There are many dumb clichés uttered about terrorism in the wake of any attack.
One of the more important ones to debunk is the notion that Islamic radicals are the people who cause problems.
The public organs often say that ‘radical clerics’ cause ‘radicalization’ or that otherwise ordinary Muslims become ‘radicalized’ after watching too many cool beheadings on Youtube and reading too many Al Qaeda PDFs.
The responsible press people want to do this to draw a distinction between peaceful, law-abiding Muslims and the types of people who detonate nail bombs next to baby carriages in airports.
This is a foolish distinction to draw.
Terrorism is a disquieting demonstration of power that synergizes well with instantaneous global communications technology. It can make people in Chicago nervous from a small explosion thousands of miles and an ocean away. The bomb isn’t just a bomb: it’s a media event.
It also generates results vastly disproportionate to the resources spent on it. A cheap bomb combined with some expendable people results in billions or even trillions of dollars of wasted expenditure on security while also serving as an effective recruiting advertisement for other political organizations.
For states, it also creates more demand for state services. It’s win-win-win all around except for the people who get blown up, the soldiers who have to fight in the wars, and to the broader society which could have used the resources in less wasteful ways.
But back to the stupidity of the distinction between the radicalized and the normal-law-abiding-tolerant types.
The greater threat is actually posed by the large populations of ordinary people who will change the overall character and political nature of the West.
Terrorists are just producers of political theater. The ordinary people are the ones you need to filter out, because not only do they provide a comfortable community that fighters can swim in, but they create a sustainable and growing ethnic faction that will cause greater political and cultural instability far into the future.
One bomber kills maybe 10 or 20 people and makes for exciting television. One mother produces somewhere between a few and a dozen new foreigners who will change the host culture in more profound ways over a longer period of time.
The terrorists are just dramatizing what’s going on over a longer period of time in an instant.
This is why the focus on terrorist plots as mysteries to be solved by genius detectives, spies, and other super sleuths is quite stupid. The plots are just plots of stories which are much less consequential than the larger reality of population replacement.
Figuring out which cleric radicalized whom and where the guns came from is stupid. Stopping the bombing with some last-second waterboarding but allowing the movement of millions of foreign people into your country is extra-stupid, as in stupider than an entire Special Olympiad stupid.
If anything, all the super-sleuthing and high-tech spying just makes the overall situation worse because it reduces how many embarrassing bombings there are, which adds to the sense of alarm among the general public.
Turning your otherwise nice country into Morocco, Iraq, Syria, or Pakistan is the great stupidity. Not catching a bomber or two is an understandable error. The problem is not the bomber, but the ordinary people with ordinary views from the country that he came from who now live in your formerly nice country.
Welcome back.
This is spot on, but try explaining this to normies, they’ll tell you you’re bat-shit crazy. This is how the Western media has shifted in the last few years, where the media once denied Islamic involvement, they shifted to the universalist appeal. It’s now “a few radicals” amongst millions of Muslims who want to be “just like us”.
The reality is they don’t want to be like us, we revolt them and offend just about everything they hold dear. They’re tribal, we’re individual. They’re R-selected with large families they can’t even feed, we’re K-selected with small families with abundant resources. We value honesty over group loyalty, they value group loyalty over honesty. We think long term, they short term. We sacrifice for the greater good, they only think of themselves and extended family.
One thing is certain, the next few years is going to be truly historical in what’s about to unfold.
Great to have you back, Henry!
I agree wholeheartedly with your point, but then again, most of the folks in this corner of the net have come to that conclusion already. To wit: Diversity + Proximity = War. That said, your article has provided a clear explanation as to where the fundamental problem really is. Efforts at trying to solve the problem of terrorism through cultural outreach are as fundamentally flawed and inefficient as trying to build a sandcastle in the surf. Any progress in pushing Cathedral values is immediately and repeatedly washed away by a profound wave of biology, faith, cynicism, alienation, and ingrained culture.
At first glance, it would appear that our task is thus:
How we can succeed at deconstructing the cultural assimilation narrative that allows this phenomenon to exist?
However, I think the reality of the situation is more straightforward than that. Remember, politics is not driven by strict rationality.
For us, the real question is: How do we take the portion of the population supporting this action and get them to change their behavior?
I suspect much of it stems from a need for personal validation rather than any specific belief in the assimilation narrative itself.
If we can break that validation mechanism, we can likely create a considerable drop in support for the narrative.
Here are some possible techniques:
-Use the repeated nature of these attacks as a way of making the target audience feel ineffective and powerless. This is really the truth of the matter, but that truth needs to be ingrained upon minds repeatedly to matter.
-Frame assimilationists as needing to defend the consequences of their actions, rather than the narrative itself. They have immense trouble with the former, but plenty of experience and support defending the latter. In other words, instead of saying “why do you support this policy?”, ask them why they insist on the continued havoc it has produced.
What are your thoughts on this?
Mutt wants the Muslim conquest of Europe and kills people. Jeff wants the Muslim conquest of Europe too, but only by peaceful means and so would never do anything like that. Every time Mutt acts, it is Media’s job to rush in and shield Jeff from the perfectly justified hatred attached to Mutt, which it can only do obscuring the fact that they are working together toward a common end. In fact, the Mutt & Jeff routine only works because Media obscures this relationship. Without the interference, everybody immediately recognizes Jeff as Mutt and so the routine never develops.
In this way labels like ISIS/Al Qaeda/Hezbollah etc. are extremely useful to the political leadership, so much so that they apply them much more often than is actually justified.
Related to the desperate search after any event to find links to larger, organized terrorist movements. Attackers are either part of a specific group–and hence easily solved once the head of group X is whacked–or lone wolfs, and thus not emblematic of any larger problem. The truth is that they are the violent edge of an invading tribe with only in group loyalty and disdain for the obsequious host culture.
So cynical, pithy, well written, and true. Welcome back.
Welcome back Henry. Needless to say you’re spot-on. I’ll be forwarding this to normie friends.
Thanks.
Double-plus stupid? Anyways glad to have you back, your presence was sorely missed,
Welcome back Henry.
Following up on Ollie’s post …
Some thoughts. The computer ate my first attempt to post.
Some people take a position to make themselves feel good about themselves. They take the ‘right’ position. They know what the ‘right’ position is because it is the same position other ‘right minded’ people take. Thomas Sowell wrote self-congratulation as a basis for social policy. The likely results are not a factor.
Other people take a position based on the likely outcome or the empirical result of similar actions in the past.
Take a group of 100,000 immigrants from some culture/religion/country. Determine what percentage have different attributes e.g. x% think killing apostates is the right thing to do etc. Determine the approximate number of the 100,000 that have this attribute. Then ask whether the people already in the country are made better or worse off by importing, say, 20,000 people who think killing apostates is OK. If the people in the country are made worse off then why do it?
Someone wrote about Merkel taking a Kantian ‘moral’ position on immigrants. She decides what the ‘right’ thing to do is then does it regardless of the likely consequences.
NN Taleb writes that you should not give much weight to the opinion of someone who does not have any skin in the game. He calls the opinions, for my example, of the chattering classes as “free options”, in the sense of options in financial futures markets. They lose nothing by being wrong. Thomas Sowell has written about this as well.
It would be good to try to get the likely outcomes from mouths of the ‘right minded’ people and better yet to have them bet on it.