Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Barbarians Rampage through Europe's Cemetery

Around the world, very few people are capable of wrapping their heads around the European reaction to the migrant crisis. On the side of the migrants, we have avid displays of barbarism, fanaticism and aggression; on the side of the Europeans, we have abject fear of appearing… intolerant. In an out-of-control situation where we would expect people to organize, protest, put up road blocks and vote en masse for nationalist parties, we are instead subjected to the ridiculous spectacle of meek, effeminate Europeans dressed up in unisex outfits chalking “No to terrorism!” on sidewalks. Most people around the world see in this an orchidaceous display of anthropological nullity. “Is Europe dead?” they wonder aloud.

Lest you think that this impression is politically incorrect or undiplomatic or somehow marginal rather than mainstream, Russia's FM Sergei Lavrov, a senior Russian statesman and a diplomat’s diplomat, is on the record saying that the European Union is “committing suicide” by letting in the invading hordes from the Middle East and North Africa.

Here we have a flood of people coming in, the majority of them young adult males shirking military service back home, and relatively few of them are qualified to seek asylum. Most of them are unqualified to do any sort of work within the EU due to lack of literacy, education or work ethic. Many of them would not be trainable in any case, coming as they are from populations bred for physical stamina and disease tolerance rather than intelligence.

Quite a few are Islamic radicals who see themselves as actual colonizers; many more have no qualms about robbing Europeans and raping European women. A few thousand are actual terrorists being sent in to await orders. For most of them, crashing into the EU and freeloading there is part of an excellent adventure—far more exciting than herding cattle or growing millet in their native villages.

European NGOs equip them with inflatable lifeboats and life vests and set them adrift off the coast of Libya or in the Adriatic. European NGO ships then scoop them up and deliver them to ports in Italy, Greece or Spain. And then they get to freeload, for months on end, while more NGO types help them with the paperwork and clog up the courts with lawsuits they file on their behalf.

I am sure that some Europeans might think me unkind for presenting such an unflattering summary of the situation. But there is a much higher standard by which to measure it than mere kindness: is it truthful? Truth is often cruel and painful, and yet without truth—with which to understand the true consequences of our actions—we are all but lambs to the slaughter.

Refusal to face the truth by hiding behind a hypocritical, threadbare veil of “kindness” is mere cowardice. Indeed, cowardice is often on display in Europe, hiding behind another threadbare veil—of “security.” When ISIS bombed the airport in Brussels, the Belgian king Philippe and his royal spouse were swiftly evacuated. During medieval times such cowardly behavior would have cost the monarch his crown, possibly along with his head. But now it is fine for a cowardly nation to have a cowardly king.

It is quite difficult to understand the rationale behind such enforced cowardice. Why are the European elites so insistent on ramming “tolerance” down the throats of their citizens and replacing them with imported barbarians? What happened to the spirit of bloodthirsty empires that had bled the entire planet dry for centuries, accumulating countless treasure?

What I believe happened is that the Europeans became too comfortable. Yes, they did experience some hardship during the two world wars, but it was nothing compared to what many other nations went through, Russia and China especially. When life is a struggle, experience is vivid, simple joys are profoundly felt, intelligent choices are critical to survival and acts of heroism are both necessary and valued. When life is comfortable, people become satiated and hard to satisfy, tastes become decadent and effete, questions of safety are pushed off on specialists and spontaneous acts individual heroism and bravery come to be treated as symptoms of social maladaptation.

Given enough safety and comfort, they become ends in themselves and the standards by which all things are measured. Those less safe and less comfortable are perceived as less successful and fashionable, and become less popular, in a game of endless oneupmanship. In turn, those yet to be seduced by safety and comfort, and willing to battle for principles higher than mere tolerance and kindness, become incomprehensible; after all, what else is there but safety and comfort? But this is only a setup for the next leg down, because safety and comfort cannot function as absolutes.

Safety cannot be guaranteed in all places and at all times: accidents do happen. You might get punched in the face by a belligerent drunk, get molested by a horny migrant, die in a terrorist attack because Allahu akbar or, more likely, break your neck by falling off your bicycle. Since you are no longer responsible for providing for your own safety—it is now the work of paid professionals—you can’t blame yourself. You can, of course, blame the paid professionals, but they are, you know, doing their best… Your only choice is to claim that you are a victim. Victimhood becomes a prized commodity and a badge of honor. Extreme attention and care lavished on all varieties of victims, who are encouraged to organize and to bargain collectively, helps assure the rest that their total security is very important. You can be a victim, but you can’t be a victim of your own stupidity.

Speaking of stupidity, the realization that you are stupid is not comfortable, yet everyone—even the stupid—must remain comfortable at all times. Given that exactly half the people are of below-average intelligence, this is rather tricky to arrange. Claiming that half the population are victims of stupidity doesn’t exactly solve the problem: such an overabundance of victims hollows out the promise of universal comfort. Nor is the problem addressed by imposing a system of universal meritocracy based on individual rights: the intelligent will do better than the unintelligent, causing the latter considerable discomfort.

The solution is to step back from the principle of meritocracy. Instead of guaranteeing individual equal rights and opportunities based on ability and performance we strive for equality of outcome: everybody gets a participation prize and a bit of money just by being obedient and polite, with the size of the prize and the sum of money carefully calibrated based on one’s level of victimhood. This is now sometimes referred to by the strangely repurposed word “equity.” Since it is hard to organize the distribution of “equity” on an individual level, people are formed into a myriad of groups and each group gets weighted against the rest. If you are a disabled black lesbian, you get to check off three victimhood boxes at once and be handed the same prize as an able-bodied white heterosexual male. This is now strangely referred to as “social” justice—as if there were ever any other kind.

This new type of person, which arose first in Europe and then spread all over the West and beyond, does seem like a degenerate form of humanity: bereft of great passion and lofty goals, lacking any clear ethnic or social allegiance or preference, fixated on comfort and safety and deficient in both masculinity and femininity: a sort of civilizational eunuch imprisoned in a four-star LGBTQ concentration camp. These may seem like major negatives, but on the plus side this type of person is mostly harmless. Half a billion people now inhabit, without posing much of a danger to each other, a smallish peninsula jutting out of Western Eurasia that until recently has been the scene of endless armed conflict. They do not destroy material or cultural artifacts but seek to accumulate them, investing in comforts and in consumption. That, most people will agree, is progress.

The last major challenge to this way of being was presented by the integration of Eastern Europe, where national passions still run high. But that problem was easily solved by finding a scapegoat—Serbia—which was cursed for its lack of multiculturalism and tolerance and bombed into submission. This scared everyone else in Eastern Europe into inaction, for the time being. But now mass migration has presented a problem on an entirely different scale, causing Poland, Hungary and now even Italy to rise up in rebellion against the alien onslaught.

The newcomers predominantly come from cultures that are the opposite of tolerant and kind. They are mainly characterized by cruelty, passion, clannishness and religious and political fanaticism. They want to live right here and right now, take pleasure in the beastlier side of human nature, and they see Europe as a treasure chest to be looted. Their cultures hearken back to an earlier era of European history, when huge crowds gathered in city squares to watch people being drawn and quartered or burned alive.

The Europeans conquered their own medieval nature, but then reimported it. The new, emasculated Western European Man is unable to push back against it; nor can their governments, whose leaders are forced to abide by the same cultural codes of tolerance, political correctness and compulsory kindness. But the Eastern European Man, only temporarily frightened into acting tolerant and emasculated, will not stand for any of this for much longer. His medieval nature is still quite close to the surface, while their Western neighbors have placed theirs in museums and various other tourist traps. This is already apparent: there was a recent EU summit on immigration; the East Europeans didn’t even bother showing up.

Looking at the situation from even farther east, from European Russia and the rest of the Eurasian landmass, there is a distinct sense of sadness in watching Europe die. A large chunk of human history is about to get trampled and despoiled. Having spent the last several decades resurrecting Eastern Christendom after the damage caused to it by the Bolshevik barbarians, they watch with dismay as the relics and ruins of Western Christendom are becoming submerged by a new barbarian wave. Western Europe’s inhabitants may no longer amount to much, but they are still valuable as museum attendants and tour guides.

That Europe is turning itself into a museum was apparent to Dostoevsky 150 years ago, when he wrote this (speaking through the character of Versilov):

“To a Russian Europe is just as precious as Russia; every stone in it is charming and dear. Europe is as much our Fatherland as Russia… Oh, how precious are to us Russians these old foreign stones, these miracles of an old, godly world, these shards of holy miracles; they are more precious to us than to the Europeans themselves!”

And then again, this time speaking as Ivan Karamazov, with even greater passion:

“...I want to travel to Europe, and so I will. Of course, I know that I will just be visiting to a cemetery. But so what? The corpses that lay in them are precious; every headstone tells the story of a great life, of passionate belief in heroism, in one’s own truth, one’s own struggle. I know already that I will fall to the ground and kiss these stones, and cry over them—even though convinced with all my heart that all of this has turned into a cemetery long ago, and is nothing more.”

[Inspired by E. Kholmogorov]

14 comments:

Jayhawk said...

Powerful piece, Dimitri. You are speaking of Europe, but I see the United States in every word of the dissertation of what happens when life becomes too comfortable. It paints a bleak picture indeed.

Anonymous said...

Dimiti is saying what so many people in Europe think but are afraid for some reason to speak about. Me, well clearly i am a victim .. i just have to find out about what. Is there a 1 -800 number i can call?

Avery said...

I spent a week living in a Muslim area of London earlier this year, and what you've described here was not my impression at all. I had a great time there, actually. I especially enjoyed overhearing a conversation between a white Christian schoolteacher at a Muslim school and his students.

Not saying that disproves what you've written, that was just my anecdotal experience.

Theophrastus said...

I posted this on the patreon site, and figured I'd place it here as well, with respect.
------------------------------

Dear Dmitry,

This essay is powerfully true, and it has struck me in a very personal way. I just flew from quaint little New Zealand to Europe to spend almost a month in northern Italy, where my people are from, and I sensed exactly --and I do mean,exactly-- what you write about here. I actually fell, onto my knees, several times (when, as best as could be determined, I was relatively alone), overcome exactly by the same emotions evoked by Dostoevsky. This land is of my people; the bones of all my ancestors are held or scattered here; it is the only part of the world where my surname doesn't stand out like a sore thumb; and, it is being buried, as we speak. The tears stream even as I write this.

I am amazed by the generosity of spirit that Russia has for Europe; Europe does not reciprocate, obviously, although it should. We won't even mention the foul and befouled Amerikans, and the "social justice" warriors least of all, except to say that you nailed that one too: what is justice, after all, if not social? For that matter, how about the motto on Justice herself in Washington: Equal Justice Under Law. What is justice if not both equal and under law? Methinks the lady doth protest too much, perhaps, thus making the hoodwink that much easier.

As for the immigrant situation, while it is true that some Italians are starting to push back, it is also true that the majority of their fellow countrymen actively desire the cheap labour, to do the jobs that they are too comfortable and satiated to do themselves anymore. Furthermore, they do not place blame squarely where it should be placed: at the feet of the EU, NATO, and, ultimately, the US government mafia.

I'm sorry, but I cannot write more. Forgive the emotion of this outburst; the truth does indeed hurt. Much has been lost, and much more will go, and knowing that it is happening as it happens is worst of all.

RB Seymour said...

Fantastic article. Thank you.

Memo to "Max":

In order to understand where the "blame" should squarely be placed, please visit
www.911nwo.com.

Thank you for your patience.

Sudansk said...

Dear Dmitry

I agree quite deeply with your sentiments and convictions as this has been the case for much of my people in Sudan and the rest of the Muslim world when naked European imperialism decimated and continues to decimate our lands, now under the aegis of the United States and its bank cartel masters.

One nagging piece I feel you've overlooked are those refugee families who have come to Europe because their respective motherlands are being ravaged by the aforementioned imperial onslaught. When I heard that whole migrant families (women and children) were being burnt alive or butchered in their homes by nativist fanatics in Northern Italy and other parts of Europe, I felt that is where Europe began to die and the barbarian hordes you speak of were fed the metaphorical gunpowder to embolden and justify their inhumanity.

I agree that a nation's borders are as essential as the walls of one's home but I contend that garnering a barbaric reputation via medieval and Nazistic pogroms is just as poisonous as one of cowardice and impotence. A culture that champions humanism dies when it fails to build on said success and retreats to barbarism, the same was true of Islamic civilization and Europe is no different.

Slo Mo said...

"exactly half the people are of below-average intelligence"
I would bet that "median" intelligence is lower than "arithmetic mean", what is usually called "average" intelligence.

Theophrastus said...

@Sudansk:

Where, exactly, did you hear that "migrant families (women and children) were being burnt alive or butchered in their homes by nativist fanatics in Northern Italy"? Because, quite frankly, I don't believe your claim. I have spent the past hour looking for such a story, and have found not a single such item. Rather, I have found many instances where villages in Northern Italy opened their doors to refugees, thus giving the lie to what I am starting to think is a specious claim by you.

This does not mean that I do not sympathise with your plight (if in fact you are a refugee, and not a troll of some kind, and please forgive my doubts but these things do happen), but that I believe that you might have preferred to have stayed home if the Imperialist dogs could have been curtailed. I certainly would have.

In any case, Italy, for one (and all of Western Europe for that matter), has enough demographic problems of its own making, and it does not help things if 600,000 extra people are placed within its borders; it doesn't help native Italians and it doesn't help the refugees. Italy's boat was overfull 30 years ago, at least, and the same is arguable for the rest of Europe.

Furthermore, it is certainly specious, and verging on duplicitous, to insist that one must act charitably towards barbarians: doing so only makes one easy prey. Championing humanism does not mean tolerating barbarians, and I would have thought it obvious that tolerating barbarism will destroy humanism, which is exactly one of the themes that Dmitry is writing about.

It is equally true that expulsion of "undesireables" is a cure that is as bad as the disease itself, and gives fuel to fascism, but the alternative is every bit as bad, as can be readily seen. I, for one, would not have stood on the sidelines in Cologne on New Year's Eve 2015/2016 and watched "refugees" rape women, especially local women; I would have acted like the Russians in Murmansk did, and kicked the barbarous pigs into bloody little pieces.

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2016/02/russia-muslim-migrants-grope-and-molest-women-get-beaten-up

Hence, I ask you, Suadansk, a direct question: who was more humanistic; the Germans who stood by in Cologne, or the Russians who stopped a barbarous act?

Tread carefully.

John Claiborne said...

Dmitri,

What a powerful piece.

No one else in our degenerate U.S. expresses these obvious truths.

May some remnants reconstruct a spiritual and real civilization.

edmund said...

China takes in no refugees, helps the Middle East and North Africa aplenty, and reeducates any Muslims it has when they step out of line. It's scary but they seem to be working out.

Dmitry Orlov said...

Lots of snowflakes are being triggered by the following sentence: "Many of them would not be trainable in any case, coming as they are from populations bred for physical stamina and disease tolerance rather than intelligence." I am not posting their comments, since they are without merit, but I will expand on it a bit. Each population is subject to many different environmental pressures to which some specimens are better able to respond than others. The better adapted specimens survive and breed at a higher rate than the rest, causing these well adapted traits to proliferate in the population. This applies to all animals, and humans are no different. The most obvious and immediate effects have to do with sexual selection, causing peacocks to develop large, colorful tails and Sweden, Russia and Czechia to develop more than its share of supermodels. One of the largest environmental pressures in the capitalist economies, the US and the UK especially, causes a surplus of sociopaths to develop (sociopathy is approximately 50% heritable) because sociopaths are uniquely well adapted to the dehumanizing, ruthless and unempathic corporate environment. In less developed countries, other environmental pressures. In malarial countries, genetic resistance to malaria confers benefits and positively affects survival rates of those who have it. Where hard manual labor is required to eke out an existence, those who cannot provide it do not survive long enough to produce offspring. Since intelligence is, in biological terms, rather expensive, with the brain being a very energy-hungry organ, superior intelligence in an environment that has no use for it is a liability rather than an asset. This is why populations from underdeveloped countries with high disease loads and much hard manual labor tend to have low average IQ. In different circumstances, the same population, over just a handful of generations, may produce a different result. But simply extracting people from that environment and expecting them to function in a technologically advanced, bureaucratized environment, is not particularly clever. Whether we like it or not, humans have breeds, and this is like bringing a whippet or a miniature poodle to a bear hunt.

Dmitry Orlov said...

Ever since Google got rid of OpenID the comments section on my public blog has turned into a cesspool. Here is someone claiming that unlike all other animals humans can't be bred, and aren't bred based on specific environmental conditions. This is just pure ignorance. You can take a bunch of mutts and breed them for specific things, just as you can take dark-skinned people, put them some place not sunny, and in 10000 years they'll be light skinned. And then these same people, when moved to a sunny place, will turn dark-skinned again. Same genes can be combined in any number of ways. This should be really obvious stuff for anyone who took Biology 101 and passed. And yet here we are reading a refutation of it. Sad.

Jacob Gittes said...

Dmitry:
wow. Tour de force essay. I'm singing up for your Patreon today.
You have such a beautiful, cold, truthful writing style. It cuts to the bone. But we need to be cut to the bone to rid ourselves of fleshy illusion.

forrest said...

The most intelligent lab rat is probably the one who first catches on: "My grad student doesn't want me pushing lever B anymore."

The one who sees that "I can climb out of my cage if I push strongly up with my nose, right there!" -- Now that's intelligence. But if he continues to live in his cage until the rat-farmer notices the loose lid and the cosy layer of rat-poop keeping the cage warm & dark, he's going to be a dead rat -- not nearly as smart as the wild rats hanging out in the walls.

Human intelligence might be defined as "The ability to think up a new reason why those people should be doing our work while we take control of their country and keep them out of ours." But I think Aristotle got there first, observing that those silly barbarians north of Greece were natural slaves, unable to speak decent Greek -- and your reasoning here is simply a different application of the same principle.

A slow cpu can make a computer a source of more frustration than entertainment -- but the main difference between a useful computer and one that merely sends private information out in the background while the owner plays freecell: software, software, software! A computer that spends most of its cycles making sure that everything you want will cost you -- is fit only for counting votes.