Author: White Whale

There is of course nothing wrong with pursuing alternative paths to contemporary America–as it existed then or now–but to do so purely in opposition, and not in a genuinely creative spirit, is to value conformity not genuine freedom.

All you have to do is remove the love beads and Nehru jackets and you get people saying openly and seemingly without shame that free speech should be confined to people who think and act like them, and thus belong to them.

It is so easy to confuse the outer form with the reality that most people do it.  People who sing about love need mean none of it.  They can limit it to accepting people who were already in their tribe.  People who sing about freedom need mean none of it: they can limit it to not being different than a group which defines itself as different, without any felt sense to actually BE different.  All gray mediocrities can claim they are special, if they also claim the right to inflict violence on their chosen enemies.  The Nazis did it.  The Communofascists did it, and continue to do it.  Muslims can do it: they claim their world view is unique and special, even if everybody within it marches in lockstep to an ideology which celebrates rape, murder, torture, pedophilia, imperial conquest, and pillage.

I read a Heinlein quote which simplified the world to two groups: those who want control over others, and those who don’t.  Freedom only benefits those who value it, and to value it you must be capable of imagining new things, new ways of being, and doing so in isolation and without immediate reassurance and reinforcement;  you must value exploration and perceptual movement.

Those who fear the new, who fear movement, join the first group, where their first act is surrendering their uniqueness and individuality.  This is all Islam really demands: that you become a slave.  It’s very name means submission.  How many people, I wonder, know this?

It is totalitarian in that it seeks to bring all aspects of life under the dominance not so much of an all-powerful government, but an ubiquitous need to conform to all the people around you: your family, your neighbors, your employer, people on the street: all can report you to the Brownshirts–and they do have religious police in many Islamic countries, including Saudi Arabia, where they can burst into your bedroom to confront you in an act of adultery or homosexuality, and drag you off to be killed or partially dismembered.

It is radical in this respect, in that like the Communists it wants to remake all aspects of life and then make them permanent.  In this, it is perfect for people seeking an escape from freedom, and it has long been my suspicion that the child rearing practices in most Islamic nations make their children frightened of the notion of an individual conscience, personal responsibility–at least outside those defined by the family–and terrified of free thought and where it might lead.

Oh, I have more to say, but I’m trying to limit all this.

I will say this: all the recent news, in my opinion, has many otherwise thoroughly acculturated men and women between the ages roughly of 18 and 40 rethinking their lives.  They have assumed that they had to integrate, but people are getting away with murders which are making them wonder if this is true, if all the scripture and Koranic study they did when children may in fact be relevant publicly.

Imagine if, instead of being told to love your neighbor as yourself–as many of us were weekly for many years–you had been told there is only one true religion and that everything else is an affront to the only God who exists, and that to rectify this situation that God has commanded religious violence until all the world is brought within the one TRUE religion.  That is both a simple and a powerful story.

The story with regard to Muslims is not that there are so many radicals, but that there are so few.  Jihad was commonly called the 6th Pillar of Islam for many, many years.

Some things I do seem to want to continue posting in public, after writing in my diary.

Last night I was dreaming of waves of men dressed as 7th century Saracens or Moors crowding a modern space with drawn swords, seeking to kill anyone they encountered.

We have reached a place where it is reasonable to suppose at least hundreds, and likely thousands of Muslims safely ensconced in our midst are secretly plotting to kill us.  If we assume roughly 10% of the world’s Muslims are “radicalized”–which is to say they have decided to take the Koran’s message of jihad seriously again after centuries of neglect forced by military inferiority–and that roughly 1% of those people are willing to act on it–1 Muslim in a thousand–then among the world’s billion Muslims plus there are one million aspiring jihadists.

Within the United States, some 12% of the Muslim population wants the death penalty for critics of Islam.  Can we not call these the “radical” ones?  Can we not admit that we, too, have “them”?  This should seem obvious after Fort Hood, Chattanooga, and San Bernardino, added on to all the other arrests for crimes allegedly planned but not committed.

We have between 5 and 12 million Muslims, I read, in the United States.  Let us use the lower number.  1% of 10% is 5,000.

Imagine if this prospective threat were Christian in nature.

Islam is asking us what century we want to live in.  Most suburban Americans literally have no place holder for, no ability to comprehend, a world view which does not consider being nice a more or less religious commandment, which hates dogs and women, and which is capable of inflicting horrific violence carefully and after long planning on completely innocent people who are completely disarmed and unexpecting, and doing so not just without mercy, but with the enthusiasm of the true sadist and savage.  Why else the GoPro’s?  They wanted to create and share snuff films.

These are laudable ideals.  They are unique in human history in their universality.  All previous experiments with “civilized freedom” were confined to power elites, who in all cases I know of still kept slaves.  The Greeks did.  The Romans did.  Even some of our Founding Fathers did.

And we have reached an age where almost every fact which has ever been known can be summoned before us with a few keystrokes. I can read Shakespeare while I am waiting at the dentist. I can study quantum theory, or Roman history.

And somehow we have reached a point of what might be termed imbecilic saturation.  The indoctrinated outnumber the thinkers.  Obviously, generalized stupidity has been and remains the goal of dedicated propagandists, but what drives the propagandists? Do Bill Ayers and George Soros REALLY believe their lunatic visions will somehow benefit humanity?

How did this happen?  I have attempted in so many ways, so many times, to explain all this, but I am feeling deeply the mystery of this whole thing, like there are swamp vapors on this planet that feed every sickness of the mind and spirit until every last decent sense has departed, every last vestige of genuine reason has been perverted into ideology and habits of mind which cannot be questioned.  Until the life we were granted, the divine spark we emerged from the ooze from, has been silenced and abandoned.

The proximate cause of this vexation is an inability to comprehend people who still do not understand that the Koran has an effect on many people which is exactly what was calculated.  How does a Muslim man go to Saudi Arabia, come home with a Muslim wife, grow his beard out, collect guns, armor and bombs, put a Go-Pro on to make snuff films with not get called a Muslim terrorist?  How are so many people not just willing to not say the obvious, but to defend Islamic terror outright?

We don’t like bullies, do we?  What else can it be called when someone puts a gun to your head and says “believe as I do or die?”

What so many people lack is a sense of principle.  Some things are inherently right–like protecting the innocent weak–and some are inherently wrong, like oppressing them.

We can and should discuss the morality of our wars.  There are many tenable ideas about our wars with Iraq.  There are many tenable ideas about what we should DO in the face of Islamic terror threats.

But it has become so hard to speak the truth, for so many.  They live in slippery places, where without realizing it, they have come to be mere mouth-pieces for organized propagandists, who can change their ideas and themes on a dime.  Rape can be a horrible crime one minute, and a non-issue the next.  They will call consensual sex a crime one minute, and defend ISIS the next.

I am really feeling like someone out of my time and place.  I know there are many like me, but I needed to get this out.  I don’t know if I feel better.  I’m going to do my Kum Nye practice.  It will be interesting to see what happens.

Update: it went well.  What I realized is that I touched a strong current of existential helplessness.  I deal with this sense through what is often violent action, which is to say arguing with people who are not ever going to agree with me, because it would require them to admit in the face of a determined and angry person that they are wrong. If you want to lose every argument you ever engage in–if winning is defined as persuasion–then start by insulting the intelligence of the person you are arguing with.  Simpler yet: argue in the first place.  Dale Carnegie was right.

What I am realizing is that I am somewhat falling prey to a common delusion: if I FEEL I am doing something, I actually am.  Now, the emotions have their own logic, and this action is logical from that perspective.  But I am a man who values both reason and effectiveness, and I have been silly.

And what I am realizing too is that stupidity is hardly unique to the modern age.  There were Salem Witch trials.  There were many Inquisitions.  The First World War was fought, and so was the Second.

What I think I am sensing is the sheer amount of wasted possibility.  Humankind has NEVER been closer to generalized peace and felicity, and yet somehow large segments of our society–understood as Westernized culture generally–want to destroy what has been built.  They do not see how much beauty is possible.

Rather, it feels to me like I have used this as a crutch, and it is time to put that crutch away.  That this process will necessarily be difficult and painful in no respect means it should not be done.  I have to learn to walk, either again, or more likely for the first time.

Still, I do continue to want to share some ideas from time to time, and here is one.

A few days ago I was doing my Kum Nye practice after watching Jim Jarmusch’s “Mystery Train”, which is billed as a comedy, but which is quite serious in its own way.  He deals continually with outsiders, with qualitative outliers, with people external to whatever system they find themselves in.

And for me there is an affect to this sense of rootlessness. I remember the feeling-tones of the 1980’s, the sense of fear, the emergence of punk rock, the wondering what is or could be next.  These feelings were very much on the cultural surface, or so it seemed to me.

They seem now to have gone underground, but I think if you look at the fierceness with which leftists cling to their falsified religion, or the attendance numbers of horror films, what I think we will find is that we have almost collectively decided not to talk about certain things, to not feel certain things openly, to not go too deep.

And yet there is this feeling current which remains, and perhaps grows stronger for not having been consciously seen, not consciously felt.  I feel it.  I sense it.

And it occurred to me that my meditations have to include this cultural element, this “verworfenheit”, this anomie and nameless fear.

And then it occurred to me that ALL genuine spiritual paths have to go through a trackless place, where all the old signifiers fall away, where there is no form, there are no reference points, where there is a sense of universal and complete loss, and sense of being lost.  “The dark night of the soul”, as I think St. John of the Cross called it.

The Buddha had to traverse modernity.  So did Jesus, and Lao Tze.  Nothing has changed, really, except the scale of the problem.

In the Buddha’s time, society was organized around tribes and clans and families.  When he left his home, he was a nobody to everybody.  When he sat under the tree and felt alone and abandoned, confused, hungry, and fearful, nobody comforted him.

The task of deep growth is indeed a daunting one.  But it is all the more magnificent for it.  Thank God it is not too easy.  All of us have been given the chance at a great, noble victory.

If you start seeing large gaps between posts–and I have “threatened” (seemingly I have few readers, so it in any event affects only a couple people) this multiple times before–then that is the reason.

All is good and getting better.

I would renounce the goal of overthrowing Assad.  This is illegal, stupid, and unnecessary. I have yet to see anyone defend this policy, or for their part, seen the complicit media push the question.

I would remove all of ISIS sources of income.  I would bomb their oil production, storage and transportation infrastructure until every tanker in their region stood empty because no one would drive them.

I would ask for a volunteer force of at least 2,000 Special Operations folks, and give them all the support–particularly air cover–they needed, and tell them to go hunting.  I would make this a multi-national effort, and although I would want to keep ultimate control over my guys, I would be willing to insert them into a larger joint task force.

I would create an informational campaign to appeal to the civilized, decent, liberal sentiments in particularly the Western populations.  Kids who grow up here by and large do not want to see adulterers stoned, and homosexuals decapitated.  They do not condone slavery, rape, and conquests intended for pillage.  I would employ theologians to figure out how to deemphasize what I would call the demonic elements of their religion at its worst, and the angelic elements of it at its best, which I see embodied in the work of the Sufis.  Most of them were very Muslim, but they focused on a relationship with the One True God, and not so much on killing, raping, and stealing.  No sane person can defend those practices, even if they were equally common among Christians in the 7th Century.  That was a very long time ago.

I would treat all calls for subverting the Constitution in the United States–which is what the call for Sharia is–as treason. I would arrest and jail anyone who publicly proclaimed this.  We have tolerated open treason for far too long.

And I would convene a panel of the worlds most powerful and wealthiest nations, and ask them: what do you want the world to look like in 20 years?  Where do WE want it to go?  Have we not had enough bloodshed?  Can we not call Communism a failure in building a better world?  Can we not grant that freedom is the precondition of any form of dignity for human beings, and its alternative an abomination we should rightly reject?

I would do much more than this–this is just dealing with Islam’s tendency to spin out of control–but this would be a start.

Edit: one thing you will note is that I did not include “bombing”.  Bombing is the tactic used by those who want to create the impression they are doing something, but who are not committed to final victory.  It is not my belief that we need to retake all of ISIS lands with large Army units.  It is my belief that these smug bastards can be made very scared, and to spend most of their time hiding, by an all volunteer force.  That will choke recruitment, and economic violence will choke revenues.  Sooner or later, it will stop seeming like an adventure, and only the goat fuckers will be left, and they will not be hard to deal with.

I have a particular affinity for the Australian SAS.  I suspect no American or European Leftists want to know this, but senior NVA commanders left fairly extensive notes on what worked and what didn’t.  As far as what worked, the Aussies scared the shit out of them.  Americans would send out patrols, make contact, call in air power or artillery, then leave.  The Aussies would stay in place.  They would remain silent.  And they would engage them again and again at close range.  One Spec. Op guy I know said the Aussies he knew in Afghanistan would go on six month patrols.  That is the sort of thing I have in mind.  A sustained commitment, by volunteers.  People who blend, who study their enemies up close, and who, when ready, bring death and destruction.