With the Global Whack-a-Mole on Terror sputtering along again in Iraq, the issue of "foreign fighters” is at the fore once more. The UK has announced an intention to do something half-assed about non-citizen passport holders who go off on jihad. While some may take this as "finally someone's doing something", I personally see it as a sign of the rot and weakness which will be the end of Western Civilization.
Western Civilization has had a rough go for sure and is far from perfect, but it has produced most of what makes modern life comfortable and reasonably long. Scientific Method, germ theory of disease, immunization and advances in horticulture and chemistry have all come from "us", immeasurably improving lives the world over and the only things which make our current population remotely sustainable. This doesn't even include the advances in materials sciences and computers which keep everything moving.
It's not about colour or race, it's about culture. Anybody can be "western" if they want to, and there was a time when it was the thing to aspire to. Two World Wars accelerated the collapse of the British Empire as well as that of the French, but not before both had left their modernizing and linguistic impressions across the globe. The ideas were loose but so were some others, specifically Communism and Islamism. It could of course be argued that Communism is a Western development, but despite its' geographical origin it fails the "keep moving forward" test. There was a time when that was about unrestrained development, but it moved past that (for most people) to be about doing things better than before, not just bigger.
That still exists, but it is increasingly opposed by limiting philosophies. Foremost in my estimation is the "Climate Change" lobby. If you actually look at who is doing what you'll notice two distinct groups. First are the profiteers, the ones pushing carbon trading
EVERY proposal to limit greenhouse gases (they could start, simply by ceasing to breathe) would destroy advanced technological societies by wrecking their economies. The partial success they've had in North America has driven up electricity rates and decreased reliability of supply, a mere shadow of what they would like to do. See the UK for the next step from where we are.
All of this is to say that the seeds of the downfall of Western Civilization are sown from within, and we are proving ourselves "unfit" in the evolutionary biological sense by the death-wish we have as a society. Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory are the key tools to take us down from within. When Moral Relativism is your guiding philosophy the outcome seems to be that everything else is judged superior to your own culture.
I like Rule of Law and having a decent chance of surviving walking the streets at night; it may surprise you but the two things are not actually related. They are in fact a historically exceptionally (vanishingly) rare combination even in the imperfect form we find them today in our First World countries. The harsh truth is that if you hate your heritage so much that you'd deluge your country with "Diversity" the basic institutions created in that First World will be replaced by the Third World which you have imported. Think of India, but where it's too cold to live in a shack, but that's the best case going down that road.
Which brings us back to the intro paragraph. Thousands of Saudis flocking to al Qaeda and now ISIS is no surprise. What is more of surprise on the face of it is recent Muslim converts of European extraction doing the same. Scratch the surface a bit and it starts to make sense. If you think of these Salafist groups as both "a Cause" and as gangs, you will see the appeal to overlapping personality types.
The simplest type is the adventurer. Young men have been from time immemorial headed out on raids and general mayhem, and these find expression in gangs, pirates, drug cartels, etc. I'm sure you would find that many in ISIS' current ranks aren't "true believers" but more opportunistic criminals and psychopaths with a gloss of religion to make it look good to the group. The next group need to belong to something, and jihad is the most dynamic something going today. A sub-set of them are the types who hate Western society as decadent and overly permissive and find the intolerance and rigidity of Wahhabi-style Islam the perfect antidote.
If the Arabs hate us, big deal, we've been fighting them since Roman times at least. When our own people turn against us to join them we really need to think about root causes. The simplest way to look at this is as osmosis or as Nature abhorring a vacuum.
Our confidence in the way we do things has declined, and with it our confidence and assertiveness as a culture. People in most parts of the world like to be on the winning side, and right now that doesn't look like us. We need something to believe in, but the common culture we once had (even between British and French in Canada it wasn't fundamentally different) has been systematically dismantled and blackballed as the worst thing ever.
There's your vacuum. Something needs to take the place of the Iliad and Odyssey, Horatius at the Bridge, Charles Martel, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Vimy Ridge, the flag raising on Iwo Jima, etc. If you don't have passing familiarity with at least 5 of the above, well, you're not alone these days.
The past is treacherous territory, but at some point you have to choose something to believe in. It could be where you come from (dangerous to outsiders) religion (ditto) or whatever else, but if you don't stake out something as the Line Which Shall Not Be Crossed you'll have no anchor and no standards for how things should be. We can do better than the old days, but we need something for people of diverse backgrounds to rally to. The current Canadian government is bucking the trend and trying to bring our history back, but they won't last forever. As long as we can't give our people something worth dying for, radical Islam will be ready to fill that void.
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