Posted on 02/19/2005 4:26:01 PM PST by Land_of_Lincoln_John
Islam has a history of aggression, oppression, and expansion for 1400 years. It never recedes. It's a total social system -- defining religion, legal obligations, and economic mores. It's a perfect system for small gangs to form around mullah patriarchs. We hear about enlightened periods of great intellectual achievement. In the long run these achievements seem small compared to the West’s. The general trend in Islam remains unchanged.
Socialism, on the other hand, is a relatively recent invention. Its principle object is one of economics. It cares little for religion. It is intellectually full of social nonsense. It attracts weird people. Unless in the hands of a despot, socialism is hard to enforce. Socialism more often attempts to extend itself through intellectual persuasion. It betrays its promises for economic justice by quickly loading the loafers on the economic dole. The more the socialists press the larger the black-market grows. Yes, Europe has a black market which is an embarrassment and therefore underreported. In the long run, socialists are at intellectual war with capitalists.
In the Islamic realm nations are ruled by either by a despotic theocracy or a despotic secular party. The two war with each other. Democracies last but a fleeting decade or so before the next strongman takes over. In the long run, Islamists are at brute force war with everyone else including themselves.
I don’t see a comparison with the Fascists of Europe with those of the Islam as a reliable analysis. Hitler took his cue from the Turkish Muslims who murdered more than a million Christian Armenians decades earlier. The murderous excesses of Hitler actually had a helping hand from Muslims in the Balkans bolstered by the cries from the Mufti of Jerusalem to kill the Jews.
You've got that backwards. The Young Turks trained in Germany and imitated the Germans. Several German generals helped organize and lead the Turkish military. The Nazis cut their teeth on the Armenian killing.
How did Hitler's Nazi's cut their teeth on the Armenian Genocide which took place during WWI? My reference to Hitler is that he is quoted as saying, "Who remembered the genocide committed by the Turks," when he was discussing final solution with his cohorts. The Muslims taught him that history forgets.
“Islam has a history of aggression, oppression, and expansion for 1400 years. It never recedes.”
I agree. What truly makes me sick are the revisionist historians and apologists (Karen Armstrong for example) that support their cult of oppression and aggression. In their attempt to whitewash Islam’s imperialistic expansion in the 8th century by heaping shame upon the West for its efforts to secure the Holy Lands for Christian pilgrims by reclaiming territory that had been Christian almost 600 years before the rise of Islam, they do a disservice to everyone and only feed the fires. All of what is now Lebanon, Israel, Jordon, Syria, Egypt, North Africa and parts of Iraq and Iran were Christian by the 7th century. In fact, about the only places not Christian were the Saudi Arabian Hijaz and Njad which no civilized people showed any interest in because it was, and remains, a wasteland inhabited only by wild savages. What nonsense it is to claim the crusades were a shameful imperialistic penetration of a peaceful Islamic world. Our shame should be we did not succeed in driving the heathens back into their wasteland.
“It's a total social system -- defining religion, legal obligations, and economic mores. It's a perfect system for small gangs to form around mullah patriarchs.”
True. It is more of an ideology than a system though. There is no form, there is no structure, there is no hierarchy and there is no church. Because of that, anyone can claim to have found the perfect word and justify an assault on those who do not subscribe. Muhammad created Islam by fracturing the first and only vestige of a stable Arabic society, setting son against father and brother against brother. Anarchy has ruled supreme in Arabic society since its domination by Islam and the death of the only force that held it together. It has been a leaderless cult since.
“We hear about enlightened periods of great intellectual achievement. In the long run these achievements seem small compared to the West’s. The general trend in Islam remains unchanged.”
True. Virtually every significant contribution claimed for Islamic culture was nothing more than the transfer of knowledge expropriated from ancient Greece and India. Islam has created virtually nothing and it lacks the intellectual foundation to do so today. Islam is an ideology and intellectual wasteland drowned by catharsis.
“Socialism, on the other hand, is a relatively recent invention. Its principle object is one of economics. It cares little for religion. It is intellectually full of social nonsense. It attracts weird people.”
Here’s where I take a slight detour in the road. If by socialism you mean fascism I agree. However, the seeds of European socialism were planted in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Nationalist socialism, or fascism, however is the only significant political achievement (if we can call it that) of the 20th century. We can thank Benito for the creation of that insanity.
“Unless in the hands of a despot, socialism is hard to enforce. Socialism more often attempts to extend itself through intellectual persuasion. It betrays its promises for economic justice by quickly loading the loafers on the economic dole. The more the socialists press the larger the black-market grows. Yes, Europe has a black market which is an embarrassment and therefore underreported.”
I largely agree. My personal estimate is that the black market in the poorer countries of Europe, say countries like Greece, is about 50 percent of the economy. In the former Soviet Republics it may be even more.
“In the long run, socialists are at intellectual war with capitalists.”
Nationalist socialists “claim” to be at intellectual war with the capitalists and that to a great extent is their appeal to the ignorant masses they depend on to gain power. However, no nationalist socialist movement has gained ascendancy without the cooperation and co-opting of the existing capitalist elites. On the other hand, no nationalist socialist movement has ever survived long enough to know how its relationship with capitalism would eventually play out. They have all self-destructed as seems to be their logical end. Unfortunately, millions, and now perhaps billions, die in the process.
“In the Islamic realm nations are ruled by either by a despotic theocracy or a despotic secular party. The two war with each other. Democracies last but a fleeting decade or so before the next strongman takes over. In the long run, Islamists are at brute force war with everyone else including themselves.”
I wholeheartedly agree.
“I don’t see a comparison with the Fascists of Europe with those of the Islam as a reliable analysis. Hitler took his cue from the Turkish Muslims who murdered more than a million Christian Armenians decades earlier. The murderous excesses of Hitler actually had a helping hand from Muslims in the Balkans bolstered by the cries from the Mufti of Jerusalem to kill the Jews.”
Whether my comparative analysis of Islamism with nationalist socialism or fascism is valid remains to be seen. However, the prospects are frightening. There are those who would argue that fascism cannot find its foundation in religion and cannot survive transmutation to an internationalist movement. However, as you so correctly point out, Islam is more than a religion. It is a total social, economic and political ideology that insists on conformity by its followers and ruthlessly subjugates those who don’t.
At the same time, Islam has sufficient trappings of ideological rigor to approach the status of a borderless state which encompasses over one billion followers who believe in allegiance to Islam above allegiance to country. The scale for potential violence far exceeds anything that could have been mounted by fascist Italy, Nazi Germany or any other nationalist socialist movement. I think my comparison warrants serious consideration given the potential consequences and that comparison is shared by a growing number of concerned individuals who argue strongly that Islamism is nationalist socialism or fascism reborn in the 21st century. It certainly will not survive but is potential destructive force is almost unimaginable.
You might find the following link interesting: www.atimes.com/atimes/others/islamism-fascism-terrorism.html. Also, Robert Paxton’s book, The Anatomy of Fascism, is an interesting read though I suspect you may have already discovered it.
Regards
A pro-Nazi government was in place in Iraq in 1941, until the British overthrew it.
Jim,
Your point is well taken. That is why we have to stop Saudi Arabia from spreading its filth. Go to the Center for Religious Freedom and check out their latest report on Saudi hate mongering in the United States. They are our enemy, not our ally.
H
I'm currently digging a tunnel to the Moon...
(Sahih Al-Bukhari Volume 4, Book 54, Number 516) Narrated Abu Huraira: The Prophet said, "If anyone of you rouses from sleep and performs the ablution, he should wash his nose by putting water in it and then blowing it out thrice, because Satan has stayed in the upper part of his nose all the night."
Suppose that there is no phase of the Armenian question which has aroused more interest than this: Had the Germans any part in it? To what extent was the Kaiser responsible for the wholesale slaughter of this nation? Did the Germans favour it, did they merely acquiesce, or did they oppose the persecutions? Germany, in the last four years, has become responsible for many of the blackest pages in history; is she responsible for this, unquestionably the blackest of all?
I presume most people will detect in the remarks of these Turkish chieftains certain resemblances to the German philosophy of war. Let me repeat particular phrases used by Enver and other Turks while discussing the Armenian massacres: "The Armenians have brought this fate upon themselves." "They had a fair warning of what would happen to them." "We were fighting for our national existence ... .. We were justified, in resorting to any means that would accomplish these ends." "We have no time to separate the innocent from the guilty." "The only thing we have on our mind is to win the war."
These phrases somehow have a familiar ring, do they not? Indeed, I might rewrite all these interviews with Enver, use the word Belgium in place of Armenia, put the words in a German general's mouth instead of Enver's, and we should have almost a complete exposition of the German attitude toward subject peoples. But the teachings of the Prussians go deeper than this. There was one feature about the Armenian proceedings that was new---that was not Turkish at all . For centuries the Turks have ill-treated their Armenians and all their other subject peoples with inconceivable barbarity. Yet their methods have always been crude, clumsy, and unscientific. They excelled in beating out an Armenian's brains with a club, and this unpleasant illustration is a perfect indication of the rough and primitive methods which they applied to the Armenian problem. They have understood the uses of murder, but not of murder as a fine art. But the Armenian proceedings of 1915 and 1916 evidenced an entirely new mentality. This new conception was that of deportation. The Turks, in five hundred years, had invented innumerable ways of physically torturing their Christian subjects, yet never before had it occurred to their minds to move them bodily from their homes, where they had lived for many thousands of years, and send them hundreds of miles away into the desert. Where did the Turks get this idea? I have already described how, in 1914, just before the European War, the Government moved not far from 100,000 Greeks from their age-long homes along the Asiatic littoral to certain islands in the Aegean. I have also said that Admiral Usedom, one of the big German naval experts in Turkey, told me that the Germans had suggested this deportation to the Turks. But the all-important point is that this idea of deporting peoples en masse is, in modern times, exclusively Germanic. Any one who reads the literature of Pan-Germany constantly meets it. These enthusiasts for a German world have deliberately planned, as part of their programme, the ousting of the French from certain parts of France, of Belgians from Belgium, of Poles from Poland, of Slavs from Russia, and other indigenous peoples from the territories which they have inhabited for thousands of years, and the establishment in the vacated lands of solid, honest Germans. But it is hardly necessary to show that the Germans have advocated this as a state policy; they have actually been doing it in the last four years. They have moved we do not know how many thousands of Belgians and French from their native land. Austria-Hungary has killed a large part of the Serbian population and moved thousands of Serbian children into her own territories intending to bring them up as loyal subjects of the empire. To what degree this movement of populations has taken place we shall not know until the end of the war, but it has certainly gone on extensively.
Certain German writers have even advocated the application of this policy to the Armenians. According to the Paris Temps, Paul Rohrbach "in a conference held at Berlin, some time ago, recommended that Armenia should be evacuated of the Armenians. They should be dispersed in the direction of Mesopotamia and their places should be taken by Turks, in such a fashion that Armenia should be freed of all Russian influence and that Mesopotamia might be provided with farmers which it now lacked." The purpose of all this was evident enough. Germany was building the Bagdad railroad across the Mesopotamian desert. This was an essential detail in the achievement of the great new German Empire, extending from Hamburg to the Persian Gulf. But this railroad could never succeed unless there should develop a thrifty and industrious population to feed it. The lazy Turk would never become such a colonist. But the Armenian was made of just the kind of stuff which this enterprise needed. It was entirely in accordance with the German conception of statesmanship to seize these people in the lands where they had lived for ages and transport them violently to this dreary, hot desert. The mere fact that they had always lived in a temperate climate would furnish no impediment in Pan-German eyes. I found that Germany had been sowing those ideas broadcast for several years; I even found that German savants had been lecturing on this subject in the East. "I remember attending a lecture by a well-known German professor," an Armenian tells me. "His main point was that throughout their history the Turks had made a great mistake in being too merciful toward the non-Turkish population. The only way to insure the prosperity of the empire, according to this speaker, was to act without any sentimentality toward all the subject nationalities and races in Turkey who did not fall in with the plans of the Turks."
The Pan-Germanists are on record in the matter of Armenia. I shall content myself with quoting the words of the author of "Mittel-Europa," Friedrich Naumann, perhaps the ablest propagator of Pan-German ideas. In his work on Asia, Naumann, who started life as a Christian clergyman, deals in considerable detail with the Armenian massacres of 1895-96. 1 need only quote a few passages to show the attitude of German state policy on such infamies: "If we should take into consideration merely the violent massacre of from 80,000 to 100,000 Armenians," writes Naumann, "we can come to but one opinion---we must absolutely condemn with all anger and vehemence both the assassins and their instigators. They have perpetrated the most abominable massacres upon masses of people, more numerous and worse than those inflicted by Charlemagne on the Saxons. The tortures which Lepsius has described surpass anything we have ever known. "What then prohibits us from falling upon the Turk and saying to him: 'Get thee gone, wretch!'? Only one thing prohibits us, for the Turk answers: 'I, too, I fight for my existence!'---and indeed, we believe him. We believe, despite the indignation which the bloody Mohammedan barbarism arouses in us, that the Turks are defending themselves legitimately, and before anything else we see in the Armenian question and Armenian massacres a matter of internal Turkish policy, merely an episode of the agony through which a great empire is passing, which does not propose to let itself die without making a last attempt to save itself by bloodshed. All the great powers, excepting Germany, have adopted a policy which aims to upset the actual state of affairs in Turkey. In accordance with this, they demand for the subject peoples of Turkey the rights of man, or of humanity, or of civilization, or of political liberty---in a word, something that will make them the equals of the Turks. But just as little as the ancient Roman despotic state could tolerate the Nazarene's religion, just as little can the Turkish Empire, which is really the political successor of the eastern Roman Empire, tolerate any representation of western free Christianity among its subjects. The danger for Turkey in the Armenian question is one of extinction. For this reason she resorts to an act of a barbarous Asiatic state; she has destroyed the Armenians to such an extent that they will not be able to manifest themselves as a political force for a considerable period. A horrible act, certainly, an act of political despair, shameful in its details, but still a piece of political history, in the Asiatic manner. . . . In spite of the displeasure which the German Christian feels at these accomplished facts, he has nothing to do except quietly to heal the wounds so far as he can, and then to let matters take their course. For a long time our policy in the Orient has been determined: we belong to the group that protects Turkey, that is the fact by which we must regulate our conduct. . . . We do not prohibit any zealous Christian from caring for the victims of these horrible crimes, from bringing up the children and nursing the adults. May God bless these good acts like all other acts of faith. Only we must take care that deeds of charity do not take the form of political acts which are likely to thwart our German policy. The internationalist, he who belongs to the English school of thought, may march with, the Armenians. The nationalist, he who does not intend to sacrifice the future of Germany to England, must, on questions of external policy, follow the path marked out by Bismarck, even if it is merciless in its sentiments. . . . National policy: that is the profound moral reason why we must, as statesmen, show ourselves indifferent to the sufferings of the Christian peoples of Turkey, however painful that may be to our human feelings. . . . That is our duty, which we must recognize and confess before God and before man. If for this reason we now maintain the existence of the Turkish state, we do it in our own self-interest, because what we have in mind is our great future. . . . On one side lie our duties as a nation, on the other our duties as men. There are times, when, in a conflict of duties, we can choose a middle ground. That is all right from a human standpoint, but rarely right in a moral sense. In this instance, as in all analogous situations, we must clearly know on which side lies the greatest and most important moral duty. Once we have made such a choice we must not hesitate. William II has chosen. He has become the friend of the Sultan, because he is thinking of a greater, independent Germany."
Let me think this through. The English cleared the Highlands of Scots without the help of the Germans.
The Americans cleared Arcadia of the French without the help of the Germans.
The Americans cleared many Indians from their ancestral territories to reservations without the help of the Germans.
The Babylonians cleared Israel of the Jews without the help of the Germans.
The Germans have done some really rotten things, But they are not alone.
None of your examples fit the description "modern times."
My point was that this was a German plan. It still holds -- the Germans tested the waters with the Armenian genocide.
It is interesting to remember the alliance between the German left and the Turkish Islamics. Has a familiar feel.
They were probably going to teach German, getting ready for the take over prior to the Nazi's losing the war.
We live in the North and, as you stated, most of the Saudi funded schools are in the South where the major Muslim population centers are. However, I have both read and been told that certain locations including Chiang Rai provence and Khon Kaen provence also have funded schools.
I lived there for a decade and I am not happy to see this. When I lived in the Inner Switzerland, not far from Luzern, I can tell you that Jews were, um, not thought of well, shall we say? There are no synagogues in the canton of Luzern. I wonder whether anti-Semitism will take ferocious hold in that area.
Sorry, I only replied to one question. As I understand from the newspapers, this has been happening since a row over a jewel theft and murder of Saudi nationals several years ago. The papers have talked about it since the search for Hambali -- about the last two years.
As with much of Europe, it probably already has.
I guess they kind of do need one; they have at least 3 lakes that border with other countries. I suppose it would be easy to have terrorists from France dropped off a boat by night in the Geneva area. Or from Italy into the Ticino region.
It is interesting to remember the alliance between the German left and the Turkish Islamics. Has a familiar feel.
The Turks practice mass killing for ages, but the Germans are behind the Armenian Genocide?
Following this logic, we must blame America for the slaughter of 200,000 to 300,000 East Timoreans by the Muslim Indonesians. After all Kissinger told Suharto that it was none of America's business that Indonesia wanted to claim East Timor after Portugal granted it independence. This he said in an airplane meeting on the runway during a visit.
And for that matter, we should blame America for Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. It was Ambassador April Glaspie who told Saddam America didn’t care to get involved with Iraq’s border disputes.
To me, this is a strange logic in which the initiator of violence is absolved of blame because someone who should know better didn’t mentor the villain. This is straight out of the Communist handbook of sophistry.
Why pick on the Germans? The Turks were a ruthless gang in their own right.
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