Wretchard, you are respectfully, telling yourself a pretty lie. Yes it is ugly that race does indeed matter and forms the fundamental basis for human organization. But indeed it does matter FAR MORE than culture: Peruvian, Chilean, Argentinian, Brazilian, Mexican, French, Spanish, Italian, and Polish Catholics do not fly planes into British buildings because the British occupy the Six Counties in Northern Ireland.
It matters “what side you are on.” The Reconquista succeeded and Byzantium failed because the former incorporated Race INTO the nation-ethno state, and the latter did not. Race is not merely a matter of skin color, rather a high-trust network of people who have the same cultural, religious, social, and other attitudes that mark them “SORTA LIKE VERY DISTANT COUSINS.”
You can trust your distant cousins, more than a fellow who looks like you but has a different language, culture, religion, and values. Malcolm X wrote of his spiritual awakening (as did Richard Burton) in Mecca when he observed the brotherhood of the Haj. BUT … Islam’s curse is that brotherhood is temporary, only for the Haj, and not something to organize a society around. A nation of vastly extended cousins, certainly is, and certainly works: Japan, Finland, Spain, France, Sweden, all function at a high level and have done so historically on the “cousin-principle.”
Moreover, all throughout the Dark and Middle Ages, the fantasy of having Muslims inside Europe in some happy John Lennon-esque multicultural heaven was found to be an ugly nightmare. This problem was “solved” by one side conquering and forcibly converting or expelling or killing the other. For Spaniards, that meant the Reconquista and the trust that a fellow Spaniard inspired. For Turks, that meant conquering the Balkans as a Slave possession and treating them as slaves, from which they have never really recovered and probably never will.
There is ZERO possibility that Muslims in Britain or other places in the West will be anything other than Muslims: a foreign entity desiring to conquer it, and the only solution for Europeans is expelling them all, long term. You can’t be “half-Sharia” in Britain or Denmark, and ordinary men there who wish to remain British or Danes cannot wish the problem away. It is NOT a problem of “protection from Jihadis” of “Moderate Muslims” since in the first place, there is no such thing as “Moderate Muslims” anymore than “just a bit pregnant” and secondly, the problem is that nation-states simply don’t function without an ethnic-religious-cultural state and significant minorities who differ in any respect in any numbers are an existential threat to unity and trust essential for a nation-state.
This is why Japan is a modern, coherent, wealthy nation and the Philippines a total mess, and why each is unlikely to ever change. Japan is filled with people who look, act, talk, believe, and behave like distant relatives and the Philippines is not. [Though to be fair, Big-Man-ism like my ancestors Ireland and Scotland can also produce pretty tribal and stupid feuds allowing powerful neighbors to gobble them up. Japan only advanced as it dialed down the Big Man-ism to some degree.]
Alexis — And how long exactly did Byzantium hold those places? A few years at best. By contrast, the disorganized, un-centralized, Viking-harassed West kicked Muslims out of Southern Italy and Sicily, PERMANENTLY. They never again ruled those places, at around the same time. Muslims were expelled from Southern France at around the same time. They were expelled because men were willing to fight and die to keep foreigners out of “their” lands. Not fight a meaningless battle for an Emperor more concerned with palace intrigues and likely to be replaced by an appeaser or weakling at any time by palace nobles, priests, and mercenaries.
Wretchard wonders how the West self-inflicted these cultural wounds that created evil Clown politicians? Duh. Because the West is in many ways, Byzantium: Wealthy, powerful, centralized, matriarchal, mercenary/volunteer driven military (instead of broad conscription), elite-ridden, priest-ridden, lacking NATIONALISM.
