Category: philosophy

Do We Need to Deislamify the Middle East in the Same Way We Denazified Middle Europe?

Let’s face it – Islam is the Nazism of the 21st century. It’s a supremacist ideology that treats entire classes of people like dogshit for no good reason. It’s aggressive, expansionist, and far too arrogant to respond to reason, compromise or even sanity. Most crucial of all, we have ended up fighting it whether we wanted to or not, and it appears the fighting will increase in intensity and scope.

In the century after Islam was founded, it swept out of the Arabian peninsula and immediately began a wave of conquest that took it as far as the gates of Paris. This wave saw Persia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, North Africa and Iberia all fall under the sword.

In the decade after Nazism took power in Germany, it swept out of Central Europe and immediately began a wave of conquest that took it as far as the gates of Moscow. This wave saw Poland, France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Yugoslavia and the Ukraine fall under the jackboot.

Hitler himself drew inspiration from the conquests of Islam, claiming that if Charles Martel had lost the Battle of Tours and thereby allowed the Umayyad Caliphate to conquer Europe, the Germans would have become heirs to “a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and in subjugating all nations to that faith. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the German temperament.”

Given such pronouncements, it isn’t surprising that the postwar Allied commanders believed that Nazism was, considered as a meme-school, too virulent to simply go away on its own accord. It would have to be rooted out, and with extreme prejudice.

Denazification required that the All-Lies “rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of any remnants of the National Socialist ideology.”

Can the West rid Middle Eastern society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of any remnants of Islamic ideology? In the final analysis we may have to – Islam is every bit as virulent as Nazism, and, like Nazism, has a similar tendency to arise every time some populist wants to climb onto a soapbox and stir up those with a chip on their shoulder.

This column puts forward the claim that the West has a moral imperative to do precisely that. After all, in much the same way that the damage done to the German people by Nazism was ultimately much greater than what had been done to them by the Jews, so too is the damage done to Muslims (especially women) by Islam far greater than, for example, the damage done to Palestinians by Israel.

The final calculus can perhaps best be considered in light of a line from Niccolo Machiavelli’s Prince:

The Romans never allowed a trouble spot to remain simply to avoid going to war over it, because they knew that wars don’t just go away, they are only postponed to someone else’s advantage. Therefore, they made war with Philip and Antiochus in Greece, in order not to have to fight them in Italy…

To whose advantage is it that the West does not go to war with Islam?

It could be the West – recent advances in solar power, mostly thanks to enormous Chinese investment, suggests that we might be able to reduce our dependency on oil to a fraction of what it currently is. If we did so, the Middle East would lose not only much of its income but also its strategic importance, and Islam would fade into irrelevance.

It could be Islam – with every passing year, their proportion of the European population increases from a combination of mass immigration and a higher birth rate. As their propaganda becomes more sophisticated, more lone wolves would be inspired to commit terror attacks within Europe which would inspire others who believe that Europe is finally, after 1,300 years, ripe for the taking.

In the end it is most likely to come down to a question of will. The European will to survive never fully recovered from the Hemoclysm of World Wars I and II; the Islamic world is yet to recover from the century of humiliation that began with the British action to shatter the Ottoman Empire.

Can Europeans be Entrusted With Self-Governance?

A cold and dispassionate analysis of the last 100 years of European history clearly reveals that the inhabitants of Europe are a primitive bunch of savages who cannot be relied upon to govern themselves properly and who will take any opportunity to slaughter anyone on the flimsiest of pretexts. This is despite their astonishing skills at playing musical instruments and building cathedrals.

100 years ago, Europe was in the middle of what was then known as the Great War, or The War to End All Wars. Later known as World War One, this started because a rising Germany wanted a bigger slice of the world economic pie, and the established powers of Britain and France wanted to keep the size of their shares.

Rather than arranging an equal distribution of resources, the European powers chose to go to war instead. It was necessary to send soldiers all the way from New Zealand to quell the savages, and this was not achieved until Europeans had killed 10,000,000 of each other.

A few decades after this, a still rising Germany decided that they still wanted a bigger slice of the pie, only this time they went East instead of West. The established powers of Britain and France wanted to keep the size of their shares, so they attacked the Germans and said the Germans started it.

It was again necessary to send soldiers all the way from New Zealand to quell the savages, however the natural bloodlust of the Europeans had by this time led to 50,000,000 dead, with some millions of those stuffed into gas chambers in humanity’s first example of industrialised genocide.

After the guns finally fell silent on Hitler and World War II, there were a few decades of non-killing as the Europeans built the weaponry to kill each other once and for all this time. This was known as the Cold War and the Europeans found it so dull that they had to go double-or-quits on the next paroxysm of mass suicide – which they duly achieved by letting tens of millions of Muslims into Europe.

Letting tens of millions of members of an aggressive, male supremacist religion into your continent, when those same members have been trying to invade your continent and enslave you for 1,300 years, makes about as much sense as injecting yourself with a syringe full of blood when you have been specifically warned by medical professionals that the blood is full of AIDS. But they did it anyway.

From today’s vantage point, it is clear that the Europeans have shown that they lack the natural intellect to consider the wider strategic perspective or the long-term historical impact of their political decisions. Given that they have been fighting for endless centuries of violence, it is fair to conclude that this violence is in the very nature of the European man and that this will never change.

So the question is this: can Europeans, given their structural failure to adequately consider the long-term ramifications of their political decisions, be entrusted with self-governance? Or can we conclude, on the basis of the last century of historical evidence, that by their very nature they will always fight, always war, always commit genocide?

If it is the latter, as this column believes it is, the non-European world is morally obligated to step in and do something about it.

What needs to be done is that the continent of Europe needs to be made into a protectorate of the peaceful nations. Perhaps some kind of mentoring system can be brought in so that political leaders from peaceful nations visit Europe and educate the natives about the cultural values that are necessary in order to live without violence.

The South Koreans, for example, would be the perfect choice to teach Europeans about the benefits of keeping millions of illiterate religious savages out of your territory. The Chinese could teach them about how to organise the continent into one group without the need for conquest. The Indians could teach them a peaceful religion to replace the bloodthirsty Abrahamism they have fallen for. The New Zealanders and Filipinos could teach them about how to interact with other ethnic groups without violence. The Americans could teach them how to have political discussions without threatening to silence anyone who thinks against the collective.

If the functioning world is to act, we must do so soon. It’s already obvious that the Europeans will stuff the Muslims into gas chambers at some point in the next 50 years if they are not conquered by Islam first.

Metasanity

Being insane is one thing, and it is usually very difficult. Not seeing reality clearly comes with pain. Avoiding the difficulty that comes with insanity is primarily a question of avoiding the patterns of thought and behaviour that can lead to things getting out of control. This second-order sanity can be described as metasanity.

For example, you can be insane, but you can also be sane about being insane, which would be metasanity. Being metasane might involve taking advice about not smoking methamphetamine when someone points out that doing so has a deletorious effect on your mental health.

It might also involve, like the Carrie Fisher quote above, maintaining a realistic and objective view of one’s own condition.

A revealing thought experiment is to consider how a person reacts when being told that they have a mental illness. In this manner, two otherwise similar people can vary greatly, depending on their metasanity.

One person might accept that they have a mental illness and that this diagnosis accurately explains the difficulty they have experienced with their thoughts and behaviour.

For such people, high in metasanity, speaking to an intelligent clinician might bring with it a moment of clarity. Probably it will bring with it a sense of relief, as a clear explanation of why things become chaotic makes it more likely such chaos can be avoided.

Another person, lower in metasanity, might deny that they have a mental illness even when told so by a well-meaning doctor, or by family and friends. Such a person will be much less likely to take medications or to avoid situations and behaviours that lead to things getting out of control.

A person low in metasanity might accept that they have a mental illness, but behave in maladaptive ways like over-identifying with the illness, or becoming hyperdramatic about bad influences on their health (often, thereby, creating an anxiety that makes the illness worse).

A lot of a person’s ability to successfully recover from a mental illness – that is to say, from insanity – is really a function of their metasanity. It is metasanity that will tell a person if their current medication regime is actually working or not and so whether they should keep taking it or not, and getting to see a doctor in the first place is usually a matter of whether the patient has the metasanity to accept that they have a problem.

Conversely, metainsanity is, of course, an inability to think sanely about one’s mental health, despite being otherwise mentally healthy.

Part of the difficulty with sanity is that it correlates so strongly with metasanity. And so, a person who has trouble keeping things together may also have problems with keeping their awareness of the need to keep things together together.

Metasanity, as could be expected, correlates highly with narcissism. The obvious explanation is that the more narcissistic one is, the more likely one is to deny anything that might be seen as a weakness, such as a mental illness.

Sometimes metasanity can be a negative. Going insane and knowing that one is going insane is a unique torture that cannot be physically replicated.

However, even when this happens, the long-term prognosis is still better, because nothing is more likely to make an illness kill you than denying you are ill.

Why Nietzsche is Hard

The experience of reading and contemplating Nietzsche is fundamentally different to that of the majority of thinkers. A natural consequence of this is the unprecedented degree to which Nietzsche is misunderstood.

Appreciating Nietzsche isn’t a simple matter of considering a number of competing claims to the truth and deciding if his case is the strongest. He is not such a man that will brook standing in the dock while his ideas are tried by plebs.

Nietzsche is hard for the same reason that integrating a psychedelic trip is hard. This is because to understand him, first you have to concede to his basic contention: that everything you know might be wrong. This makes Nietzsche appear to be a nihilist for anyone who stops reading him at this point, which most people do.

But to appreciate Nietzsche, at least initially, you have to accept that the very way you think may be fundamentally flawed.

His contention is that people have been lied to so often by the church, by the state, by centuries of half-wit philosophers, by power-crazed kings and by the bleating of the herd, that they’re too confused to even begin thinking their way out of it. The way people think is so fundamentally flawed that to make progress the first point of order is to forget all the lies that they currently consider to be true – and there are many.

In fact, you can’t merely forget them – you have to deliberately and purposefully smash them. To get to the truth you have to escape the labyrinth of lies, and so you have to “philosophise with a hammer”.

Understanding the truth of Nietzsche is thus not a pleasant and straightforward experience like sitting in a kindergarten listening to the sweet voice of a kind teacher guiding you gently away from ignorance. It’s more like Hell Week of the Navy Seals, in which a person’s entire personality has to be torn to the ground so that a new, stronger one can be rebuilt in its place.

Regular readers of this column will recognise this phenomenon as the task of the mystic, the shaman or the schizophrenic. Nietzsche himself clearly recognised this when he subtitled Thus Spake Zarathustra as “A Book fof Everyone and No-one.”

This is very evidently not a task for the man of clay; Nietzsche had no intention of founding his own religion for the masses (probably this explains the appeal of Nietzsche among those of the left-hand path).

All of this helps to explain why the name of Nietzsche has been associated with the Nazis.

Any political power who seeks to tear down the established order (which in Hitler’s time was the Anglo-American Empire) and impose their own based on transvaluated values (the Nazi Empire) has one immense – but superficial – connection with Nietzsche’s philosophy in so far that both are revolutionary.

Both seek to tear down old ways that they see as corrupt or decadent. Indeed, crusades against ‘decadent’ art was one of the ways the early Nazis built outrage in their favour, and rhetoric about the corrupting effect of Jews on German society was regular.

Moreover, Nazism was one of the most striking historical examples of a supremacist movement, and supremacists of all stripes find a superficial interest in Nietzsche’s talk of the ‘Superman’.

The great irony here is that Nietzsche would likely have considered the Nazis – like all egoic supremacists – a pack of plebs.