Let Allah sort them out

The way things are shaking out, I think it’s time to revisit Samuel Huntington.

I can’t say I agree completely with his conclusions, but he’s been in the ballpark for a lot of it, so the whole “clash of civilizations” idea is still in the running. This snippet from “Clash of Civilizations” says most of it for me:

“Fifth, cultural characteristics and differences are less mutable and hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and economic ones. In the former Soviet Union, communists can become democrats, the rich can become poor and the poor rich, but Russians cannot become Estonians and Azeris cannot become Armenians. In class and ideological conflicts, the key question was "Which side are you on?" and people could and did choose sides and change sides. In conflicts between civilizations, the question is "What are you?" That is a given that cannot be changed. And as we know, from Bosnia to the Caucasus to the Sudan, the wrong answer to that question can mean a bullet in the head. Even more than ethnicity, religion discriminates sharply and exclusively among people. A person can be half-French and half-Arab and simultaneously even a citizen of two countries. It is more difficult to be half-Catholic and half-Muslim.”

That said, I’d say that the REAL divide right now is between progress and regress, and that really gums up the works. Yes, it’s “us vs. them”, but who are we and who exactly are they?

Well, I’m a white Anglo-Scot male, and I haven’t fallen too far from that tree. I’m a believer in (sustainable) progress, and I’m not interested in any kind of organized religion, but I’m not hostile to any that leave me alone. The first sentence may explain the second, but my worldview/beliefs are my identifiers, not my background.

So who do I see as allies? Anyone anywhere who looks forward, not backward; if you’re interested in the tangible progress of humanity (meaning science and new frontiers of discovery in any discipline) we have something in common.

That’s nice and simple. There is no requirement for any ethnic or religious affiliation, but ones’ implementation of religion is an “us or them” determinant. That brings me to the Enemy…

Those crack-head jihadist sons (and daughters) of multiple fathers are “Number 1 with a bullet”. Bullet is the operative word, because in the short term bullets are the only cure for them. There is any number of Luddite apocalyptic cults of various affiliations, but this Islamic throwback to the bad old days puts all of them in the shade.

I share the opinion that Western Civilization is in mortal danger, but the danger isn’t from idiots with car bombs. The real enemy is those in our civilization who are paving the road to hell with their “good intentions”. Tolerance is great, but there are things that we should NOT be allowing. Top of that list is anyone who wants to destroy our civilization. I know I can speak for a lot of other people, but I’ll speak for myself; if you don’t like progressive (“decadent”) western democracy, stay the hell away from it.

Indeed, feel free to start up your Taliban-style repressive dark-ages shithole countries and live in them. Just be prepared that if you do anything to threaten our interests, we will return and settle your hash again, as many times as necessary, leaving you at that stone-age level that you wish so badly to revisit.

Anyone who opposes that sort of system, THOSE are the people I want immigrating to the western democracies. At all costs we have to screen out all of those who want to turn our countries into that circle of hell, and help the people who want the freedom to live well and dress pretty much how they’d like.

As for countries that we’re trying to sort out, I’ll say right now we can’t do it. In places like Afghanistan and Iraq, a lot more people will have to die than we would be willing to kill before you could affect a cultural shift of sufficient magnitude to have any chance of governments arising there that were compatible with our ideas.

Taking the current situation with Lebanon, if the west and Israel moved in, organized all the non-Shia factions, armed them and helped them kill or drive out every last Hezbollah supporter, maybe then there’d be a chance to stabilize the country and allow it to live peacefully with Israel, and Israel could help (in their own self-interest if naught else) keep the Syrians or Iranians from stirring the pot again.

The cold hard truth is that a lot of people would have to be in some way “ideologically cleansed” from places to separate “us” from “them”. However, one of the ideals of Western thought these days is to not slaughter people who don’t agree with you. This makes our civilization more pleasant than others to live in, but at the same time leaves us vulnerable to those more ruthless than us.

The various Islamist terrorist groups want nothing more than to convert by force the entire world to their repressive and backwards theology, period, full-stop. Anyone who thinks we can negotiate or reach any kind of accommodation with them is a fool. They see all such attempts, (correctly) as a sign of weakness and they will exploit it.

I’d waste my time if I seriously advocated slaughtering our enemies and their support base, but we have potential allies in a lot of these messed-up countries and we should be looking for ways to support them effectively. Israel is dropping the ball in that regard in Lebanon at this moment. There are noises to that effect coming out of the region, so we’ll see if anything useful comes out of the current carnage. My money’s on “no”.