Kritik der Orientalismuskritik

By Michael Kreutz

In der “Welt” geht der Historiker Walter Laqueur dem Erfolgsgeheimnis von Edward Saids Orientalism nach, das jetzt in einer neuen Übersetzung auf Deutsch erscheint. Rätselhaft bleibt, wie Laqueur darauf kommt, dass Edward Saids Buch erst jetzt auf Deutsch erhältlich sei. Tatsächlich erschien die erste deutsche Übersetzung bereits 1981, zwei Jahre nach dem amerikanischen Original. Davon einmal abgesehen zeigt Laqueur zutreffend, warum es gerade die ideologische Ausrichtung von Saids Buch ist, die es so populär gemacht hat. Laqueur hat zweifelsohne recht, wenn er darauf hinweist, dass man mit der von Said angewandten Scherenschnitttechnik ebensogut eine Geschichte westlicher Islamophilie hätte schreiben können.

Saids Denken ist nicht nur von immenser Einseitigkeit, sondern weist eine Reihe innerer Widersprüche auf. Irfan Khawaja (2008) hat die gröbsten Verirrungen Saids beschrieben.[1] So kritisiert Said Generalisierungen über den Islam, schreckt selbst jedoch nicht vor generalisierenden Äusserungen über Christentum, Klassizismus, Europa, Imperialismus, Philologie, Romantik, Zionismus usw. zurück. Es gebe weder einen richtigen noch einen falschen Islam, erklärt Said, jedoch lobt er muslimische Intellektuelle wie Eqbal Ahmad oder Ali Shariati dafür, den Islam richtig verstanden zu haben. Die Protagonisten des Orientalismus dagegen sind unfähig, den Islam anders als falsch zu verstehen.

Zum Wesen des Orientalismus, so Said, gehöre auch, dass er den Islam zu abstrakt begreife, ihn damit enthistorisiere. Auf derselben Buchseite behauptet er jedoch, die falsche Wahrnehmung des Islam beruhe auf der empirizistischen Einstellung des Orientalismus, die Dinge also zu konkret zu betrachten. Der Blick von aussen auf den Islam ist also per se falsch, der Islam wird damit erst durch Said mystifiziert und einer rationalen Betrachtung entzogen.

Der Islam, belehrt Said seine Leser weiter, erkläre nichts, aber zugleich erklärt Said mit dem Utilitarismus den britischen Imperialismus in Indien, mit dem Zionismus das Massaker von Hebron 1994, mit der christlichen Orthodoxie des Johannes von Damaskus den libanesischen Bürgerkrieg der 1970er Jahre und mit dem mittelalterlichen Christentum den Orientalismus und mit diesem wiederum den modernen Imperialismus. Khawaja bringt es auf den Punkt: “To be consistently inconsistent about consistency is a feat in itself.”

Im Schatten von Orientalism steht Saids Spätwerk Culture and Imperialism, in dem er z.B. die Thesen von Martin Bernal (”Black Athena”) unhinterfragt für bare Münze nimmt: “… as Bernal has described it, a coherent classical philology developed during the nineteenth century that purged Attic Greece of its Semitic-African roots.”[2] Man muss dazu wissen, dass die Behauptungen Bernals, denen zufolge die Kultur Griechenlands einen ägyptischen Ursprung habe, seinerzeit von der Fachwelt einhellig zurückgewiesen wurden. Auch die sog. “Grosse Arabische Revolte”, eine vermeintliche populäre Widerstandsbewegung gegen die westliche Kolonialherrschaft, die George Antonius in seinem bekannten Werk über das “Arabische Erwachen” geschildert hat, passt Said nur zu gut ins eigene Konzept, als dass er sie kritisch zu erörtern bereit wäre. Tatsächlich ist ihre Existenz umstritten. Der Londoner Historiker Efraim Karsh hält sie gar lediglich für eine Erfindung Antonius’.[3] Differenzierungen gibt es bei Said eben kaum.

In Culture and Imperialism finden sich weitere Ungereimtheiten. Said hält den Nettoeffekt des Kulturaustausches zwischen zwei Partnern, die sich ihrer Ungleichheitheit bewusst sind, für grundsätzlich negativ: “In modern times (…) thinking about cultural exchange involves thinking about domination and forcible appropriation: someone loses, someone gains.”[4] Keine dreissig Seiten später jedoch behauptet Said[5]:

“A confused and limiting notion of priority allows that only the original proponents of an idea can understand and use it. But the history of all cultures is the history of cultural borrowings. Cultures are not impermeable; just as Western science borrowed from Arabs, they had borrowed from India and Greece. Culture is never just a matter of ownership, of borrowing and lending with absolute debtors and creditors, but rather of appropriations, common experiences, and interdependencies of all kinds of different cultures.”

Said äussert diese Ansicht im Rahmen einer Erörterung des Dritte-Welt-Nationalismus, wobei er dem britischen Historiker Elie Kedouri den Vorwurf macht, diesen für grundsätzlich verdammenswert zu halten. Said nämlich glaubt, dass westliche Wissenschaftler nationale Bewegungen im Rest der Welt für nicht authentisch genug halten, um sie akzeptieren zu können. Ebenso hält er es für einen gängigen Irrtum zu glauben, dass es allein westliche Ideen von Freiheit seien, die den Kampf gegen die Kolonialherrschaft motiviert haben und dabei übersehen werde, dass die Reserven in den einheimischen kolonisierten Kulturen immer dem Imperialismus Widerstand geleistet haben.[6]

Ich weiss nicht, wer diese These von der Ausschliesslichkeit westlicher Vorstellungen in diesem Zusammenhang vertreten soll, aber Said räumt selbst ein, dass emanzipatorische Ideen westlicher Herkunft durchaus eine Rolle für orientalische Intellektuelle spielten. Zwanzig Seiten später schreibt er nämlich, dass Raja Ramuhan Roy, “an early nineteenth-century nationalist influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft, mobilized the early campaign for Indian women’s rights, a common pattern in the colonized world, where the first intellectual stirrings against injustice included attention to the abused rights of all oppressed classes”.[7] Das widerspricht seiner These zwar nicht, macht sie aber auch nicht plausibler.

Andererseits scheint er zu glauben, dass ein Kulturaustausch von Europa in den Vorderen Orient für diesen nur Nachteile bringe, während in umgekehrter Richtung Europa von ihm profitieren könne. Said versteigt sich sogar zu der Forderung, eine neue literarische Beschreibung der einheimischen Kultur zu schaffen, “not pristine and pre-historical (…) but deriving from the deprivations of the present.”[8] Das wirft natürlich grundsätzliche Fragen auf, wie die, ob man auch die durch die arabisch-islamische Eroberung vermittelte Kultur aus der Geschichtsschreibung herausfiltern solle und überhaupt, wie weit man in der Geschichte zurückgehen muss, um auf unverfälschte, authentische Kultur zu stossen. Said beantwortet diese Fragen nicht.

In diesem Stil geht es weiter. Said übt zuerst eine Generalkritik an den Orientalisten – um dann später wieder einzuräumen: “This is not to denigrate the accomplishments of many Western scholars, historians, artists, philosophers, musicians, and missionaries, whose corporate and individual efforts in making known the world beyond Europe are a stunning achievement.”[9] Akademiker wie Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes u.a. kritisiert er nicht etwa dafür, dass ihre Thesen im Widerspruch zu den Fakten stünden, sondern dass sie eine Linie vertreten, die “opposed to native Arab or Islamic nationalism” sei und die fachliche und journalistische Diskussion beherrsche.[10] Said fordert implizit also nicht anderes als die Unterordnung wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisinteresses unter einen romantisierenden Nationalismus.

Treibende Kraft hinter dieser Ideologie ist auch hier wieder einmal der Antikapitalismus. Dieser, so glaubt Said, habe eine Landschaft geschaffen, die für das Kapitalinteresse profitabel sei und zugleich durch externe Herrschaft regierbar werde.[11]. Mit Partha Chatterjee, der behauptet, dass die postkolonialen Länder einem weltweiten Prozess unterworfen seien, der aus einem globalen Kapitalismus bestehe, “commanded at the top by the handful of leading industrial countries”[12], geht er offenbar konform. Saids Programm ist das der Entwissenschaftlichung einer ganzen akademischen Disziplin.

1. Khawaja, Irfan: Essentialism, Consistency and Islam: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, in: Philip Carl Salzman and Donna Robinson Divine (eds.): Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israel Conflict. London and New York: Routledge, 2008, S. 12-36. ⇧
2. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage 1994, 132. ⇧
3. Vgl Efraim Karsh/ Inari Karsh, Empires of the Sand. The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923, Cam., Mass./ London: Harvard University Press, 2001, 185 ff. ⇧
4. Ebd., 235. ⇧
5. Ebd. 261. ⇧
6. Ebd. 241-2. ⇧
7. Ebd. 263-4. ⇧
8. Ebd. 272. ⇧
9. Ebd. 235. ⇧
10. Ebd. 315. ⇧
11. Ebd. 272 ⇧
12. Ebd. 320. ⇧

Saturday, November 21, 2009

The Counterjihad: Resisting Islamization and Reviving the West

Islam has been at war with the Western world for fourteen centuries — since its inception. Muslims all over the world still consider themselves to be at war with non-Muslims; this is why Islam refers to us as Dar al-Harb, the “House of War”.

The West, however, has forgotten that this war exists. We continue to labor under the illusion that Islam is an ordinary religion, like Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism.

Unfortunately, Islam is above all a totalitarian political ideology, sugar-coated with the trappings of a primitive desert religion to help veil its true nature. The publicly stated goal of Islamic theology and political ideology is to impose the rule of Islam over the entire world, and make it part of Dar al-Islam, the “House of Submission”.

Widely accepted Islamic theology based in Koranic doctrine explicitly requires that Islam be spread by any and all means necessary, including by violence and mass slaughter, in a process known as jihad, or holy war.

The fact that many Muslims do not support or engage in violent jihad is not germane. If only one percent of Muslim believers take the Islamic mandate of jihad seriously, it means there are over fifteen million people scattered among the world’s Muslims who want to destroy us, and we have no means of determining in advance which ones they are.

Therefore, those who oppose Islamic totalitarian ideology and the expansion of Islam into the West have formed themselves into a coalition known as the Counterjihad.

The goals of the Counterjihad are:
- - - - - - - - -

1.		To resist further Islamization of Western countries by eliminating Muslim immigration, refusing any special accommodations for Islam in our public spaces and institutions, and forbidding intrusive public displays of Islamic practices.
2.		To contain Islam within the borders of existing Muslim-majority nations, deporting all Muslim criminals and those who are unable or unwilling to assimilate completely into the cultures of their adopted countries.
3.		To end all foreign aid and other forms of subsidy to the economies of Muslim nations.
4.		To develop a grassroots network that will replace the existing political class in our countries and eliminate the reigning multicultural ideology, which enables Islamization and will cause the destruction of Western Civilization if left in place.

We are a loose international association of like-minded individuals and private organizations. We all share the overriding goals described above. We are non-partisan, and welcome members from any political parties who share those same goals, and who also demonstrate a strong commitment to the humane democratic values of the West.

We are Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Baha’is, agnostics, and atheists.

We live in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA.

We are the Counterjihad.

Left and Right: Backing the Intifada

From the desk of A. Millar on Tue, 2009-11-10 14:20

It’s been nearly two decades since the United Nations repealed the General Assembly Resolution that equated Zionism with racism. Yet “Zionism equals racism” became the mantra of the radical Left and their Islamofascist allies, and, it seems, some are trying to twist the logic still further: If Zionism equals racism, then “Zionists” (and let’s not forget their neocon allies) must be connected to neo-fascist parties and organizations – the Left’s traditional enemy.

Neocon Europe, for example, asserts a connection between US neoconservatives and the European far-Right, right on its home page (neoconeurope.eu). Modeled after Wikipedia (although with no access to edit entries), at first glance the website looks legitimate, even if most entries consist of only a sentence or two. There is a lengthy entry on Douglas Murray, but his highly praised book Neoconservatism: Why We Need It is not in the recommended reading list of books on the links page. Instead, those hostile to neoconservatism are.

That would be one thing, but a list of articles supposedly written “by neocons” includes “Understanding Jewish Influence III: Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement” by one Kevin MacDonald. MacDonald is not a neocon, it turns out. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center he is a “true anti-Semite and white supremacist,” whose books are sold by neo-Nazi groups, such as National Vanguard, and an inspiration to such figures as David Duke. The Anti-Defamation league likewise states that MacDonald espouses White supremacist views based on social Darwinism.

In the article in question MacDonald gives a new spin to old prejudices – the Jews control the media, the Jews/neocons control the Whitehouse, the neocons dragged the US into war, and so on, and so on. There are profiles of “neocons” ranging from Donald Rumsfeld to Daniel Pipes. And MacDonald also claims that, “[i]n alliance with virtually the entire organized American Jewish community, neoconservatism is a vanguard Jewish movement with close ties to the most extreme nationalistic, aggressive, racialist and religiously fanatic elements within Israel.”

It is deeply deceitful, and indeed perverse, to recommend an article on the “Jewish influence” by a White supremacist, while claiming that the author is a “neocon” (read “Jew”). But then Neocon Europe isn’t run by neocons either. It’s actually run by Muhammed Idrees Ahmad, a PHD student and admirer of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Gilad Atzmon, and David Miller, a far-Left professor at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland. (Harry’s Place blog has an article on Ahmad here.)

A few days ago I came across another article of interest: “Israel's anti-Semitic friends.” It was authored by Tony Greenstein, a trade unionist, socialist, and self-described “anti-Zionist, anti-racist,” and published by a webzine called, believe it or not, The Electronic Intifada.

While I strongly disagree with Greenstein, it should be noted that, unlike many on the far-Left, he has rightly attacked Atzmon for his conspiratorial anti-Semitism, and has himself been attacked for taking this stand. Nevertheless, the proposed alliance of anti-Semites and Israel is more than faintly reminiscent of the absurd and repulsive conspiracy theory that Jews financed Hitler in order to establish Israel – a theory that has been promoted by British-based Ahmad Thompson among many others on the Islamist extreme Right.

Greenstein asserts in his article that Israel and anti-Semites/neo-fascists are now falling into a kind of alliance, and gives several examples to illustrate his point. I disagree with his assessment, not least of all because those referenced include the Conservative Friends of Israel and libertarian-with-a-cause Geert Wilders. However, it will be worth citing Greenstein’s mention of the British National Party and Jobbik: “[T]he only far-right party that I could find whose anti-Semitism is disguised as anti-Zionism,” he says, “is Jobbik,” and “This is the party that the BNP, which ‘opposes anti-Semitism,’ is joined with in the European Parliament.”

He is right about the alliance of these two parties, at least. About a week ago the BNP announced that it had formed an EU bloc with several far-Right parties, including Jobbik, which, with nearly 15 percent of the vote in Hungary, is the largest in the group.

The BNP is an avowed “anti-Islamification” party. Contrary to what Greenstein believes, Jobbik is openly anti-Semitic, and its leader Krisztina Morvai, at least, is pro-Palestinian, and, it would seem, pro-Islamist. Morvai accuses Israeli leaders of war crimes, and is pictured wearing the keffiyeh (an emblem of Palestinian militancy favored by Islamists and the far-Left), on Jobbik’s official website.

Moreover, as the formation of the BNP-Jobbik bloc was being negotiated, the Palestinian Telegraph and Islam Times announced a “pro-Palestinian” rally to be held in the UK, with Morvai among the names of scheduled speakers. The event is being organized by the Palestinian Return Centre, a Hamas front group.

Jobbik is obviously not a friend of Israel. Griffin, though – as Greenstein points out – recently asserted that he had “[…] brought the BNP from being frankly an anti-Semitic and racist organization into being the only political party which in the clashes between Israel and Gaza stood full-square behind Israel's right to deal with Hamas terrorists.” And now, of course, the “anti-Islamification” BNP is allied to a party, whose leader is advancing Hamas’ agenda in Britain. Make sense?

As if it needed to be spelled out, here is the central problem with the thesis of neo-fascist parties allying with Israel: neo-fascists have long allied – and still align themselves – with Palestinian and Islamist groups, to oppose Israel and Jews.

In other words, neo-fascism is almost indistinguishable from the “anti-Zionist,” anti-Israel, pro-Hamas, pro-Islamist far-Left. No doubt this explains why some are turning to White supremacists for information on Jews and neocons, and why others want to distinguish themselves from Jobiik and co., even as they cozy up to Islamofsascists – even if it means concocting an alliance of Israel and anti-Semites.

Bürger Moslem

Von Frank A. Meyer

Sind die Muslime in Europa heute, was die Juden gestern waren? Eine verfolgte und gefährdete Minderheit? Sind Islamfeindlichkeit und Judenfeindlichkeit also letztlich dasselbe? Handelt, wer den Islam bekämpft, wie ein Antisemit?

In der Debatte um ein Minarettverbot fallen Sätze wie der von Hisham Maizar, Präsident der Föderation islamischer Dachorganisationen Schweiz: «Es gibt eindeutige Parallelen zwischen Antisemitismus und Islamfeindlichkeit. Etwa die Sündenbockmentalität: Wenn in Afghanistan jemand hustet, dann ist der Schweizer Muslim dafür verantwortlich.»

In Afghanistan wird nicht gehustet. In Afghanistan wird gemordet: durch schwer bewaffnete Stammeskrieger, durch Selbstmordattentäter, durch die Taliban, durch grausamste Fundamentalisten. Dagegen wird vom Westen Krieg geführt. Es ist ein Krieg für ein bisschen Freiheit und ein bisschen Gleichheit: für ein menschenwürdiges Dasein der Frauen, für Schulen, die auch Mädchen offenstehen.

Niemand macht Schweizer Muslime für den Terror in Afghanistan - für das «Husten» der Taliban - verantwortlich. Auch nicht für andere Untaten, die im Namen Allahs begangen werden.

Zwischen Islamgegnerschaft und Antisemitismus herrscht ein sehr wichtiger Unterschied:
Ziel des Antisemitismus war stets die Verweigerung von gleichen Rechten. Juden wurden gesellschaftlich geächtet, indem man sie stigmatisierte, ihnen Kleidung aufzwang, die sie auf den ersten Blick als Juden erkennbar machte; indem man den Kontakt mit ihnen mied, christliche Kinder nicht mit jüdischen Kindern spielen liess; indem man Juden in Ghettos ausgrenzte; indem man sie verfolgte durch die Inszenierung von blutigen Pogromen.

Die Geschichte des Antisemitismus ist eine Geschichte der Verweigerung von Freiheit und Gleichheit, von Teilhabe und Mitbestimmung: Juden sollten nicht Bürger unter Bürgern sein - für die Nazis nicht einmal Menschen unter Menschen. Sie sollten vom Erdboden verschwinden, ausgerottet werden wie Ungeziefer. Antisemiten in ganz Europa waren die willigen Helfer von Hitlers Holocaust.

Was hat die Kritik an der mächtigen Weltreligion Islam mit der jahrhundertelangen Verfolgung ohnmächtiger jüdischer Minderheiten zu tun?

Geht es den Islamgegnern um die Ausgrenzung der Muslime? Geht es um die Verweigerung von Freiheit und Gleichheit für Menschen, die sich gen Mekka verneigen? Will man ihnen das Recht vorenthalten, Bürger unter Bürgern zu sein?

Nein. Um das Gegenteil geht es.

Die Muslime sollen sich in unsere Gesellschaft integrieren. Sie sollen Freiheit und Gleichheit unserer rechtsstaatlichen Demokratie akzeptieren, indem sie sich lösen aus der religiösen Unterdrückung, die Koran und Scharia bedeuten. Sie sollen die Gleichberechtigung ihrer Töchter und Frauen akzeptieren, wie sie unsere Rechtsordnung gebietet. Sie sollen ihre Kinder ermutigen, sich zu modernen jungen Bürgern zu entwickeln, verantwortungsbewusst, leistungsbereit, ehrgeizig, auf ihr berufliches Fortkommen bedacht.

Die Muslime sollen Bürgerinnen und Bürger werden wie die Bürgerinnen und Bürger ihres Gastlandes, mitgestaltende Menschen einer säkularen, einer offenen Gesellschaft.

Islamkritiker im Geiste von Freiheit und Gleichheit ringen darum, dass die Muslime die Freiheit unserer Kultur akzeptieren, sie ringen darum, dass die Muslime diese Freiheit in ihrem täglichen Leben praktizieren.

Islamkritik ist Kämpfen für Integration - der Muslime; Antisemitismus ist Kämpfen gegen die Integration - der Juden. Islamgegnerschaft ist deshalb das präzise Gegenteil von Antisemitismus.

Doch die paradoxe Gleichsetzung von Islamgegnerschaft und Judenfeindschaft entfaltet Wirkung, denn sie berührt das schlechte Gewissen der westlichen Gesellschaft. Islamische Organisationen haben sich zusammengefunden in einem «Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland» - eine bewusste Gleichsetzung mit dem «Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland».

Die Verniedlichung der islamischen Weltmacht zu einer verfolgten Religion, die Stilisierung der Muslime in Europa zu verfolgten und gefährdeten «Juden» des 21. Jahrhunderts ist absurd - und ein schamloser Missbrauch des schrecklichen Schicksals der Juden für politische Propaganda.

© SonntagsBlick, Zürich

BASIC SYSTEMS DISRUPTION

Here's a simple overview of what is increasingly becoming the dominant method of offensive warfare in the 21st Century.  Early applications of this methodology to modern conflict have been very successful.  In short, it's better to understand its dynamics than to assume it doesn't exist.

There are two basic types of systems disruption:

• Social.  Disruption of social networks.   Division of the network into non-cooperative or openly antagonistic centers of gravity. 
• Physical.  The disruption of physical networks, particularly infrastructure.

System disruption leverages network structure and dynamics to turn small attacks into large events.  Selection of the best point to attack is based on an analysis of the network's design and flows.  The term to describe this point is: the systempunkt.  Essentially, the systempunkt is the point in the network, that if attacked, will yield the maximal possible impact.  

Systems disrupters typically prioritize attacks based on the potential of the following:

• Cascades of failure.  
• Cross network/system cascades.
• Self-reinforcing failures.  Those failures that generate feedback loops that keep the system from returning to the status quo ante (the former equilibrium point).

Systempunkts typically fall into the following categories:

• Highly connected nodes (particularly useful in scale free network designs).
• Sources of systemic flow.
• Cross sub-network or cluster connections.

Repetitive systems disruption yields better results than singular large events since it impacts decision making processes of those impacted (disruption tax).

Systems disruption is superior to traditional methods of attack due to the following:

• It is effective at delegitimizing governments.  Service availability is a key political good.  
• It produces minimal public backlash and is likely to generate co-operative entities.
• It is easy to recruit for (few skills and very little, if any combat required), usually results in low casualties and few arrests, and requires nearly zero (financing, equipment, and personnel) to accomplish.

Open source warfare, a set of autonomous groups engaged in coopetition to achieve an amorphous promise/goal, works extremely well with systems disruption due to the following:

• Rapid discovery of systempunkts across a variety of target systems/networks via tinkering networks and stigmergic processes of cross network communication.
• Increased chance of repetitive attacks due to a multiplicity of groups.
• Self-reinforcing dynamics.  Systems disruption gives rise to groups that can profit or exploit the dynamic.  These groups in turn disrupt systems to perpetuate their survival and thereby give rise to yet more groups.

Market dynamics and systems disruption can become mutually reinforcing processes.  The precise dynamics of this connection are still amorphous and ill defined.  However, practice shows that this cross connection can be leveraged to achieve coercive results.

Most target networks are designed to maximize efficiency.  This design constraint yields configurations that are particularly vulnerable to systemic disruption.  Further, globalization (due to network integration, tight coupling, and network complexity) have made systems disruption applicable to nearly every corner of the globe.

Urban environments are particularly vulnerable to systems disruption due to the extreme concentration and cross connections of the networks required to sustain high population densities.  As a result, urban takedowns are possible if not probable.

The high levels of amplification and potential reach of system disruption allows participants in a local conflict to attack regional and global foes with minimal effort.

Systems disruption can generate results (damage) that if measured in a return on investment (the damage caused divided by the cost of the attack) that exceed one million percent.

The long term trend toward individual superempowerment -- the leverage gained by individuals due to network access and new tools -- is made dangerous due to an ability to accomplish systems disruption.

Posted by John Robb on Tuesday, 03 November 2009 at 10:52 AM

On the Failure of Law Enforcement
by El Inglés

Introduction

I will argue in this essay that there are a number of mechanisms and tendencies in place in European countries that make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to control or restrain the burgeoning criminality of their Muslim populations under extant political paradigms. Readers of certain of my other essays will be familiar with the type of argument I advance here, though I apply it in this essay to new subject matter.

It should be understood that this text is essentially a piece of analysis, an attempt to rigorously frame and discuss one large and important piece of the problem we face thanks to Islam. Though it does not attempt to formulate a response, it is written in the hope that those keen to defend their countries and peoples from the depredations of Muslim colonization will find it useful in clarifying their own thinking.

The Human Substrate Problem

First, it is necessary to discuss what I have chosen to call the Human Substrate Problem. Though this part of the analysis may seem slightly esoteric, I ask that readers bear with it, as its relevance will become clearer later on.

The Human Substrate Problem derives from the historically irrefutable observation that racially and/or culturally different groups in a given society tend to have very different statistical properties with respect to crime and other forms of deviance. Note that the causes of these differences are not of any particular importance here. I myself believe that both racial and cultural factors play important roles in creating these disparities, but for the purposes of this essay, it suffices to ignore the question of causality and focus on the mere existence of the differences and their persistence with respect to time.

Here, we will create a conceptual model simple enough to be easily grasped, but complex enough to capture some of the intricacies and seeming paradoxes of crime and criminality in our societies.

Imagine a society in which only two racially and culturally distinct groups exist: the Blues and the Greens, who exist in equal numbers. The Blues are relatively law-abiding and the Greens relatively criminal, a state of affairs that we describe by creating a composite index of criminality, C, for all individuals in our societies. This is plotted on the x-axis of a graph that has number of individuals, N, plotted on the y-axis, with the stipulation that C is normally distributed for both Blues and Greens, with the same standard deviation but with the Green mean being higher than the Blue mean. Individuals are not necessarily fixed in place within these distributions. Law-abiding folk can drift toward crime, and those with criminal backgrounds can, in principle, go straight. However, this Brownian motion of individuals around the distribution does not alter its statistical properties; it is merely a reshuffling of components within a persisting whole. This state of affairs is represented in Figure 1.

Now we must imagine an addition being made to our graph: an incarceration point. The incarceration point, as its name suggests, marks that degree of criminality which will result in the incarceration of the criminal in question, which is to say that everyone to the right of the line is incarcerated. This oversimplification (some criminals will escape detection, and criminals newly released from prison will be at large even if they are, strictly speaking, to the right of the incarceration point) could be overcome by refining the model further, but we need not concern ourselves with that at the moment. Figure 2 shows the Blues and the Greens as they appear on the graph, the incarceration point, and the incarcerated and non-incarcerated fractions of the Blue and Green populations. It is clear that a greater fraction of the Greens than of the Blues is incarcerated at any given point in time; this is precisely what we would expect on the basis of their higher criminality. But this simple model implies certain other things too.

Focus for a moment on those fractions of the Blue and Green populations not in prison, i.e. those to the left of the line. We can see that the non-incarcerated fraction of the Greens is relatively close to the incarceration line, which means that the mean C-value of the non-incarcerated Greens is higher than that of their Blue equivalents. Given that crime is committed by the non-incarcerated, we must expect the crime rates of the Greens, therefore, to be higher than those of the Blues. This is an important point: even if the law is applied to both the Blues and the Greens in a completely evenhanded manner (represented by their incarceration points being in the same place), the Greens will be both disproportionality incarcerated and disproportionality criminal. In other words, under the same legal system, there is no way to equalize their crime rates.

Our model captures and explains one of the puzzling phenomena that confront those who think about crime: that disproportionally incarcerated groups are, without major exception as far as I am aware, also still disproportionately criminal despite the larger fraction of their most criminal members already locked away. However, there is something else that it sheds light on as well. Let us imagine that, for whatever reason or reasons, the government of our hypothetical country chooses to apply the law somewhat less assiduously to the Greens. We represent this in our model by making a distinction between Blue and Green incarceration points, with the Green incarceration point being to the right of the Blue incarceration point. For the time being, we will ignore the obvious objection that shifting the incarceration point for the Greens alters their behavioural profiles and increases their criminality, C, (which it surely would) and stipulate that their C curve stays the same, as shown in Figure 3 below. What happens now?

The fraction of the Greens incarcerated is still larger than the fraction of the Blues incarcerated, and the Green crime rates will now be higher than that of the Blues by an even greater margin. Bearing in mind that we have, in a manner of speaking, simply let some number of otherwise criminal Greens out of prison and back onto the streets, this rise in Green crime rates as a whole is hardly surprising. However, the significance of this lies in the fact that we now have a way of explaining how the Greens can possess the following, seemingly contradictory characteristics: a) being more criminal than other groups in a society (as measured by the mean C-value of the non-incarcerated), b) being incarcerated in greater numbers than others in a society (as indicated by the fraction of them to the right of their incarceration point), and c) being treated more leniently by the long arm of the law (as made clear by their higher incarceration point).

Treated with kid gloves, filling up the prisons, and causing chaos on the streets; such are the characteristics of our as yet entirely hypothetical population of Greens. If the law is applied to them without fear or favour, they impose a disproportionate burden on the law enforcement apparatus and criminal justice system whilst also inflicting disproportionate damage directly through their criminal behaviour. If the law loosens its grip upon them, the burden on the prisons is eased, but the burden placed on the common man through their disregard for law and order soars. Such is the nature of the problem, which is why I call it the Human Substrate problem; it is the underlying behavioural and attitudinal characteristics of the population that cause difficulties. In response, the state seems to have little option but to trade the two evils of greater incarceration and greater crime off against each other by shifting the incarceration point up and down.

Our Predicament and its ‘Solution’
- - - - - - - - -
It will hopefully not be lost on readers that the rudimentary model of crime and criminality developed above on the basis of the Human Substrate Problem model is not so unrelated to reality as it may have seemed at the outset. Indeed, it is the reality of crime in heterogeneous societies. In this essay, I propose to apply it to an analysis of Muslims and natives in European countries, and the gist of the analysis that is to follow can probably already be guessed at. To be completely explicit, it is that the Muslim populations of European countries are akin to the Greens in the model outlined above, and that the native populations are akin to the Blues, with the single caveat that the sizes of these two populations are not in fact equal, a stipulation made earlier to avoid unnecessary complications in presenting the model.

Our problem then, consists of large Muslim populations of whom the following can be said: a) their criminality profiles lie so far to the right of those of their host societies that they must be some combination of substantially over-incarcerated and substantially over-criminal, irrespective of where their incarceration point lies, and b) it so happens that weak and confused governments have allowed the Muslim incarceration points to edge up, sometimes significantly, in relation to the baseline incarceration points, which is to say that they have chosen greater Muslim crime and less Muslim incarceration than would otherwise be the case. We now have a fairly rigorous statement of the problem. How do we solve it?

The most obvious candidate for a solution to the problem would be the forcing of the Muslim incarceration point back down until it rejoins the baseline incarceration point. How could this be accomplished? To a greater or lesser extent, the police, court system and prison system would have to be expanded, with the ultimate target of all this expansion (i.e. the Muslim population) being obvious to all and sundry. Considerable financial and other costs would have to be incurred, and the state and society as a whole would have to implicitly revise their relationship with the Muslim population.

If the UK — to pick a country — were to take on this challenge and ensure that the Muslim incarceration point were identical to the baseline incarceration point (and this would be relatively feasible in the UK, whose Muslim population is not so chronically criminal as that of, say, France), we would have a situation in which the British people (i.e. the actual, historic, white British people) would have to bear two burdens: the excess crime committed by their Muslim populations, and the excess financial and organizational costs incurred through bringing to justice and incarcerating a disproportionate fraction of the Muslim population. Might this be an acceptable solution to a difficult situation? It would surely be at least as effective a response as those implemented by many other countries with troublesome and unruly minorities. It is, after all, how America has solved the disproportionate criminality of its black population.

But what sort of solution has that turned out to be? Once-great cities, from Detroit and St. Louis to Baltimore and Philadelphia, hollowed out, with crumbling inner cities populated by a degenerate, desperate black underclass, and surrounded by the suburbs into which whites and the black middle class have long since fled. Massive population decline in these same cities, with St. Louis losing over 50% of its population from its peak of several decades ago. Murder rates and robbery rates in the black population seven and eight times higher, respectively, than for whites. Blacks seven times more likely to be in prison than whites. If this is success, what would failure look like?

This essay is not about race. Nor is it about America. I am simply attempting here to convey the reality of a specific instance of the Human Substrate Problem. And the difficulties that America faces with its black population, are, arguably, dwarfed by the problems that certain European countries now face or soon could with regards to their Muslim populations. For we have no guarantee that our societies consist of only Blues and Greens. Perhaps they contain another group, the Oranges. What if the Oranges are to the Greens as the Greens are to the Blues? What if their criminality profile is as far to the right of the Greens as that of the Greens is to the right of the Blues, as shown in Figure 4? What then?

We have already noted that Greens are significantly overincarcerated and overcriminal relative to the Blues. Let us now assume that the Blue-Green disparities are bearable for the Blue-Green society as a whole, whatever exactly one understands by this term. The same cannot be true for the Oranges, whose incarceration and crime rates (as indicated, again by the mean C-value of the non-incarcerated) are so much higher than those of the Blues as to create a huge qualitative gap between the two, and a large gap between them and the Greens. The Oranges impose massive costs on the society as a whole, via both the huge financial costs required to restrain their criminality, and the massive costs, financial and human, of the crime they commit. In other words, even ensuring that the Orange incarceration point remains the baseline incarceration point cannot create a situation in which we could feel that we have solved the problem of Orange criminality. On the contrary, their criminality will plague our model society and its people, be they Blue or Green, (or, for that matter, Orange) and criminal justice will come to resemble a mechanism created solely for the purpose of keeping their savagery at bay.

What happens if the Orange incarceration point now starts to slide to the right as the state, for whatever reason, takes a step back from applying the law fully to the Oranges, as shown in Figure 5? As in the Blue-Green comparison, their incarceration rate will fall and their crime rate rise, yielding a situation in which they are still hugely overincarcerated but in which their crime rates soar to a point at which they represent a threat to the very nature and cohesion of the society they inhabit. Again, this is the stark reality of the Human Substrate Problem: a problematic human substrate presents no good options for dealing with it, only a trade-off between bad and worse.

As was suggested earlier, keeping Orange and Blue incarceration points the same would result in incarceration rates and crime rates being so much higher for Oranges that there would effectively be two societies in one country, with a single law enforcement apparatus struggling to deal with the very different problems they create. Bad though this would be, allowing the Muslim incarceration point to slide is a recipe for total collapse, and will result in an inexorable breakdown of law and order. Combined with growth in the Orange population as a fraction of the whole, it must and will destroy the society in question.

We need look no further than France to see this process in action. Insofar as I understand the situation there at all, it seems to me that this is an accurate description of the current situation, which is to say that the Blue French have a very large Orange Muslim population. Furthermore, Belgium, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands also seem to have rapidly growing Orange Muslim populations as well, though these populations are not yet so large as to create a situation as dire as that which obtains in France. For reasons that are not easy to understand, the UK seems to have a Green Muslim population rather than an Orange one, though I suspect, for reasons that I will not go into here, that it will become Orange over time.

The Likelihood of the Problem Being ‘Solved’

Having stated some fairly strong reservations as to whether the problem posed by Muslim criminality in Europe is soluble in any useful sense of the term, I would now like to make a key claim, to wit, that it is highly improbable that even the stop-gap solution, i.e. the reapplication of the baseline incarceration point to Muslims, will be implemented by mainstream politicians. I consider this to be true irrespective of whether the Muslim population of a given country is closer to Green than Orange or closer to Orange than Green, though the probability of such action is even less for the latter type of Muslim population.

There are many reasons why Muslim incarceration points will have an inexorable tendency to creep up and be extraordinarily resistant to being pushed down again. Discussing them all here would be excessive, so I will simply present a handful of the most important.

1) Prevalence of Narrative of Oppression

First and foremost, there still exist large constituencies in our political and media establishments who are deranged enough to believe that the criminality of Muslims derives from the racist oppression visited upon them by the white man. In the absence of such hideous white supremacism, the Arab population of Sweden would be no more criminal than the Swedes, the Turkish population of Germany would be no more criminal than the Germans, and the Somali population of the UK would be no more criminal than the British.

This bizarre delusion evokes a significant degree of sympathy for these downtrodden Third-World masses as they merrily inflict robbery, riots, rapes, assaults, and murder both on the people of their adopted countries and each other. Every day, fewer people believe that this behaviour derives from our actions, and more wake up to the obvious truth that it derives from who and what these people are. Nonetheless, substantial and influential constituencies in all European countries are still committed to the notion that freeing these people from the terrible oppression they face at our hands will be far more effective in reducing their sky-high crime rates than applying the law to them. As long as this remains the case, generating the political will required to reunite the Muslim and baseline incarceration points will be extremely difficult.

2) Dynamic of Escalation and Effects on Cost-Benefit Analysis of Police Action

This is emerging as a key factor in interactions between Muslims and the state in several countries, and warrants extended discussion. In fact, it warrants a degree of discussion so great that I have decided to postpone in-depth analysis for a future essay. Here, I will have to be brief, and explain the problem through reference to recent events in Brussels.

In preparation for Ramadan this year, that holy time when the behaviour of the believers best exemplifies the values of their psychotic creed, the police in Brussels were issued with instructions to avoid all unnecessary ‘provocations’ of Muslims in the Belgian capital. As far as the layman could discern, these provocations consisted of virtually all normal police work conducted in the presence of Muslims, and normal human activities such as eating and drinking. However, even these sterling efforts on the part of the ‘law enforcement’ apparatus of this disintegrating city proved insufficient. One particular Muslim youth, having got away with taunting and challenging the police for days, was finally arrested at his home one evening. A crowd of some twenty agitated believers gathered outside the entrance of said domicile as the arrest was taking place to explain to the police the error of their ways and prevent the great injustice inherent in the application of Belgian law to Muslims. Eventually, the police were forced to pepper spray their way through the slaves of Allah to take the youth to the local police station.

The believers not being the type to take such unconscionable police brutality lying down, a crowd of several dozen of them soon gathered outside the police station in question to contest the issue further, by hurling rocks and abuse at the unfortunate edifice and those within. The situation escalated to the point where the riot police were called in to quell the situation, which obliged them to engage in running battles with an estimated two hundred Muslim youth.

Now, I confess that I have no background in criminology, law enforcement, or anything else of even oblique relevance to these matters. But it is surely not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Brussels police, come Ramadan next year, might decide to further reduce the ‘provocations’ that they visit upon hapless Muslims even further. Is it really worth having a riot, their leaders will ask themselves, simply to apprehend one youth who will probably be out of prison the next day at the latest? In a nutshell, brute, tribal responses to law enforcement rewrite the cost-benefit analyses of law enforcement processes so completely that they can no longer be expected to function properly.

And indeed, they do not.

3) Magnitude of Extra Financial Commitments Required

The law enforcement apparatus of a developed country is an exceptionally large, complex and expensive entity. In the UK, the size of the prison population and the costs of maintaining that population are a perennial topic of discussion and debate, and sometimes a cause of agonized disagreement. Incarceration is a fantastically expensive way of keeping criminals out of commission, costing tens of thousands of pounds per prisoner per year in the UK. It is very hard to imagine any European government embarking on a plan to expand the criminal justice system and law enforcement apparatus at a time of such financial difficulties as we endure at present, when prison chiefs are actually being ordered to slash their budgets.

4) Electoral Disadvantage

Muslims now exist in sufficiently large numbers in European countries to exert significant influence over election results, particularly at the local and municipal levels. The scale of the problem and its consequences are well-attested to by the fact that Rotterdam now has a Muslim mayor who is also a Moroccan citizen. The socialist politicians who decided to re-engineer the demographics of their countries for political objectives I will not pretend to understand are unlikely to lose favour with their imported savages any more than they have to. Given that one of the reasons for their initial importation was to shift the electoral balance to favour the left, the probability of such action appears all the more remote.

5) Demographic Issues

Lurking behind this entire discussion is the demographic bogeyman, with, for example the growth rate of the Muslim population of the UK being ten times higher than that of the country as a whole. I hope I have managed to convince readers that forcing the Muslim incarceration point back down to the baseline incarceration point would already constitute a staggering challenge in many European countries. Now how much harder does it become as a given European Muslim population creeps up from 5% to 6% and from there to 7%? Every day that passes, the problem becomes more difficult to even start to grapple with, as the demographic problem compounds every other aspect of the problem.

Conclusion

Let us review our progress so far. The apparatus of state in all European countries afflicted with large Muslim populations is being confronted with a Human Substrate Problem already severe and growing worse by the day. The best that said apparatus can do, at least in the absence of a two-tier legal system, and short of reducing the number of Muslims in the country through deportation, is to ensure that the Muslim incarceration point remains the baseline incarceration point for the whole society. However, even this optimal response will inflict significant costs of various sorts on the native populations, costs which will tend towards the unsupportable as the Muslim population of any given country a) grows in size and b) tends from Green to Orange. Furthermore, this response is, politically speaking, exceptionally difficult to implement, a fact testified to by the sheer feebleness of the response to Muslim criminality throughout Europe (a phenomenon represented by the sliding Muslim incarceration point in our model). As such, it will not be implemented until we hit a discontinuity of the type I have written about in the past, and the cancer of Muslim crime will spill out over an ever-greater swathe of our urban areas for some time.

The beauty of making bold, concrete predictions is that their falsifiability provides feedback as to the strengths and weaknesses of the analytical model that they stem from. Though the task of determining how much crime actually takes place in a given society is plagued by any number of methodological difficulties, trends in crime rates (as opposed to absolute rates at any given time) are relatively easy to get a grip on. Incarceration rates, by their nature, can be known with great accuracy. Expenditures on the various parts of the law enforcement apparatus and criminal justice system can also be known. These sorts of information, taken together, will provide a relatively straightforward way of determining how accurate my analysis is. Those who consider it to be flawed should, over time, be able to demonstrate just how flawed it is.

Assuming that my rudimentary model is as sound as it needs to be to allow a reasonably rigorous discussion of the problem, what are the implications for those opposing the Islamization of their countries? Readers of my past articles, most obviously SGW and related tracts, will not be looking to me for much optimism, and I have do not have much to offer. Eventually a discontinuity of the type I have predicted in the past will completely change the prevailing political paradigms and allow European societies to take the gloves off with respect to Islam.

That said, I am not advocating apathy. This essay is not a message of despair; consider it, if you will, a call to arms instead. The nature and severity of the problems we face are now sufficiently clear for European patriots to start asking themselves what actions they and others like them will eventually be called upon to take when the failure of the state reaches a critical point, and what sort of battlefield they will be arrayed upon at that moment.

Hopefully these people will find that their preparations are at least somewhat aided by the analysis herein, which I hope to continue and expand upon in future essays.

Previous posts by El Inglés:

2007		Nov		28		The Danish Civil War
2008		Apr		24		Surrender, Genocide… or What?
		May		17		Sliding Into Irrelevance
		Jul		5		A Crystal Ball for Britain: Part 1
				6		A Crystal Ball for Britain: Part 2
				8		A Crystal Ball for Britain: Part 3
		Aug		25		Identity, Immigration, and Islam
		Oct		4		The Blackhoods of Antifa
				26		Racists ’R’ Us
		Nov		25		Surrender, Genocide… or What? — An Update
2009		Feb		16		Pick a Tribe, Any Tribe
		Apr		11		Pick A Tribe, Any Tribe — Part II
		May		18		To Push or to Squeeze?

Samstag, 31.10.2009

Ende einer Lebenslüge

Von Michael Paulwitz

Masseneinwanderung macht Integration unmöglich

Multikulturalismus ist Glaubenssache. Je eindeutiger die statistischen Fakten und die alltäglichen Erfahrungen der ganz normalen Leute dagegen sprechen, desto verbissener bestehen die Propheten und Profiteure der multikulturalistischen Ideologie auf Anerkennung ihrer Glaubenssätze von der kulturellen und wirtschaftlichen Bereicherung durch Einwanderung aus allen Kontinenten.

Und doch mehrt sich die Zahl der Spielverderber, die wie der finnische Einwanderungskritiker Timo Vihavainen, der amerikanische Publizist Christopher Caldwell oder auch der Berliner Ex-Finanzsenator Thilo Sarrazin das Mythengeflecht um Einwanderung und Integration in Europa unbarmherzig demontieren. 

Der unmittelbare Effekt solcher Ordnungsrufe bleibt freilich begrenzt. Denn Fakten spielen in der Auseinandersetzung mit der europäischen Einwanderungspraxis schon seit längerem nur eine sehr untergeordnete Rolle.

Abwechselnd müssen die Bedürfnisse des Arbeitsmarktes, auf dem mal Mangel an Fachkräften und dann wieder an Ungelernten herrschen soll, der demographische Ausgleich für die Folgen von Überalterung und Kinderarmut und die erhoffte Stabilisierung der Sozialsysteme durch junge und arbeitswillige Einwanderer als Rechtfertigung für Immigration aus Ländern jenseits der EU-Außengrenzen herhalten.

Die Auflösung der nationalen Identität wird willentlich herbeigeführt

All diese Argumente dürfen längst als widerlegt gelten. Unterschichtseinwanderung kostet die Sozialsysteme mehr, als sie ihnen jemals einbringt, und die Masseneinwanderung in die Arbeitsmärkte führt letztlich zwangsläufig zu Lohndumping durch Ausweitung des Angebots an Arbeitkraft, zum Nutzen großer Unternehmen und Konzerne und zum Nachteil der konkurrierenden einheimischen Arbeitsuchenden.

Ausgerechnet im Einwanderungsmusterland Großbritannien haben die Statistiker das den Politikern Schwarz auf Weiß vorgerechnet. Berücksichtigt man zudem kulturelle Konfliktpotentiale und soziale Folgekosten, so ist die Einwanderung insbesondere aus afrikanischen und islamischen Ländern für europäische Staaten in jedem Fall ein Minusgeschäft.

Doch nicht einmal rationale volkswirtschaftliche Überlegungen können europäische Einwanderungslobbyisten davon abbringen, mit vulgär-ökonomistischen Vorwänden großzügige Asylrichtlinien und Niederlassungsprogramme für illegale Einwanderer auf den Weg zu bringen und Einwanderungsbedarf in utopischen Größenordnungen anzumelden, die eher dem Bevölkerungsaustausch als der vermeintlichen Bevölkerungsstabilisierung dienen.

In dieser werterelativistischen Denkweise, die Menschen wie austauschbare Nummern und Produktionsfaktoren ohne Rücksicht auf ethnische und kulturelle Bindungen verschiebt, wird die Auflösung der abendländischen und nationalen Identitäten nicht nur gleichgültig in Kauf genommen, sondern willentlich herbeigeführt.

Schuldkomplexe sind nämlich der ideologische Unterbau, gewissermaßen das mythologische Fundament der Zivilreligion Multikulturalismus. In Deutschland sind diese besonders ausgeprägt durch die brisante Überschneidung mit der gefühlten „ewigen Schuld“ am Holocaust.

Anderen Europäern geht es allerdings kaum besser. In der politischen Klasse ehemaliger Kolonialmächte, Großbritannien vorneweg, manifestiert sich der Schuldkomplex als Wiedergutmachungswahn gegenüber den einst unterdrückten Kolonialvölkern. Noch am leichtesten zu revidieren ist die allgemein gutmenschliche Fernstenliebe, die insbesondere die skandinavischen Staaten eine Zeitlang veranlaßte, die Mühsal der Welt zwecks Lösung im eigenen Lande großzügig zu importieren.

Erst aus dieser Perspektive erschließt sich, warum aus einem Prozeß, der – wie die deutsche Anwerbung ausländischer Arbeitnehmer – aus zunächst ökonomischen und außenpolitischen Erwägungen in Gang gesetzt wurde, ein Selbstläufer werden konnte, den die Verantwortlichen nicht einmal steuern und schon gar nicht beenden wollen, sondern tatenlos hinnehmen und allenfalls noch zu moderieren begehren.

Zur Begründung werden unausweichliche Finalitäten behauptet, wo in Wahrheit komplexbeladene Entscheidungsschwäche herrscht. Europäische Einwanderungspolitik geht den Weg des geringeren Widerstands; sie gibt dem globalen Armuts- und Arbeitsmigrationsdruck und dem offensiven Willen zur islamischen Landnahme nach und verwendet im Gegenzug um so mehr Energie darauf, Widerstände im eigenen Volk propagandistisch niederzukämpfen.

Der Preis der Feigheit ist hoch

Selten gibt dies einer so offen zu wie Wolfgang Schäuble, der sich jüngst brüstete, Deutschland sei „nie ein Land, das aussucht“ gewesen. Das wäre allerdings das klassische Verhalten eines Einwanderungslandes gewesen, das man angeblich doch gern sein möchte.

Der Preis der Feigheit ist hoch und wird in Sozialtransfers und im Verlust an politischer und sozialstaatlicher Bewegungsfreiheit entrichtet. Eine radikale Lösung hat der nordrhein-westfälische Minister Armin Laschet parat, der den Deutschen bei der „Integration“ der wahllos hereingelassenen Einwanderer dieselbe Solidarität abverlangen will wie beim Lastenausgleich mit den ostvertriebenen Landsleuten und der Wiedervereinigung mit dem von der kommunistischen Diktatur befreiten mitteldeutschen Teil von Staat und Volk.

Weiß der Mann, daß er mit dieser Gleichsetzung die nationalstaatliche Solidarität als Grundlage von Sozialsystem und Wohlfahrtsstaat abwickelt?

Die Masseneinwanderung aus nichteuropäischen Kulturkreisen, namentlich aus dem islamischen, wird Europa stärker verändern als alle Kriege und Revolutionen vergangener Jahrhunderte. Man mag darüber streiten, ob die „Vernichtung des Westens“ (Vihavainen), die „Revolution in Europa“ (Caldwell) ein unentrinnbares Schicksal ist. Besiegelt ist das von Manfred Pohl bereits konstatierte „Ende des Weißen Mannes“ allerdings erst, wenn niemand mehr dagegen aufbegehrt.

JF 45/09

Comment by jacmak 15 minutes ago

Did Allah speak in arabic to Mohammed? Most muslims would declare 'yes' but is it feasible to think that Allah would speak the language of the idols worshipers of the day and the very same people who were to be the enemies of Islam. And if arabic is the divine language why were those who spoke it not so transformed by its perfection that they were utterly unable to resist the meaning of the words expressed in the language? There should not be any need whatsoever for inducemnts or coercion. Since it must be presumed that Allah would have communicated with Jibreel in the same way as he did before the creation of the world - it is not credible. Anyway for a muslim to utter the very words of Allah verbatim, is to partner Allah in his perfection- which of course is Shirk. .

Lisbon Treaty: Europe’s Slow-Moving Coup d’État

From the desk of Soeren Kern on Sat, 2009-10-10 15:43

Irish voters have overwhelmingly approved the European Union’s controversial Lisbon Treaty, a document that will forever change the dynamics of European (and potentially global) politics. The “yes” vote comes less than 18 months after Irish voters gave the “wrong” answer by rejecting the treaty in a first referendum.

According to the final results, 67.1 percent of Irish voters approved the treaty, while 32.9 percent voted “no.” Turnout in the three-million electorate was 58 percent.

During the past year, the Irish government has faced intense pressure from an irate European political establishment, which demanded a second referendum that would produce the “correct” answer. Dublin achieved the desired result by playing on public fears over Ireland’s faltering economy, which is expected to contract by a shocking 10 percent this year. It also warned that Ireland would be “pushed out” or “left behind” in Europe in the event of another “no” vote, a disconcerting prospect for a country traumatized by the second-highest unemployment rate in the EU.

Ireland, which accounts for 1 percent of the Union’s 500 million population, was the only one of the EU’s 27 member states to put the Lisbon Treaty to a public referendum. Twenty-four other EU countries quietly rubber-stamped the treaty in their parliaments, which has proved to be a far less risky route than direct democracy to get the document ratified. The leaders of Poland and the Czech Republic, the only two remaining holdouts, will now be induced to ratify the treaty as quickly as possible (the parliaments of both countries have already approved the treaty) so that the grand European project can proceed apace.

The Lisbon Treaty, also known as the Reform Treaty, is nearly identical to the European Constitution, a document that was soundly rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005. Among many other innovations, the 250-plus page Lisbon Treaty will establish a permanent EU president (Tony Blair?), a European foreign minister and a European Union diplomatic service. The agreement also paves the way for the covert creation of a European army by way of a mutual defense clause called Permanent Structured Cooperation.

Moreover, the Lisbon Treaty obligates EU nations to surrender their sovereignty in many areas to centralized decision-making; and it reduces national veto rights to allow more decisions to be made by majority voting instead of by unanimous consent.

The Lisbon Treaty is the stunning culmination of more than 50 years of European economic and political integration, a process that has resulted in the systematic erosion of democracy and democratic accountability in Europe.

The EU has its origins in the Treaty of Rome (1957), which gave birth to the European Economic Community (EEC). The EEC, also known as the “Common Market,” was a customs union. EEC member countries agreed to dismantle all tariff barriers over a 12-year transitional period, and over time a common tariff was also established for all products coming in from third countries.

The Single European Act (1987) extended the scope of the EEC to include not only the free circulation of goods, but also the free movement of persons, capital and services. The Act established a genuine common market, but it also codified European Political Cooperation, which was the forerunner of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP).

The fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the reunification of Germany (1990) led French President François Mitterrand, who feared a return of German hegemony, to search for a way to permanently anchor Germany within European institutions. Together with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who was keen to relieve misgivings in Paris and London about a reunified Germany, Mitterrand worked to transform the whole of Europe into an all-encompassing union.

In 1989, an Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) established monetary and economic union. In 1990, another IGC was called to study the constitution of a political union. Then, in 1992, following three years of closed-door debate which ignored public demands for more transparency, the Treaty of the European Union (also known as the Treaty of Maastricht) came into being.

The Maastricht Treaty modified the Treaty of Rome and the Single European Act by moving far beyond the limits of a common market toward political union. The Maastricht Treaty also changed the official name of the EEC to the European Union.

The Maastricht Treaty created three pillars, one of which enables joint actions in foreign policy and military matters, and another one which enhances co-operation in the fight against crime. The Maastricht Treaty also established a European Central Bank (ECB), fixed exchange rates and introduced a single currency called the euro.

In 1998, the Treaty of Amsterdam modified parts of the Maastricht Treaty, again with no public participation. The main change introduced by the Amsterdam Treaty was the creation of a new position called the High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy. The treaty also provided the EU with a common security policy, including the gradual formulation of a common defence policy.

In 2001, the Treaty of Nice was designed (once again without public input) to reform the institutional structure of the EU, with a view toward eastward expansion.

Fast forward to 2009, and the stated aim of the Lisbon Treaty is to “complete the process started by the Treaty of Amsterdam and by the Treaty of Nice with a view to enhancing the efficiency and democratic legitimacy of the Union and to improving the coherence of its action.”

Supporters of the Lisbon Treaty say its purpose is to cement European integration by “streamlining” decision making. But in its essence, the Lisbon Treaty, which has been called a “slow motion coup d’état,” is all about the centralization of political power by an unelected ruling clique in Brussels who desire to rule Europe free from the constraints of democracy.

The Lisbon Treaty also promotes European aspirations far beyond Europe, which is why Americans should take notice. Indeed, European globalists hope the Lisbon Treaty will transform the EU into a superpower capable of counter-balancing the United States in global affairs.

European strategists have long been frustrated by Europe’s inability to speak with one voice, a debilitating weakness that often neuters Europe’s economic and political weight on the global stage, especially vis-à-vis the United States. The Lisbon Treaty is designed to remedy this deficiency by imposing a European president and foreign minister at the top of the European edifice.

More specifically, the Lisbon Treaty is meant to avoid a repeat of European divisions in the lead up to the Iraq War, when France and Germany were frustrated in their attempts to present a unified European front to block the American invasion. At the time, a fair number of European countries broke ranks with France and Germany and joined the United States in a “coalition of the willing,” much to the anger of the Brussels elite.

By giving unelected EU bureaucrats jurisdiction over questions of war and peace, the Lisbon Treaty will usurp the national prerogatives of its member states on the use of military force. This will make it far more difficult for European allies to support the United States in unpopular wars in the future.

The Lisbon Treaty will push the EU in a direction that should be deeply disconcerting to Americans and Europeans alike. The Lisbon Treaty will make Europe more centralized and far less democratic than it already is. For transatlantic relations, this means that many foreign policy decisions that directly affect the United States, ranging from economics and trade to transatlantic cooperation on Islamic counter-terrorism, will increasingly be made by unelected (and often pathologically anti-American) bureaucrats in Brussels rather than by national governments.

The history of European integration is a textbook case in how a simple economic treaty can be gradually transformed into an all-encompassing non-democratic supranational federal leviathan. Indeed, the Lisbon Treaty should be a warning to Americans who dream of remaking the United States in Europe’s image.

Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group

Why Did Europeans Create the Modern World?

by Baron Bodissey

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.

This essay was originally published in four separate parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

In this essay I will compare the works and theories of Jared Diamond, especially his international bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies from 1997 and to a lesser extent his 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, with the 2007 book Understanding Human History by the American astrophysicist Michael H. Hart. Diamond’s work is very focused on the importance of geography, which brings out useful perspectives in some cases but not in all. Hart puts his emphasis on differences in intelligence between various ethnic groups seen in light of the theory of evolution. I will quote books by other authors, too, to assess the importance of law, religion, education system, capitalism etc.

I am sometimes critical of Mr. Diamond’s writings, especially his overall conclusions, but that doesn’t mean that I believe everything he says is wrong. He correctly points out that environmental destruction is far from limited to Western culture, and he doesn’t hesitate in stating that brutal and violent practices were carried out in many societies around the world.

Along with other Mesoamerican civilizations, the Maya lacked metal tools, boats with sails, wheels and domestic animals large enough to carry loads or pull a plow, but they nevertheless had impressively high population densities by pre-industrial standards before the so-called Classic Maya collapse after AD 800. Because of breakthroughs in the decipherment of Mayan glyphs in the late twentieth century, our understanding of Mayan society and culture is now far greater than it was a few generations ago. Diamond elaborates in his book Collapse:

“Archaeologists for a long time believed the ancient Maya to be gentle and peaceful people. We now know that Maya warfare was intense, chronic, and unresolvable, because limitations of food supply and transportation made it impossible for any Maya principality to unite the whole region in an empire, in the way the Aztecs and Incas united Central Mexico and the Andes, respectively….Captives were tortured in unpleasant ways depicted clearly on the monuments and murals (such as yanking fingers out of sockets, pulling out teeth, cutting off the lower jaw, trimming off the lips and fingertips, pulling out the fingernails, and driving a pin through the lips), culminating (sometimes several years later) in the sacrifice of the captive in other equally unpleasant ways (such as tying the captive up into a ball by binding the arms and legs together, then rolling the balled-up captive down the steep stone staircase of a temple).”

It is interesting to notice that Western observers, contrary to what is often claimed, often show non-Western cultures too much good faith rather than being “Eurocentric.” When I was young I was once told that regularly practiced cannibalism didn’t exist in any society in early modern times; this was a racist, colonialist lie invented by prejudiced Europeans to demonize other peoples and cultures. One example would be the former cannibal dubbed “Friday” who was converted to Christianity in Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe. As I grow older and investigate things for myself, I see clearly how wrong this claim was.

In New Zealand, Paul Moon in his book This Horrid Practice: The Myth and Reality of Traditional Maori Cannibalism looks at the Maori tradition of eating each other in what was generally an extremely violent society. Cannibalism lasted until the mid-nineteenth century, says Moon, a history professor at the Auckland University of Technology. It didn’t disappear until after the arrival of Europeans and Christian missionaries. Infanticide was widely practiced, too. Tribes wanted men to be warriors, and mothers often killed their daughters by smothering them or pushing a finger through the soft tissue of the skull. Cannibalism was part of a post-battle rage. “One of the arguments is really if you want to punish your enemy killing them is not enough. If you can chop them up and eat them and turn them into excrement that is the greatest humiliation you can impose on them,” says Moon. “The amount of evidence is so overwhelming it would be unfair to pretend it didn’t happen. It is too important to ignore.”

The head of the Maori Studies Department at Auckland University, Professor Margaret Mutu, says cannibalism was widespread in New Zealand. “It was definitely there. It’s recorded in all sorts of ways in our histories and traditions, a lot of place names refer to it.” She said Maori cannibalism was not referred to by many historians because it was counter to English culture.

We are being told that Europeans invent negative stereotypes about other peoples. Notice how in this case — and it is far from the only such example to be found — Europeans actually downplayed very real flaws in other cultures, and this was even during the colonial period. We know that cannibalism was practiced among a number of peoples in the Americas as well, most likely including the prehistoric Anasazi in what is today the southwestern United States.
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As Diamond says in his book Collapse, “the existence of non-emergency cannibalism is controversial. In fact, it was reported in hundreds of non-European societies at the times when they were first contacted by Europeans within recent centuries. The practice took two forms: eating either the bodies of enemies killed in war, or else eating one’s own relatives who had died of natural causes. New Guineans with whom I have worked over the past 40 years have matter-of-factly described their cannibalistic practices, have expressed disgust at our own Western burial customs of burying relatives without doing them the honor of eating them, and one of my best New Guinean workers quit his job with me in 1965 in order to partake in the consumption of his recently deceased prospective son-in-law. There have also been many archaeological finds of ancient human bones in contexts suggestive of cannibalism.”

Jared Diamond writes in Guns, Germs, and Steel that “…the virus causing laughing sickness (kuru) in the New Guinea highlands used to pass to a person from another person who was eaten. It was transmitted by cannibalism, when highland babies made the fatal mistake of licking their fingers after playing with raw brains that their mothers had just cut out of dead kuru victims awaiting cooking.”

Diamond, an evolutionary biologist, does not reject the possibility that there could be unequal levels of intelligence among ethnic groups developed over thousands of years, but insists that if there are, Europeans are less intelligent than others, as “natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent….there is also a second reason why New Guineans may have come to be smarter than Westerners. Modern European and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies….This effect surely contributes a non-genetic component to the superior average mental function displayed by New Guineans. That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners.”

Mr. Diamond has just stated that many New Guineans have widely practiced cannibalism until the present day. He says this matter-of-factly but does not clearly indicate that he disapproves of this. In fact, in his writings he appears to be more critical of television than he is of cannibalism. Moreover, he thinks it is morally loathsome if those denounced as “white supremacists” should believe that people of European origins might have higher intelligence than, say, Australian Aborigines, but he apparently thinks it is fine to say that New Guineans have higher intelligence than Europeans. Does that make him a New Guinean supremacist?

You can find traces of the concept of cannibalism in modern European culture, for instance in the story about Hansel and Gretel, one of the many traditional folk tales and fairy tales such as Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella that were collected and popularized by the influential German scholars and linguists Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859) in the early nineteenth century. However, in this fairy tale adapted by the Brothers Grimm, the idea of eating people was attributed to the villain of the story, the evil witch, and the practice was seen as self-evidently immoral and totally unacceptable.

Diamond indicates that he writes specifically in order to dispel “Eurocentrism” and claims that IQ tests measure cultural learning only, not innate intelligence. Yet studies have shown that people with higher IQs make wiser economic choices. Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen in their 2002 book IQ and the Wealth of Nations argue that a significant part of the gap between rich and poor countries is due to differences in national intelligence measured in IQ.

According to Swedish Professor Annica Dahlström, an expert in neuroscience, men are found more frequently than women at the extremes of high and low intelligence. Female geniuses exist, but they are much less frequent than male ones. The feminist establishment claims that she has misused her position as a scientist to reinforce “gender stereotypes,” yet as Dahlström says, “The difference between boys and girls, in terms of their biology and brain, is greater than we could ever have imagined.” We can now scan and follow brain activity in real time. Differences between the sexes are clearly recognizable at the age of three, if not before. The centers of the brain dealing with verbal communication, interpretation of facial expressions and body language are more developed in girls even at this early age.

In the USA, Larry Summers, President of the prestigious Harvard University, was forced to resign partly because of a 2005 speech where he suggested that women’s under-representation in the top levels of academia is due to a “different availability of aptitude at the high end.”

Professor Helmuth Nyborg at Aarhus University in Denmark did research which revealed that there are differences between the sexes when it comes to intelligence. This triggered massive resistance from his colleagues. He states that “Within the realms of psychology you are not allowed to talk about intelligence. You cannot measure intelligence and you cannot rank people according to intelligence. The entire field of intelligence is a so-called ‘no-go-area.’“ If you still choose to proceed, you are a bad person. If you also look at differences between groups of people, not just between men and women, you are immoral and a “Nazi.” This is certainly the case for white scholars, though interestingly enough not always for Asian ones.

The problem is that this view is not logically consistent. If you believe that God, or some divine being or force, created all human beings exactly as equals, then you can talk about racism. If, on the other hand, you believe that human beings are the result of evolution, then the entire concept of “racism” is scientifically meaningless. The West at the turn of the twenty-first century is dominated by Darwinists who don’t believe in the theory of evolution. If you think that sounds like a contradiction in terms, consider the message of Guns, Germs, and Steel. The essence of Diamond’s beliefs is that evolution has been going on for billions of years, creating elephants and whales out of single-cell organisms, but then it miraculously stopped about 50,000 years ago and you are evil if you suggest that human beings were subject to evolutionary pressures after this. This is, rationally speaking, completely absurd, yet this is the unquestioned ruling ideology in Western media and academia today.

Diamond himself attempts to give a summary of his entire book in just one sentence: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.”

Yes, but what if these different natural environments also changed the biology of early human groups in non-superficial ways, something which the theory of evolution would indicate?

The Near East had access to a wealth of useful local plants and animals. Four species of big mammals — the goat, sheep, pig and cow — were domesticated very early in the Fertile Crescent, possibly earlier than any other animal except the dog anywhere else in the world. Agriculture was launched in the Fertile Crescent by the early domestication of eight “founder crops,” the cereals emmer wheat, einkorn wheat and barley; the pulses lentil, pea, chickpea, and bitter vetch and the fiber crop flax. Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, people in this region could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production, which again led to complex, socially stratified societies with bureaucracies that needed some system of recording. According to Diamond, writing arose independently in the Near East (Mesopotamia), Mexico and possibly in China because those were the first areas where food production emerged in their respective hemispheres, a theory which appears plausible. This constitutes the strongest part of his work.

Something momentous took place in the capabilities of early humans between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago. Diamond calls this the Great Leap Forward. Whether this was caused by a perfection of verbal skills or a general change in brain organization remains unresolved. Around 40,000 years ago the Cro-Magnons moved into Europe and after some millennia of coexistence displaced the Neanderthals. At about the same time we find the first evidence of human colonization of New Guinea and Australia via Southeast Asia. As Diamond writes:

“The rate of development was undetectably slow at the beginning, when hundreds of thousands of years passed with no discernible change in our stone tools and with no surviving evidence for artifacts made of other materials. Today, technology advances so rapidly that it is reported in the daily newspaper. In this long history of accelerating development, one can single out two especially significant jumps. The first, occurring between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, probably was made possible by genetic changes in our bodies: namely, by evolution of the modern anatomy permitting modern speech or modern brain function, or both. That jump led to bone tools, single-purpose stone tools, and compound tools. The second jump resulted from our adoption of a sedentary lifestyle, which happened at different times in different parts of the world, as early as 13,000 years ago in some areas and not even today in others. For the most part, that adoption was linked to our adoption of food production, which required us to remain close to our crops, orchards, and stored food surpluses. Sedentary living was decisive for the history of technology, because it enabled people to accumulate nonportable possessions.”

Diamond accepts the possibility that there could have been major genetic changes until about 50,000 BC, but considers it “loathsome” and “racist” to suggest that genetic changes between various human groups could have happened after this. This is not sustainable when confronted with historical realities. Those early humans who settled in Africa, Europe, many parts of Asia, Australia and finally North and South America lived in different natural environments for thousands or tens of thousands of years after this and adapted to their local environments.

In fact, recent studies indicate not only that human evolution continued but that it accelerated and became greater during the last 10,000 years. This was after the beginning of agriculture and the rise of urban civilizations, when our bodies had to adapt to new living conditions, new crowd diseases and different types of food. This is the theory behind the 2009 title The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, which I haven’t yet had the opportunity to read when writing these words.

The main theory of Michael Hart’s book Understanding Human History is that when early humans after about 60,000 BC left Africa and settled on other continents (he uses the out-of Africa theory as his starting point, but early human evolutionary history is highly complex and much-debated), the average IQ was about 70 or lower, almost certainly not higher than that. There are humans living in Africa today who have average IQs of less than 70, and there is no strong reason to believe that human intelligence has declined in the past sixty thousand years. This level rose slowly (not more than one IQ point per millennium) during tens of thousands of years due to evolutionary pressures, but more in some regions than in others. Hart supports the “cold weather” hypothesis which says that as the climate got colder, people developed higher intelligence in order to survive in the challenging natural environment, which essentially means that the further north you get, the higher the average IQ becomes.

Theoretically speaking you should be able to see the same trend in the Southern Hemisphere the further south you get, but Antarctica was uninhabited by humans until very recently, and the only people who live there for any extended periods of time even today are scientists. In practice, therefore, this principle only applies to the Northern Hemisphere. People from Sweden or Russia should accordingly have higher IQs than people from the Nile Valley. Similarly, Koreans or Japanese should have higher average IQs than people from South India or New Guinea. Both of these examples roughly correspond to observed reality.

Evolutionary changes in human anatomy and physiology that lead to higher intelligence do not come cost free, since larger brains require greater amounts of energy as well as larger heads, which create strains on the muscular and skeletal structure. However, in challenging colder climates, the advantages of higher intelligence outweighed these costs.

The idea that climate could somehow be related to the culture and mentality of different peoples has an ancient pedigree, going back to the Greek geographer Strabo, to China, Ibn Khaldun in medieval North Africa and to the great French political thinker Baron de Montesquieu in The Spirit of Laws (L’esprit des lois) from 1748. All of this was long before any coherent theory of evolution or knowledge of genetic mutation had been developed.

The Upper Paleolithic is the last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age, about 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. The Upper Paleolithic Revolution is the name given to the phenomenon that Homo sapiens during this age began to demonstrate signs of a new level of sophistication and abstract thought. Stone tools made hundreds of thousands of years ago by early humanoids were very crude and can barely be recognized as man-made objects. In contrast to this painfully slow rate of progress, rapid changes occurred during the Upper Paleolithic with the introduction of such innovations as sewing needles, early ceramics, bow and arrow, harpoons, fishhooks, flutes for music etc. Archaeological evidence indicates that few of these inventions were made by groups of humans in tropical regions; they were made by humans living in cooler climates. Michael H. Hart writes in Understanding Human History:

“Whatever the exact dates of the inventions listed may be, it is plain that the rate of technological advance was much, much higher in the Upper Paleolithic than in preceding eras. What was the cause of this great increase (the ‘Upper Paleolithic Revolution’) in the rate of technological advance? It is sometimes said that the rapid rate of intellectual and technological progress in recent eras results primarily from the fact that we are building on the foundations that earlier peoples laid. While this may be one factor, it is certainly not the whole story. After all, at most times in the distant past, human beings were not making advances over the achievements of earlier generations. The main reason why the rate of progress increased during the Upper Paleolithic was simply that humans living then were more intelligent than their distant ancestors had been. (One aspect of that greater intelligence, of course, was their greater linguistic ability.) Similarly, an important reason why the rate of progress has been even higher in recent millennia than in the Upper Paleolithic is that human intelligence has continued to grow, and is higher today than it was then.”

Technological progress accelerated during the Neolithic Era, or New Stone Age. In the Neolithic Revolution, agriculture arose more or less independently in at least half a dozen separate regions around the world, which brings us to a couple of intriguing questions: Why did this development not begin until after about 10,000 BC, and why did it then occur in several widely separated places within a few thousand years? Why was agriculture not invented in 30 or 40,000 BC even though plants and animals suitable for domestication existed already then, and humans lived in all major landmasses except the Americas?

In Michael Hart’s view, useful plants and animals were a necessary factor for the rise of agriculture, but not a sufficient one; a population with a minimum level of intelligence was needed, too. The reason why agriculture wasn’t invented by early humans forty thousand years ago is that none of them had yet developed the necessary intelligence to successfully make the conceptual leap that was required to start growing food. Hart believes that the “threshold” level required to originate agriculture even in a region with suitable climate, plants and animals was a mean IQ in the high 80s. Following tens of thousands of years of evolutionary pressures, the average IQ of some human groups had finally become high enough, but agriculture was nevertheless not introduced first in challenging northern climates.

The period from 13,000-9,000 BC marked the end of the last Ice Age and the establishment of a climate similar to our own. Nevertheless, the tropical regions, for example in sub-Saharan Africa, had been relatively warm even during the Ice Age, and food was probably plentiful.

Hart considers the alternative geography-focused hypothesis for the development of civilization presented by Professor Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel. He suggests that the comparative backwardness of pre-colonial Australia and parts of the Americas compared to major Eurasian civilizations was entirely due to geographic factors, climate and the lack of a favorable flora and fauna. Surprisingly, he is willing to consider the possibility that there could a genetic component to intelligence as long as this reflects poorly on whites, which is so intellectually dishonest that it very seriously undermines his general conclusions.

Michael Hart is careful, and in my view correct, in not dismissing everything Mr. Diamond says out of hand. The ancient Near East really did have a favorable climate as well as a far greater local supply of useful and easily domesticable plants and animals than any other region, which is in all likelihood a very important reason why agriculture and urban civilization emerged so early there; both Australia and the region we know as the United States were indeed badly lacking in such species. However, according to Hart the facts do not support Diamond’s theory when it is applied to a comparison between sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and Mesoamerica. As regards fauna, SSA had a great advantage over Mesoamerica as it was not completely cut off from the civilizations of Eurasia. Some important aspects of Eurasian technology like pottery-making, bronze working and ironworking reached SSA from the Middle East, as did the use of domesticated camels, sheep and goats:

“Using his criteria, civilization should have begun earlier in SSA than it did in Mesoamerica, and it should have progressed more there (prior to the European expansion of modern times) than it did in Mesoamerica. In fact, though, by 1000 AD, Mesoamerica was far more advanced than SSA was, or ever had been. For example, Mesoamericans had originated writing on their own, had constructed many large stone structures, and had built large cities (rivaling any existing in Europe, and far larger than any in sub-Saharan Africa). Furthermore, the Mayan achievements in mathematics and astronomy dwarf any intellectual achievements in SSA. We must therefore conclude that, although Guns, Germs, and Steel is an informative book, the obvious superiority of Mesoamerican technology to that of sub-Saharan Africa appears to be a fatal blow to the main arguments presented in it.”

Michael H. Hart evaluates the accomplishments of various civilizations. He claims that the contributions of the ancient Egyptians were relatively meager. The Sumerians in Mesopotamia invented writing first, which the Egyptians may well have been aware of. The Egyptian political structure was an absolute monarchy, which was not an original idea and did not influence modern thinkers. They made no significant contributions to astronomical theory nor to physics, chemistry, biology or geology. While the pyramids are visually impressive, the pyramid is strictly speaking a simple architectural structure and for the most part not a very useful one. Because the climate in Egypt is so dry, the architecture (and the mummies) they created survive better there than elsewhere. Their monuments are still visible. Hart is not claiming that the Egyptians were savages, only that their contributions are often overrated.

Personally, I think he slights the Egyptians somewhat. It is true that they were not very scientifically advanced, and Classical Greek art was far more lifelike than Egyptian art ever had been, but the Greeks were inspired by Egyptian studies of the proportions of the human body. According to art historian Gombrich, “the Greek masters went to school with the Egyptians, and we are all the pupils of the Greeks.” As American writer Lawrence Auster puts it, “Let’s remember to give the Egyptians credit for first developing the beautiful human form, which the Greeks then adopted and made more alive. Camille Paglia is mostly silly, but be sure to read the first chapter of her book Sexual Personae, where she discusses the Egyptian creation of the clear, perfect, ‘Apollonian’ form which became the basis of Western art.’“

In science, the ancient Greeks easily outperformed the Egyptians. Greek deductive geometry turned out to be an indispensable prelude to the advent of modern science, and apart from mathematics and astronomy they made great contributions to poetry, history, drama and mythology, produced elegant architecture such as the Parthenon in Athens as well as great sculptors and painters. The works of Plato and Aristotle are among the oldest analytical writings on political theory. If people in the twenty-first century read Aristotle’s Politics to see what it says about democracy, this is not just out of historical curiosity but because this is considered relevant today. In contrast, virtually nobody reads “Pharaonic” political theory.

Why did the ancient Greeks achieve so much? Possibly the geography of Greece made them a seafaring nation and led them to engage in exploration and trade. Yet there were many other peoples who enjoyed a similar geographic advantage, too, and the Phoenicians, while being great seafarers and traders, did not create anything near the scientific achievements of the Greeks according to historical evidence. Hart believes that while other Europeans had at least as high IQ as the Greeks, science is above all the creation of urban, literate cultures, and in this the Greeks benefited from early contact with the literate civilizations of the Middle East:

“The best explanation for the Greek phenomenon lies in a combination of genetic and geographic factors. The peoples living in the cold regions of Europe had, over a period of many millennia, evolved higher average intelligence than the peoples living in the Middle East. However, because of the mild climate in the Middle East, and the availability of a large assortment of useful domesticable plants and animals, the inhabitants of the Middle East developed agriculture long before the peoples of northern Europe. The early advent of agriculture and cities in the Middle East enabled them to make major progress during the Neolithic Era and the early historic era, and to get a big jump on the rest of the world in technology and in intellectual matters. In time, the superior genetic endowment of the Europeans would enable them to overcome that head start. However, between European groups, the one most likely to advance first was the one which had the earliest opportunity of learning from the civilizations of the Middle East and Egypt. Because of their geographic location, the Greeks were the first European people to come into contact with those civilizations.”

In Understanding Human History, Michael H. Hart also evaluates the Islamic world. He says, correctly, that non-Muslim dhimmis under Islamic rule were hardly even second-rate citizens, but rather non-citizens who lacked many basic civil rights. For example, they could not testify in court against a Muslim. He disputes whether conversion to Islam were always “voluntary,” given the various humiliations, pressures and taxes non-Muslims continuously had to face just for the sake of being non-Muslims. Regarding cultural achievements, he mentions some noteworthy scholars and figures. One is the Moroccan Berber explorer and writer Ibn Batutta (1304-1369), who traveled from West Africa via southeastern Europe and India to China in the fourteenth century and described his experiences in his book Rihlah (Travels).

Ibn Khaldun could be mentioned for his work in historiography, although he shared the contempt for all non-Muslim cultures which hampered the growth of archaeology and comparative linguistics in the Islamic world. Muslim scholars did not seriously study other cultures with curiosity and describe them with fairness, the Persian universal scholar al-Biruni’s (973-1048) writings about Hinduism and India being one of very few exceptions to this rule. He had taken the trouble to learn enough Sanskrit to be able to translate in both directions between this language and Arabic (for him also a learned language). As author John Keay writes in his book India: A History, Muslims were viewed by Indians as just another group of foreigners, perhaps annoying but essentially marginal. This was a big mistake:

“There is no evidence of an Indian appreciation of the global threat which they represented; and the peculiar nature of their mission — to impose a new monotheist orthodoxy by military conquest and political dominion — was so alien to Indian tradition that it went uncomprehended. No doubt a certain complacency contributed to this indifference. As al-Biruni (Alberuni), the great Islamic scholar of the eleventh century, would put it, ‘the Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no science like theirs.’…his scientific celebrity in the Arab world would owe much to his mastery of Sanskrit and access to Indian scholarship….Unlike Alexander’s Greeks, Muslim invaders were well aware of India’s immensity, and mightily excited by its resources….Since at least Roman times the subcontinent seems to have enjoyed a favourable balance of payments….The devout Muslim, although ostensibly bent on converting the infidel, would find his zeal handsomely rewarded.”

Personally, I wouldn’t say that absolutely no achievements were made in the medieval Islamic world, only that they are greatly exaggerated for political reasons today. Let us divide scholars into three categories: Category 1 consists of those who make minor contributions, category 2 medium-level ones. Category 3 consists of scholars who make major, fundamental contributions to an important branch of science. Not a single scholar of this stature has ever been produced in the Islamic world even at the best of times. Finding some Muslim scholars who made minor contributions to mathematics, medicine or alchemy is not difficult, and I can probably name half a dozen to a dozen individuals who might qualify under category 2, for instance al-Khwarizmi, Omar Khayyam, Rhazes, Geber and perhaps Avicenna and Averroes.

Hart says that Alhazen was “probably the greatest” of all the scholars in the Islamic world, which I agree with, but even he was a good scholar in category 2, not 3. Muslim original contributions to engineering were minor and they do not appear to have equaled the achievements of the Romans. He notes that the mediocre contributions of Middle Easterners are all the more striking given their geographically favorable position, which gave them a unique opportunity to gain knowledge from all major Eurasian civilizations simultaneously.

According to Hart, Middle Eastern scholars made few major discoveries in science or technology, nothing comparable to printing and gunpowder in China in the Early Middle Ages or spectacles and mechanical clocks in Western Europe during the High Middle Ages. While they did produce, for a while, a number of scholars who made minor contributions and a handful or two who made medium-level contributions, they never produced truly great geniuses such as Aristotle, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler or Newton. Hart attributes this to their lower IQ compared to Europeans. I would personally add the repressive atmosphere created by Islamic orthodoxy as a significant contributing factor as well. Ideas have consequences.

Michael H. Hart writes about India, by which he means the entire Indian subcontinent, which has been affected by several human migrations/invasions from the northwest. At its peak between 2500 and 2000 BC, the Indus Valley or Harappan civilization close to Sumerian Mesopotamia in the northwest was larger and more advanced than anything we know from China during the same time period. It is noteworthy that civilization originated in the far north of India, in a region that was geographically and maybe genetically more closely attached to the civilizations of the Middle East than to South India, which was usually more backward.

Hart believes that the peculiar caste system in India originally had a racial component and dates back to the invasion of lighter-skinned peoples from the northwest. It is conceivable that this peculiar Indian institution originated as an IQ preservationist strategy. High-caste peoples typically have slightly lighter skin color than those of lower caste, although there are exceptions to this rule. Few societies are more obsessed with skin color than modern India.

He devotes considerable space to arts and literature. The Rigveda is a collection of hymns composed between 1500 and 1200 BC; the Upanishads from around 900-500 BC are prose commentaries on the Vedas. The two most famous works of epic poetry are the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. India has produced a great deal of lyric poetry, and theater has been a major art form there, as it was in ancient Greece, for many centuries; Kalidasa from the fifth century AD has a position within Sanskrit literature comparable to that of Shakespeare in English literature. India has a long tradition of sophisticated music and musical theory, painting and above all sculpture, but Indian music and literature is not widely followed elsewhere in the world, at least outside of Southeast Asia. India did relatively well in the arts but was weaker in science and technology, with the partial exception of mathematics.

Buddhism was a local creed until about 250 BC when Emperor Ashoka the Great (304-232 BC) converted and promoted this religion in India and far beyond. Buddhism was of limited importance in a global perspective, but it had a great influence throughout Asia and as such easily trumps any ideology developed in China. Chinese philosophies such as Confucianism and Taoism had some impact among China’s immediate neighbors, the Koreans, the Japanese and the Vietnamese, but little in other regions. The Chinese will no doubt say that this is because they do not impose their ways on others, but given China’s size and the fact that it was for centuries the world’s largest economy, the Chinese ideological impact abroad must be described as surprisingly limited. According to Thomas T. Allsen in Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia, “Almost all of the major religious movements originating in the Middle East — Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Manichaeanism, and Islam — reached China, while Chinese ideological systems made no inroads in the West. This intriguing and persistent pattern, which has never been explained, was apparently established quite early.”

As Michael H. Hart sums up, “no other non-European civilization has produced nearly the variety of high-quality literature, music, and art that India has. The mathematical knowledge of the ancient Greeks was eventually transmitted to India. However, the only important advance made by Hindu mathematicians was the invention of positional notation, which greatly simplifies arithmetic operations. Positional notation was probably invented about 700 AD; however, the first complete description is by Bhaskara, about 1150 AD. Prior to the modern era, Indians do not appear to have made significant contributions to science; nor did any important inventions come from India. The Indian subcontinent produced a thriving civilization, and in pre-modern times its culture was incomparably more sophisticated than that of backward regions such as Australia or sub-Saharan Africa.”

Let us consider the case of China. The Chinese were convinced of their superiority to all other nations and kept careful historical records. The most celebrated Chinese historian of ancient times was the palace eunuch Sima Qian (ca. 145-86 BC) during the Han Dynasty, who had an enormous influence on later Chinese historiography and on how the Chinese view their own civilization. His great work Records of the Grand Historian “is generally considered to be superior to anything written by European historians before modern times,” according to Hart.

As Bruce G. Trigger states in his fine A History of Archaeological Thought, second edition, Confucian Imperial scholars in China stressed the past as a guide to moral behavior and made historical studies an important component of the unifying Chinese culture. Bronze vessels and jade carvings from the ancient Shang Dynasty were treasured as prestige objects the way ancient vases or statues were viewed in the Classical Mediterranean. Yet the Chinese did not develop a specific corpus of techniques for recovering and studying such artifacts comparable to European archaeology. Even the ancient Greeks and Romans did not develop a systematic science dedicated to the study of physical remains from the past. According to Trigger,

“Wealthy Romans admired the works of talented Greek artists and sought to purchase the originals or good copies of them. This interest inspired the Roman author Pliny the Elder’s (AD 23-79) historical account of Greek art and artists. Yet, despite a growing interest in ancient works of art, scholars made no effort to recover or collect such artifacts systematically, nor, with the notable exception of a few works, such as that of Pliny on art, did artifacts become a specialized focus of analysis….Educated Greeks and Romans were aware that the culture of the remote past was different from that of the present and valued the fine art works from earlier times as collectibles. Yet, they did not develop a sense that these objects could be used as a basis for learning more about the past, as written records and oral traditions were being used.”

There was a general gap between theory and practice in Greek science and a strong dislike among intellectuals for studying mundane objects. Archaeology was created in early modern Europe, beginning with the growth of antiquarians from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. The influential German antiquary Johann Winckelmann (1717-1768) carefully studied Greco-Roman art and is sometimes called “the first archaeologist.” However, while his comparative work represented a great step forward in the systematic study of the past, he was not interested in the everyday life of the ancients and studied objects removed from their archaeological context. “Hence, in many ways, the claim that he was the founder of art history may be even more appropriate than the claim that he was the father of classical archaeology. Winckelmann clearly was responsible for establishing a close and lasting relation between classical studies and what was to become the separate discipline of art history.”

The eighteenth century witnessed more systematic archaeological excavations, especially at the buried Roman sites of Herculaneum and Pompeii near Naples, Italy, but prehistoric archaeology was born with the scholar Christian Jürgensen Thomsen(1788-1865) from Denmark in the early 1800s. Although he was inspired by earlier ideas and Enlightenment ideals, it was Thomsen who developed the highly influential Three Age system (Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age). During the Napoleonic Wars the Danish fleet had been destroyed by the British, so Danes needed national consolation and reassurance in their past. His importance is often underrated in historical accounts, but “Thomson’s work constituted the chronological breakthrough that set the study of prehistory on a scientific basis. His work was as fundamental for the development of prehistoric archaeology as were the major theoretical discoveries in historical geography and biology during the nineteenth century.”

Compared with the West the Chinese were a conspicuously practical people who had relatively little interest in pure mathematics or theology and no European-style religious wars. They made many useful practical inventions, from papermaking, block printing, the magnetic compass, cast iron, porcelain, wheelbarrows and canal lock gates to the use of coal as fuel.

As a writing material, bamboo was cumbersome and silk was expensive. With the invention of paper, China had a better and cheaper writing material than anything used anywhere else in the world, although a certain type of bark paper books were made by the Maya and others in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Hart believes that the introduction of paper partly explains why China was so dynamic in the period which corresponds to the Early Middle Ages in Europe. In contrast, the famous Great Wall of China is somewhat overrated. Author Julia Lovell explains in the book The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 BC — AD 2000:

“Wall-building was in general an unpopular choice because it was associated with defeat and political collapse, with short-lived imperial houses such as the brutal Qin (221-206 BC) — the first regime to erect a more or less continuous barrier across northern China — or the Sui (581-618). And the Great Wall simply hasn’t worked that well as a barrier to protect China from marauding barbarians. Ever since walls were first built across Chinese frontiers, they have provided no more than a temporary advantage over determined raiders and pillagers. When Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes conquered China in the thirteenth century AD, frontier walls proved little obstacle. The Great Wall offered no protection to the greatest wall-builders of all, the Ming dynasty, from their most threatening adversaries, the Manchus of the north-east, who ruled China as the Qing dynasty from 1644. Invaders could make detours around strong defences until they found weaknesses and gaps or, less effortfully, simply bribe Chinese officials to open the Great Wall forts. When the Manchus decided to make their final move on Beijing in 1644, they were let through a Great Wall pass by a disaffected Chinese general.”

The Great Wall could be compared to the Maginot Line, the elaborate system of concrete bunkers, tunnels and machine gun posts which France had constructed along its eastern borders following World War I. These expensive fortifications provided little effective defense for the French as the Germans during WW2 circumvented it and invaded France, anyway. When the Chinese built their Great Wall they spent a very large amount of financial and human resources on something that was, in the end, not very effective. When the Chinese invented paper and printed paper books they changed the course of human history. Sometimes the most visually spectacular creation is not necessarily the most historically important one.

A great feat of Chinese engineering which actually worked as intended was the Grand Canal, which has later been extended and now stretches from Beijing to the city of Hangzhou, roughly 1,770 km. The Japanese Buddhist pilgrim and writer Ennin (ca. 794-864), who is better known in Japan as Jikaku Daishi, was one of the many visitors who were impressed by the sheer size of the Grand Canal. Nevertheless, in architecture “The Chinese were relatively late in making use of the arch and the dome; and although they did build many attractive homes and other buildings, they did not construct anything that rivals the Parthenon in Athens, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, or the magnificent cathedrals of medieval Europe.”

In sharp contrast to the impressive list of great practical inventions was the relative sparseness of major Chinese achievements in science and mathematics. They suffered from a general lack of interest in theory in the sciences. For instance, the Chinese were diligent in keeping astronomical records, but they never created any elaborate theoretical structure and never deduced that the Earth was round. Their failure to do so made significant progress in astronomy difficult. In 1600 AD, Chinese astronomy was at least 2000 years behind the West. The Chinese made no major contributions to physics, chemistry or geology, either.

During politically strong periods China expanded into neighboring territories in the immediate south and west, especially Xinjiang and Central Asia as well as Vietnam. There were a few exceptions, mainly related to the introduction of Buddhism when some scholars went to India to study, but the Chinese usually showed little interest in exploration beyond this. There were the famous naval expeditions in the Indian Ocean during the Ming Dynasty in the early fifteenth century AD led by men such as the admiral Zheng He (1371-1433), which reached as far as the east coast of Africa. Yet the whole reason why these expeditions have generated so much attention is precisely because they constituted a rare event. The project happened comparatively late and was eventually discontinued. Claims that the Chinese reached the Americas before Christopher Columbus in 1492 are not convincing. If anything, they might have brought Eurasian crowd diseases, which means that many of the Native American peoples could in that case have died from smallpox even before the first Europeans got there.

The Chinese produced many beautiful landscape paintings, great calligraphy and a very extensive literature in philosophy, poetry, fiction and history. Relatively few of these works are widely read outside of East Asia today, one of them being the Tao Te Ching (“The Classic of the Way and its Power”) ascribed to Lao Tzu or Laozi, considered to be the founder of Taoism, some Confucian classics and above all The Art of War by Sun Tzu, by universal acclaim the greatest treatise on the psychology of warfare ever written in any language.

Virtually all of the admirable features of their civilization were created by the Chinese themselves, whereas Muslims relied heavily on knowledge generated by others, ancient Greeks, Byzantines, Persians, Hindus and Chinese. Michael H. Hart rates Chinese civilization as the only one that rivals European civilization:

“The Chinese — virtually unaided by outsiders — created a complex and complete civilization, with a smoothly functioning government, and multitudinous achievements in technology, construction, literature, the arts, and philosophy. They had a wide variety of skilled craftsmen; they maintained large, powerful armies; and they created a school system, a network of roads, an elaborate (and delicious) cuisine, and all the other attributes of a sophisticated civilization. In general, the Chinese enjoyed more internal unity than Europe. Europe has usually consisted of many independent states, often fighting one another. In contrast, China has usually been politically unified. Between 600 and 1300 AD, China was clearly more prosperous than the West. Because of this, it has often been asserted that (until the rise of modern science in the last five centuries) China was usually more advanced than the West. However, that assertion is incorrect. In the first place, even during that period, China was far behind the West in mathematics and science. In the second place, the interval 600-1300 AD was atypical. For most of recorded history — and for most of the last ten thousand years — China has been well behind the Western world in both technology and the arts.”

Yet in spite of all this, there were no Chinese equivalents to Copernicus, Newton, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Columbus or Magellan. In the ancient world, there were none to Pythagoras, Archimedes, Euclid, Hipparchus or Ptolemy, either.

During the unusually dynamic Song Dynasty (960-1279) they issued the first banknotes (paper money) and recorded the first known use of gunpowder and the magnetic compass. According to Arnold Pacey in Technology in World Civilization, “In 1100, China was undoubtedly the most technically ‘advanced’ region in the world, particularly with regard to the use of coke in iron smelting, canal transport and farm implements. Bridge design and textile machinery had also been developing rapidly. In all these fields, there were techniques in use in eleventh-century China which had no parallel in Europe until around 1700.”

The practice of footbinding, which lasted until the twentieth century and affected countless Chinese women, began during Song times. Confucian scholars found nothing objectionable about this. J. M. Roberts’ The New Penguin History of the World is somewhat dismissive of the negative impact of Islamic Jihad but still worth reading. As Roberts indicates, the history of women is often obscured by the bias of the documentation, but in China especially so:

“We hear little of them, even in literature, except in sad little poems and love stories. Yet presumably they must have made up about half of the population, or perhaps slightly less, for in hard times girl babies were exposed by poor families to die. That fact, perhaps, characterizes women’s place in China until very recent times even better than the more familiar and superficially striking practice of foot-binding, which produced grotesque deformations and could leave a high-born lady almost incapable of walking. Another China still all but excluded from the historical evidence by the nature of the established tradition was that of the peasants. They become shadowly visible only as numbers in the census returns and as eruptions of revolt; after the Han pottery figures, there is little in Chinese art to reveal them, and certainly nothing to match the uninterrupted (and often idealized) recording of the life of the common man in the fields, which runs from medieval European illumination, through the vernacular literature to the Romantics, and into the peasant subjects of the early Impressionists.”

This does not by any means indicate that the rest of Asia was technologically primitive, but China’s role was disproportionate. Professor Derk Bodde lists a number of innovations from porcelain, tea, paper and gunpowder to dominoes, playing cards and the shadow play that made their way to the West. Lacquer, like silk, is one of the products longest known in China. It comes from the sap of a tree which is native to China and is used to paint decorative designs on wooden boxes and other objects. European agriculture was improved after the arrival of tools such as the moldboard plow. The Dutch and others saw that the Chinese plough did not suit their type of soil, but Asian prototypes stimulated them to produce new designs.

Even though you can find a number of practical innovations that came to the West from China, very few theoretical scientific ideas came from East Asia. Moreover, it would be fair to say that by now China owes vastly more science and technology to the West than vice versa. Arnold Pacey admits that “…the most significant developments in Asia were the technical books published in Japan during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a handful of Chinese scientific works, and very occasional episodes in India such as the use of models in the design of the Taj Mahal in the 1630s, and the systematic use of scale drawings by some shipbuilders by the end of the eighteenth century. But such examples are few and isolated. The great preponderance of new technological potential generated by increased ability to conceptualize technical problems was accruing in the West.”

Geography may well have contributed to the early cultural and political unification of China, which was difficult in the more rugged terrain of Europe. As Jared Diamond states in Guns, Germs, and Steel, the “Sinifaction” of East Asia “involved the drastic homogenization of a huge region” and the repopulation of tropical Southeast Asia by people of Chinese origins:

“Some developments spread from south to north in China, especially iron smelting and rice cultivation. But the predominant direction of spread was from north to south. That trend is clearest for writing…All three of China’s first three dynasties, the Xia and Shang and Zhou Dynasties, arose in North China in the second millennium B.C. Preserved writings of the first millennium B.C. show that ethnic Chinese already tended then (as many still do today) to feel culturally superior to non-Chinese ‘barbarians,’ while North Chinese tended to regard even South Chinese as barbarians.”

Although Southeast Asia was originally populated by dark-skinned peoples comparable to some New Guinean groups, only a few New Guinean-like populations remain in this region today, among them the Negritos living in mountainous areas of the Philippines. The rest have been more or less completely eradicated. As Diamond writes, “The historical southward expansions of Burmese, Laotians, and Thais from South China completed the Sinification of tropical Southeast Asia. All those modern peoples are recent offshoots of their South Chinese cousins. So overwhelming was this Chinese steamroller that the former peoples of tropical Southeast Asia have left behind few traces in the region’s modern populations.”

Regarding the Indo-European expansion, Michael H. Hart supports the hypothesis championed by scholars like the archeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994), born in Vilnius, Lithuania and later based in the USA, in believing that the Proto-Indo-European homeland was in the region of southern Ukraine and Russia north of the Black Sea. Gimbutas identified the early speakers of PIE with the so-called Kurgan people who lived there after 4000 BC. These people got their name from the low mounds, kurgans, where they often buried their dead. Speakers of an early Indo-European branch which would evolve into Greek probably entered Greece from the north between 2200-2000 BC, when we can find traces indicating a disruptive intrusion in the archaeological record. The ancient Greeks themselves referred to an earlier people (the Pelasgians) who had lived in Greece before them, although he exact nature of these people and their culture is still a matter of contention. How can we explain the spread of the Indo-European languages into so many different regions and forms of terrain?

“The simplest explanation is that the original speakers of PIE possessed, on average, considerably higher intelligence than most of the peoples they defeated (including the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Pelasgians, Tartessians, Iberians, Etruscans, Berbers, and Dravidian-speaking peoples), all of whom had evolved in milder climates than had the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans. This hypothesis has the added advantage of also applying to the modern expansion of the Indo-Europeans, and it also explains their remarkable intellectual achievements. No other hypothesis comes close to explaining all of these phenomena.”

While the basic premise may well be correct, I personally find this a little simplistic since the Indo-European languages also displaced the native tongues of the northern peoples, who presumably had at least as high IQ as the Ukrainians. The only surviving pre-IE language on the entire European continent is believed to be Basque. The Basque people inhabit the Pyrenees in northern Spain and southwestern France. Their tongue has no known relatives and contains words for axe and other tools which carry the root meaning “stone.” It is perhaps a direct descendant of the languages spoken in some regions of Europe during the Stone Age. Does this mean that the Basque had uniquely high IQs since their language alone survived?

In this age of DNA analysis, some earlier findings of comparative linguistics can be confirmed through genetics. In 2008, Fox News reported that a Cornell University-led study found that white (European) Americans are genetically weaker and less diverse than their black compatriots. This follows the first rule of Political Correctness, which says that there are no significant genetic differences between different groups of people, and if there are, whites must always be inferior. I’m glad our weak genes didn’t prevent Europeans from producing individuals such as Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Beethoven and Pasteur.

The study showed that genetic diversity was greatest among Africans and smallest among Native Americans. This is consistent with the fact that North and South America were the last major landmasses to be settled by humans. The study also showed that the Basques are not closely related genetically to anyone else. Judged by a combination of linguistic and genetic evidence, the Basque people have a strong claim to being the oldest distinct nation in Europe.

Throughout history, most of the instances where people from one region have conquered another have involved “northerners” invading lands to the south. China has never been conquered by the populous nations south of it but has been repeatedly attacked from the north. On two occasions — the Mongols and the Manchus — invaders conquered all of China. Within China itself, it was the northerners who first created a unified country by conquering southern China. India, despite its large population, has never invaded the lands north of it, but has itself been repeatedly invaded from the north and northwest. The three Indian dynasties which came closest to ruling the entire subcontinent (the Mauryas, the Guptas and the Mughals) all originated in the north. According to Hart, “The obvious — and, I believe, the correct — explanation for the military superiority of the northerly peoples is the higher average intelligence of those peoples compared with the inhabitants of more tropical regions.”

Michael H. Hart admits that the Muslim conquests constitute a major counter-example to this general rule. It is true that Muslims never managed to establish lasting control over Europe, as they did in North Africa and the Middle East, but the impact of Islamic Jihad over many centuries on the nations of southern Europe was far from marginal. Regarding the Mongols, as soon as they left the dry and colder region of the mountains, both warriors and horses weakened and grew sick. They failed to adapt their successful strategies based on horses to the sea, and never conquered most of India and Southeast Asia. Their conquest of Iran and Iraq but defeat by the Egyptian Mamluks in 1260 cannot be attributed to differences in IQ.

Some would say that the mass immigration of many low-IQ peoples to white majority Western nations at the turn of the twenty-first century is another major counter-example, but this development constitutes such an anomaly in world history that it must be treated as a special case. Western nations have not been military defeated. These immigrants/colonists would not have been able to settle in these countries if they couldn’t exploit the deranged altruism and political-ideological flaws of the modern West, and they have always received substantial aid from high-IQ groups within the West itself, among them white Marxists.

Scandinavian (Norse) Vikings dominated much of northern Europe from the late eighth century on, trading as well as plundering. At home they were free farmers. The Viking Age ended in the eleventh century AD when