Most of you aren’t Muslims, and I don’t court a Muslim audience. I’m not Muslim and have no love for the religion.
However, there are a couple ethical methods which Muslims use especially heavily when they are a minority in a non-Muslim country. They are especially alien to the people of Northern Europe, who have tended to be more forthright and honest than most other ethnic groups all over the planet.
The concepts are called taqiyya and kitman — they are just ethical justifications for lying to non-Muslims in a systematic way in order to advance the general interests of Muslims against that of the foreigners.
It’s very difficult for a lot of people from Northern Europe to empathize with that sort of mentality, which is partially why dopey democratic elites tend to try to universalize from their own limited experiences within their own ethno-religious group.
Progressives in part enjoy so much success because they can count on the honesty of the conservative opposition. For the left, the operating principle is the Satanic one — “nothing is true and everything is permitted.” The strength of our traditional culture has become a sort of weakness for us. We expect to speak the truth and expect the other people around us to speak truly, but our opponents are willing to drop all ethical restrictions on their behavior to achieve their goals.
This is really only a tentative suggestion, so I expect some push-back from it. There is an element of taqiyya in using a pen name and concealing one’s political opinions to the general public, especially in a time when we are supposed to expose ourselves to casual surveillance from everyone around us.
What I’d like to say is that it’s permissible to lie to progressives about what you believe. There should be little shame in it. You’re not obligated to go throw yourself into the fray, especially if you have to live around progressives owing to your profession or your family situation. You don’t have to tell everyone on Facebook that you think democracy is bad and that the protesters in Ferguson should be machine-gunned. It’s probably preferable that you keep a low profile.
You don’t necessarily have to go so far as to write a Facebook bot to post the most popular post on Upworthy every day to your wall, but it probably couldn’t hurt, either.
The advantage to this is that it helps to feed paranoia and cannibalization within the progressive sphere. You want them to be frightened and erratic. They should know that their are wreckers in their midst, but not know who they are. Success is when they harry or consume someone on their own side who is basically a moderate leftist. Sowing terror, leaking information, and generating confusion while minimizing personal risk is useful.
This is where conventional Republicans and other radicals with a democratic mentality tend to go badly wrong. They think that if they speak often and loud enough, they will get what they want. Depleting the controlled opposition (or eliminating it) dissipates an illusion and frees up a lot of energy for more productive projects.
If dissent is just going to be used to exact penalties on dissenters, then it’s really best to be more roundabout about it. This also damages the information quality available to progressive bureaucrats. Giving false information to pollsters is also possibly useful for certain efforts, as is the orchestration of mass misreporting of statistics.
When you stop thinking about it in terms of how many people you can get to repeat your slogans, an awfully large number of options start to open up for you.
1. The burden of being openly rightist hopelessly binds the rightist to the aesthetics of conservakin in the eyes of his fellows, no matter how far distant that particular rightist may be from conservakins philosophically, politically, morally, etc.
2. That false-but-guaranteed association necessitates all sorts of irritating conversations and equivocations by rightists: “Yeah, but I’m not THAT kind of Republican”. Rightists can eliminate all sorts of unnecessary adjectives like “constitutional” or “libertarian-leaning” from their self-descriptors, and simply shut up.
3. Severing from the aesthetics of conservakin and the self-effacing equivocations that the open rightist now degrades himself with, the rightist can then recapture a certain amount of both dignity and subversive appeal. Subversive appeal enhances dignity and vice versa.
4. Who was it that said the two greatest testaments to the truth of the Church were its art and the lives of the Saints? Conservakin are (often literally!) the Campus Crusader bothering you at lunch, asking about your relationship with Jesus, and failing miserably in the process. The subversive rightist needs to follow that other path — art and the lives of saints as testament — and through taqiyya and kitman win over individuals with dignity and subversive appeal.
I was sitting here listening to your discussion on “Ascending the Tower” and I though of taqiyya (when you mentioned how easy it is to be removed from Harvard for political difficulty). I come over here and…taqiyya. I’ve noticed this about other topics. I am not your long-lost twin brother separated at birth.
There was a guy who went by “Mindweapon” and had a blog “Mindweapons in Ragnarok” who was big on taqiyya. His blog is gone, but it was talked a lot there, but called it “being a mindweapon” which I like. It means you’re a dangerous weapon instead of a slinking rat.
We should gum up the works when we can. We’re in occupied territory, why should we make Satan’s kingdom work more efficiently?
Mindweapons had a lot of good points, and I am glad to see that the conservative world is coming around to his way of thinking.
Looking at the ongoing success of guys like Mark Dice, James O’Keefe, Charles C Johnson, and many of the folks running around on 4/8chan, there is a decided payoff in playing dirty and hitting the cathedral whenever possible and wherever it hurts, without permission or apology.
Remember when Rush Limbaugh apologized to Sandra Fluke? Who the hell was he trying to curry favor with? The folks who would want him in a pine box? I believe he lost a good chunk of his audience (and credibility) on that day.
Frankly, we cannot afford to pull any punches because the stakes are just too high.
Those of us who are reluctant to get their hands dirty, have to realize that the alternative will eventually result in those clean hands being cast in manacles or simply hacked off entirely by our adversary.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, Henry, but we do have to keep in mind that outright lying is still sinful (someone important may have once said ‘What doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul’)
Having said that, what you have proposed is perfectly permissible if it is kept within the bounds of broad mental reservation.
I did ask for push-back on this post, so good on you. A very senior lawyer once told me that “a good lawyer never lies.” That’s probably the better way to go about it. Avoid outright lying, but you don’t have to say everything that you know, necessarily, and you can present the truth in a different way that goes to your advantage.
“I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.” http://biblehub.com/matthew/10-16.htm
You’re not going to get many people on board with a “deception campaign” unless you paint it in terms of war. Wartime deception takes many forms, and no one seems to have trouble with it. Even the Mohammedan taqiyyah is in terms of war–in the dar al harb (territory of war).
That shouldn’t be too hard to do.
There’s more than enough evidence to show that we are most definitely in the midst of a war.
Is Dampier involved with Christianity? I’ve been reading for a while and never seen him mention it. I’m not sure that committing a sin by misleading progressives about our beliefs is something most of us are worried about.
I’m a recent convert (not really the right term because I was baptized as an infant), which is why I asked to be corrected. I don’t write about it much because it’s an area where my knowledge, experience, and acculturation is much weaker — and I try to avoid personal writing as much as I can here.
Even without lying, a great deal can simply be accomplished by shutting up.
Pleading, equivocations, and logically correct but socially inappropriate arguments all serve to weaken one’s overall case, and weaken one’s self-perception.
All these can be avoided by simply shutting up, and accepting that the worst way to advocate for anti-democracy is convincing a large number of people about it.
There is dignity in silence. There is also the opportunity to draw hard lines. By shutting up, you are allowing that you will not argue yourself into or out of something.
When you are placed in a position, socially or professionally, which would necessitate either 1) lying or 2) arguing, equivocating, or conservakinning, simply exit. Leave. Physically walk away. Say nothing. Preserve dignity, increase mystery.
Our best weapon is for people to actually hear our opponents insanity out in full and think it through with a few moments of silence, as soon as we start talking they immediately begin mentally shaking their heads just as they’ve been trained to do.
Ideological illegibility is always beneficial to those not currently in power. A NRx community that practices Taaqiya might make up 1% of the population, or 50%. That’s good for the morale of NRx, and bad for Progressives.
It’s useful to consider the impact of a Kitman (or Ketman, via Milocz) on progressive and neoreactionary morale. Consider a hypothetical Neoreaction community that venerates outspokenness. Suddenly the divide between Prog and NRx becomes legible. The small number of outspoken subversives will be that much easier to isolate, mock, and persecute. Even worse, progressives will feel safe in their numerical superiority.
The ability to Parody is also crucial. Imagine a group of SWPLs in a circle, discussing the social justice issues near and dear to their hearts. Now imagine them having the same conversation, but each wondering: Am I being mocked right now? That’s powerful.
I think it’s an important pre-revolutionary condition that both Progs and NRx believe the upper echelons of politics, tech, government, military, media, etc are full of secret Reactionaries – a Pax Dickinson behind every blade of glass.
The Sokal Hoax is classic trolling. Sokal wasn’t trying to deceive, he was trying to hold up a mirror so they would learn the truth about themselves.
And we learned a lot of truth from the whole thing.
Well-said.
I’d have to disagree on the outright deception part.
A characteristic of the arya pudgala, from which we get “Aryan” is frank and honest speech.
Deception in wartime is obviously acceptable, and it is no virtue to coddle your enemies or give them an advantage. But can we really be said to be at war while we work, earn money, and contribute to a corrupted society?
R. Wilbur has the right of it; to borrow a Buddhist term, practice “right speech”- abstain from lies and abusive speech. Stay silent or, when pressed, simply admit that you do not care about the prog’s pet issue.
There is immense power in stating “I don’t care”. At the very least, it ends the conversation.
-PW
I just remembered Solzhenitsyn’s “Live Not by Lies”.
I have repeatedly told my fiancé, a practicing Catholic who is in the mental health field, that she needs to try and comprehend how dissident Soviets — especially doctors — were able to still do good work in their profession while avoiding a bullet to the back of the head, as she’ll need to do the same on a basic level.
“But can we really be said to be at war while we work, earn money, and contribute to a corrupted society?”
Of course we can, didn’t you guys learn anything from the 20th Century? By the way, I don’t want to get into theology, but the belief that lying is always sinful is a matter of dispute. Most Catholics believe it is, but not all, and Protestants and Orthodox are all over the map.
While I cannot in good conscience condone lying, I wholeheartedly advocate less than entirely forthcoming-ness.
I will say something as a pushback in that lying outright can be a double-edged sword. The last thing we want to do is provide a host of convenient and easily proven talking points to our opponents. Bending or oversimplifying the truth, in a shocking and clickbaity kind of way, is a much safer and more defensible taqiyya to employ.
If anything, the use of dubious information should find a context within a disinformation campaign or similar psyop, where discovery of the truth is ultimately immaterial to the campaign’s effectiveness. In other words, there is a lot to gain by baiting the left’s useful idiots into an embarrassing frenzy.
Given the fractious nature of the Cathedral’s coalition, it doesn’t take much to sew discord, and conveniently enough, it doesn’t really require any lie in the first place. The truth for them is damaging enough.
Changing the subject, one of the defining aspects of neoreaction is its willingness to employ ridicule, which for years has been a handy shiv readily and primarily employed by the left. I have heard conservatives lament “Where is our John Stewart? Where is our Colbert?” too many times to count. It’s like watching somebody in a fully stocked gun store complain there’s nothing they can use to defend themselves with.
The conservative John Stewart has been lying right underneath their noses the whole time on the same goddamn channel. Watch Daniel Tosh and you will see precisely the kind of material that the Conservakin are too afraid to embrace, but which the right can, should, and must employ to devastating effect.
Part of the reason Gawkerites are afraid to tangle with 4/8chan is that they have finally found an outlet that can considerably outfox and outsnark them every time. Really this isn’t saying much, because:
A: As said before, most conservatives pull their punches.
B. The left, when you really think about how utterly broken most of them are, is a target-rich environment for any marginally competent jester.
C. When faced with (even the impression of) actual resistance outside their hugbox, lefties get pretty skittish.
Concerning point C, remember that the “trigger warning” is something entirely confined to the left. They freak out over the mere prospect of resistance.
Superior numbers also do the trick. Click on the link and listen to the interview:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/03/02/jezebel-attends-the-breitbart-cpac-party-one-of-the-weirder-nights-of-my-life/
One little lefty surrounded by all those mean ol’ Republicans. You can hear the palpable fear in Ryan’s voice at the start of the video. I swear, if there were some video to go along with the clip, you would see her running her twitchy fingers through her hair every three seconds.
The best part of the clip comes in at 7:10, where Ryan tells us why she fears Scott Walker – he actually follows through on his rhetoric. To most on the reactionary right, Walker is a fairly weak sauce candidate, but the thought of conservatives actually making remotely conservative policy is terrifying to her.
What are the Jewish words for Taqiyya and Kitman then?
Torah is ripe full of it.
-Jewish midwives lying about babies, cucking Egyptian society to raise Jews.
-Moses lying about his intentions to the Pharoah
-Jacob and his mother pulling elaborate deceit on Isaac in order to get Esau’s blessing.
-The sons of Jacob pretending to agree their raped sister can marry a man, telling that man and his family that they must be circumcised, then going back and murdering them all.
That’s only a couple from the first few books and I haven’t even touched upon all the examples within. Fact is Middle Eastern mentality is like this.
Heck even Jesus never gave straight answers, tried to hide his intentions at many points.
Rather than imagine Taqiyya and Kitman to be some mystical Islamic code followed by all Muslims, it is better to think of it as human nature that all do to varying degrees. If Muslims are so good at this, it is only because they learned it from the very best and originals first.
You don’t show your hand of cards to the other players in the game. The problem is Westerner’s spread of the English language and culture kind of dropped the ball on this. Any foreigner can read or hear the most intimate private thoughts of the Western peoples on blogs such as this or even in public (and the Western man can’t get to say his own private thoughts without fear of being called a racist or bigot) while every foreign person can say the depraved things about other peoples with a much smaller fear of being caught or seen by an unintended audience. Everyone sees the West’s hand openly
The Mongols knocked on the door from East Asia to Eastern Europe and conquered all. They spread the Golden Horde far and wide, as well as cultures and customs. Then the many different peoples outnumbered them even in their own culture. The Chinese assimilated them in China, the Muslims assimilated them in the MiddleEast, they lost all except a pitiful poor nation that exists today.
The Americans and the West went far and wide as well, spreading their culture their language. Now half the world nows English. They know your culture, your mannerisms. Your Hollywood, your entertainment, your philosophies, your theories, your science. The only thing is, they now outnumber you.
And just like some manospherians like Vox imagine a secret war simmering and that Europe and America will eventually get fed up and push out Muslims and immigrants out of their nation.
History shows it will more likely be a case like the Mongols where they outstretched and became assimilated.
Most do not want to marry, your daughters are messing around with foreign men, your sons are going after Asian women instead of white (even in the manosphere and reactionary parts) and the mexicans and muslims are outbreeding you all. All while everyone lays a claim in what they think white culture should or should not be, eliminating a sense of nationality.
Westerners were at a world poker game and they were winning by so much, they put down their hands to show everyone their cards and taunt them. Now that other players are starting to play accordingly, the West is scrambling to hide their cards again. I do not imagine other nations that take the power vacuum to be as advanced or culturally more civilized. But then again they don’t need to.
Winners average winners, losers average losers. We are in a bad position, though — no doubt about that.
The language issue in part derives from our intentional weakening of France and Germany along with N. Europe, which has hollowed out what should be a buffer. The centuries-long crappiness of Spain and Italy has not helped anything — there goes our Mediterranean buffer.
A downside to this approach is that it makes connecting with real world fellow travelers more difficult. Within my group of real life acquaintances, I have a sense of who is retweeting or repeating the latest leftist crusade. I make sure to never drop my guard around those people.
But if I sense a sympathetic soul, then maybe in private over a beer I say something like, “Man, can you believe that Ferguson thing? They burn down their own city – and then the court documents show the cop is innocent all along. Has the world gone insane?” Then if they respond receptively, a bridge can be built.
Personally, I prefer an “agree, subvert, and amplify” tactic when at a party with lots of progressives. For example: “Yah, Bush is a total idiot. He can’t even do imperialism right! What a dope, didn’t he read the playbook? You gotta set up your own strongman who rules with an iron fist. Egads, how hard is it to find a proper oppressive overlord these days?” I don’t delude myself by thinking that this tactic will actually be subversive. But the reception is usually positive, and it allows me to have fun while maintaining my sanity. Many progressives are only skin deep progressives; they have more sensible instincts deep down. So if you can sneak around their memetic defenses, they often end up nodding along.
The vast majority of people have no interest in politics (as it should be).
That is less disruptive, than, say, telling a progressive at a party that it’s time to restore the British monarchy because democracy has failed.
For quite some time I have wondered if doing a Poe’s Law version of the most extreme leftist on internet fora might be an interesting and effective strategy for two reasons. Firstly, it could be a way of getting leftists carried away and exposing their true insanity and evil and driving others away from them. Secondly, it could be enough to really push mainstream conservatives over the edge to the thought crime right.
For instance, for a long time, even after I had started reading NRx, I was ambivalent about the issue of gay marriage. The thing that really pushed me over the edge, however, was witnessing two liberals discuss it. One dared to suggest that whilst he didn’t agree with those who opposed gay marriage, he could understand where they were coming from when they said that they thought their culture and way of life were under assault. The other liberal jumped down his throat and savaged him far worse than he would have had the other guy been on the right. That incident was far more effective at tipping me over the edge to being staunchly anti-gay marriage than if a conservative had patiently argued all the predictable points. We can theorise all day about how we would react in the face of danger. If a lion came into your room right now, all discussions would be moot. The left get away with so much of what they get away with because they are very, very good at not confronting people with their true face.
Pick out anyone who is not a raving left wing idiot and try to constantly ride him for not being ideologically pure from a leftist point of view. Because it seems to me that trying the same old tired strategy won’t work. It hasn’t worked for decades, or even centuries, so why would it begin working now?