, which only the highest of men partake in. It is entirely absent in some ages and places – and in the vast majority of men – and corresponds the the state of gold in elementalism.

Relatively few men dabble with this drive, although doing so may have been popular in times and places that revered the art more.

It isn’t easy to summarise all of the behaviours that fall into this category. This is for a couple of reasons.

This is because actions in this category are particular to the individual. A man might create a work of art to impress a woman, or as a conscious sublimation of his sexual impulse, and in either case the work of art will be the same (or at least similar).

The second reason is that very few men have the necessary education to understand where his sexual energies ultimately come from, and without this knowledge it is impossible to consciously direct where those same energies might ultimately go.

Taken together, these four great masculine drives explain much of why men do what they do.