I don't think there's a better analogy for Israel/Palestine than Cain v Abel. Brilliant!
The Palestinians are a truly twisted and spiritually deformed people, an incarnation of and synonym for hatred and violence. There is absolutely no hope for people this drunk on victimhood and fantasies of bloody revenge—they even based their entire society on the destruction of another one!
Trump has just been babbling about emptying out Gaza and getting Egypt or Jordan to take in millions of refugees, and though this is most likely fruitless and he will probably forget about it and move on, it's somehow not as stupid as the sacred "2-state solution", which is hopefully dead and buried.
The Palestinians have never wanted a state, have rejected multiple offers of statehood, or in the words of Yasser Arafat: "We don’t want peace. We want war, victory. Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else. What you call peace is peace for Israel and the imperialists. For us it is injustice and shame. We will fight until victory. Decades if necessary, generations."
The "2-state solution" fantasy exists because Westerners are terrified of facing the truth about the Palestinians, as we are a deeply secular people who cannot accept that this conflict is only superficially about land but is really about religion—specifically the Islamist refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state in/near their territory. Also, Westerners really believe they reside at the apex and terminus of human history, that people will gladly give up their faith in exchange for goodies like Prime and Pornhub etc. Our leaders and thinkers have no ability to absorb or understand medieval beliefs and deeds and what they might mean and what kind of response they require.
If I were King of the Israelites I would draw a hard border somewhere, build a 20-foot prison wall across it with barbed wire and armed guards, let the Palestinians know that any bombs will be met with a 10fold response, and try to forget about them. There will never be peace with them or any kind of "2-state solution"—how many times do people have to show you who they are before you believe them?
Ta. If UNRWA was abolished, and the funding not replaced except for the tiny number of people who count as refugees under the UNHCR rules, there might be a change. The choice of making peace or starving would concentrate minds.
By defunding UNRWA Trump ensures that others, above all the UK, EU and the Gulf are left to finance Resistance Incorporated. If they want endless jihad, they pay for it. This incentivises moderation allround.
Trump's sophistication in diplomacy is quite remarkable.
The two-state solution was implemented long ago with the separation of Transjordan from the British Mandate. What people call the two-state solution is continuously dividing the part with Jews on until there is nothing worthwhile left for them.
$5billion/yr to Egypt from the US helps keep the peace. But I should have been more specific by clarifying this was in reference to handing Gaza over to them which only led to having terrorists in control next door.
From a Nietzschean point of view, the contrast reveals divergent pathways formed by history.
The Palestinians are what happens when Biblical antiquity is consumed and incorporated by Islam, the Israelis by the same when it is adapted and developed under maximum pressures in multiple portions of the Diaspora (Sassanian, European and Islamic).
A believer might say that Providence is at work.
A cheeky, terminally online, consumer of fringe culture might think it all a selective breeding programme by the Anunnaki. Speciation in belief fortified by endogamy with Jews, conquest, forced conversions and slavery with the Sunnis of Syria (aka the Palestinians).
The Pepsi challenge of beliefs, though there is the alternative of Kool Aid from various quarters.
1. A good article. There was one dimension that you neglected: geopolitics.
Secular Palestinian nationalism was curated by American philanthropy in the classic Wilsonian/ Arabist manner. Charles Richard Crane, a Chicago plutocrat, took a shine to George Antonious and financed him. Antonious, a Chrustian, produced the first works of self-conscious nationalism focussing on the Arabs of the Mandate. Previously they had been Syrian Sunnis.
At the time American interest in the region had been aroused by Lawrence, the greatest psyop in modern history. Enlightened Americans wanted an end to British rule and the US oil industry was keenly interested in exploration rights that were monopolised by the UK.
The UK itself soured on Zionism from the late 20s. In large part because of Lord Passmore (Sydney Webb) and Harry St John Philby (Kim's dad). Philby was an intelligence officer and IMHO was the number one UK man in the region during WW1. Lawrence misdirected attention from Philby's work with the Sa'udis. In the 20s this included the conquest of the emirate of their rivals, the al-Rashidi. The lands Ibn Sa'ud took from the Rashidis are where the oil is. The war is conspicuous by its omission from practically everything written about the region.
Philby told London that the best way to resolve Ibn Sa'ud's controversial image in the wider Muslim world after drivibg the Banu Hashemi from the Hijaz and the iconoclasm of the Ikhwan in Mecca and Medina was for him to become the number one champion of the cause of the Arabs of the Mandate, the proto-Palestinians. Ibn Sa'ud was a client of the UK and London was anxious about Muslim opinion in South Asia.
In the 30s Berlin and Rome also supported the cause of the Arabs in Palestine. The vote at the UN in the 40s was not all about sympathy for Jews. It was also an expression of dislike and suspicion by much of the European political class towards the Arabs who had been pro-Axis.
Ta. I didn’t want to get into what would make the post way more complicated. Also, I am not particularly knowledgeable about the geopolitics of oil.
St John Philby I was aware of. Lawrence’s activities were more directly useful to the British war effort, which, along with him being a fine writer and brilliant self-publicist, is why he gets far more attention.
Lawrence useful for humbugging the US, Philby for state-building and serious intrigue.
Philby met with Eichman in the 30s. The UK was getting seriously anti-Zionist at the time. First shots fired in anger by UK were directed at Jewish refugees attempting to reach Tel Aviv (Tiger Hill incident). Have wondered if Kim's politics and his first marriage were some kind of Oedipal reaction.
You lay down facts, as harsh they sound in this excellent essay. What’s the likelihood of Australia loosening its restrictions on receiving Gazan refugees?
We have an idiot head of ASIO (Aussie HomelandSec/FBI amalgam) who turned out to be an idiot (Mike Burgess if you need the name). He seems to think his job is to act as a problem importer rather than a sentry to keep danger out. If the Liberals promise they will take zero Palestinians they will easily get in.
Worth remembering that Malcolm Fraser disregarded advice from national security crowd and brought in refugees from Lebanon. None met the standard UN criterion, but they were from port cities in Lebanon long haunted by spooks. This is 'French Connection' stuff. The refugees were the foundig stock of the Middle Eastern crime families.
Ever since Jordan Peterson popularized the idea of resentment being destructive to the soul with his "spirit of Cain" bit, my mind immediately associated the idea with the Palestinians. You have eloquently captured the essence of Palestinian identity in your essay.
I wish more people could see past their ideological blinders to get a good look at the folks who have made it their life's mission, quite literally, to eradicate Israel; that's not the end goal, it's the opening act.
It was listening to a James Lindsay podcast where he talked about the “woke Right” as acting out the role of Cain, and then, serendipity, watching a Jordan Peterson YT snippet when he talked about Cain, and remembering previous such commentary from him, and listening to a podcast that discussed Israel/Palestine that made me go, aha!
nailed it here. Like in many things, if you stop funding failure, it will eventually fix itself. But the Left, UN, and NGO complex will die on this hill of funding these terrorists.
3. The US made the PLO an American client and forced the Israelis to accept a Palestinian statelet on the West Bank and in Gaza. They bullied Sharon into evacuating Gaza in 2005.
My take is that before Trump the US wanted to keep the jihad going endlessly. Obama was as keen as possible for this.
Then October 7. Biden and Blinken wanted Netanyahu out but were constrained in how they did this. Probably because the US is deeply compromised by its relationship with Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar and by infiktration of its intelligence community by all three.
There is a sub rosa espionage prosecution underway in Israel. On Oct 7 they arrested a spy in the command post of the district adjacent to Gaza. Strict suppression of what is going on.
The charges against Netanyahu and Gallant may well be leverage for Washington to ensure that nothing embarrassing comes to light from the trial. Worth noting that Obama leaked both civilian and military intelligence to Hizbollah. No reason not to think that the Biden Admin was up to serious mischief in this regards too. This fits with the presence of military grade weapons on the aid convoy organised by World Central Kitchen (which was not checked by US military because State Dep't had vouched for them).
Trump's re-election transformed the dynamic. We live in interesting times.
I'll offer a third explanation: at least since progressives of the ACLU fought the Skokie case, being on the right side of history has been very lucrative. Pretending to be a principled human rights lawyer signals that you will work for anyone, no matter how depraved. And international migration causes a lot of legal complexity which makes work for said lawyers.
In the UK context, the intifada was considered the sister struggle of Irish republicanism, which came in handy when shipping weapons and explosives from the Middle East. And so hard left champagne socialists like Jeremy Corbyn never met a terrorist they didn't like.
Progressives have long argued that asylum seekers (including people fleeing justice) are not economic migrants. That is, any right to remain does not depend on making an economic contribution, or even a commitment to integrate with the host society. I think your analysis demonstrates that to be true.
Previous generations of migrants, without state support, generally had no alternative but to work and make a living for themselves, except the horror of the Dickensian workhouse. See my recent article on reparations for examples of successful integration by Russian-speaking Jews in London.
Any crime which results from failures of social integration creates more work for lawyers. It's a win-win for them.
As for high land prices and excessive regulation being the cause of housing shortages, please see my recent essays on British and Australian housing; comments welcome.
Foisting Palestinians on the West, or on Egypt, or on Jordan is unfair. But so is leaving them in place on Israel's border to attack once they have regrouped. Is there a half-way reasonable solution?
It may be an insoluble problem. Stop paying them not to make peace with Israel would be a good start. I cannot see any chance of a solution while that is still happening.
Do you support a two-state solution then? If the Middle East won’t take them, and the West shouldn’t take them, and their current status as perpetually aggrieved and forever homeless is untenable, what are they supposed to do?
Or a three state solution: one in Gaza, one in the West Bank plus Israel. (Four, it you count Jordan.) It is all a bit moot while the Palestinians continue to be paid not to make peace with Israel.
They could try something they've never tried before. Stop being fucking terrorists. Start acting like they want a functioning state instead of a terrorist haven. Start being responsible citizens of the world in the 21st century, instead of medieval barbarians. Maybe then they'd have some decent options.
When one reads Razib Khan's discussions about populations migrating and disappearing, like in this article https://www.razibkhan.com/p/we-are-what-we-speak-indo-european , the theme repeats over and over again. None of these civilizations, at their peak, ever imagined that a few hundred, a few thousand, or even ten thousand years later, they would merely be archaeological and genetic data representing one of many major or minor tribes, cultures, or civilizations.
So it will be for us. Someone in the far future will say our epitaph. I'm curious what it could be. Most likely the epitaphs we give to these past people: "They were long time ago and they lost and disappeared, and there was nothing they could have done. Now it is different."
Sudetentlanders hold occasional get together but are not allowed to form armies or set up militias. It is amazing how well things work when Wilsonianism is honoured in rhetoric but not practice.
Our continent 🇺🇸 has many centuries- and Space, the solar system- in front of us. Indeed we will ultimately birth our Doom, not the others. For all the Dross we 🇺🇸 have the steel of the others.
"Most non-monotheist societies have strict rules against marrying within one’s kin-group. The problem with monotheism is that its notion of a unified moral and ritual order breaks the ritual boundaries around kin-groups."
Ha-ha.
An otherwise excellent piece, but seriously, do you think the Arabian tribes, or Celtic tribes, *started* endogamous marriage when they became monotheistic? No, that is the default state of clans: the Hindus and Romani being modern examples. One of the advantages of having the Jewish scriptures is we have a record of how that can change; the near annihilation of the Tribe of Benjamin required marriages with the other tribes, flipping the entire nation over to exogamous relations - and dramatically changing the entire nature of the nation, going from the tribal rule of the judges to the age of the kings.
Most is not all. Across East Asia and upland South-East Asia, for instance, the rules were very much you marry outside your patrilineal group.
One of the reasons for so many male-only secret societies in New Guinea and Sub-Saharan Africa was so the men could plot without the women warning their kin-folk, the women having married in from precisely the groups you might go to war with. If you have marriages inside the kin-group, that wasn’t a problem.
Marrying inside your ethnicity was utterly normal: that is not the form of endogamy which is at issue.
The Germanics and the Steppe peoples were also very much, do not marry inside your kin group. The Germanic resistance to marrying kin was one of the reasons the Latin Church could get so finicky: it was partly pushing at an open door. They both had armed women, which would have made out-kin marriage less threatening.
The Middle East proper does seem to have been a bit of a different case. Can’t comment on the Celts, don’t know the story there: though they also had armed women.
One of the reasons that anthropologists made quite a fuss about Dravidian patterns is precisely the tendency for uncle-niece marriages. It was a strikingly unusual pattern. Though, that was only an in-kin-group pattern if the kin-group was matrilineal.
The West's weakness is that we have set ourselves the standard that we must treat the barbarian according to the same standard we grant to the civilized. The barbarian however is free to rape & pillage in return. Look at Ukraine with Russians benefiting from the same asymmetry.
In the olden days powers didn't mess around - atrocities such as Oct7 would have ended with killing all men and enslavement of the women & children, just like the Turks did at Chios. There is room for magnanimity but extending civilized treatment to the barbarian is suicidal.
Wasting civilised behaviour on barbarians is a perennial error. If the lapse into barbarism is temporary—e.g., Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan—civilised behaviour from a position of overwhelming strength can demonstrably work. Other than that …
I would like to congratulate those who have commented for their informed and civilised comments on a matter that brings out the crazies.
I don't think there's a better analogy for Israel/Palestine than Cain v Abel. Brilliant!
The Palestinians are a truly twisted and spiritually deformed people, an incarnation of and synonym for hatred and violence. There is absolutely no hope for people this drunk on victimhood and fantasies of bloody revenge—they even based their entire society on the destruction of another one!
Trump has just been babbling about emptying out Gaza and getting Egypt or Jordan to take in millions of refugees, and though this is most likely fruitless and he will probably forget about it and move on, it's somehow not as stupid as the sacred "2-state solution", which is hopefully dead and buried.
The Palestinians have never wanted a state, have rejected multiple offers of statehood, or in the words of Yasser Arafat: "We don’t want peace. We want war, victory. Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else. What you call peace is peace for Israel and the imperialists. For us it is injustice and shame. We will fight until victory. Decades if necessary, generations."
The "2-state solution" fantasy exists because Westerners are terrified of facing the truth about the Palestinians, as we are a deeply secular people who cannot accept that this conflict is only superficially about land but is really about religion—specifically the Islamist refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state in/near their territory. Also, Westerners really believe they reside at the apex and terminus of human history, that people will gladly give up their faith in exchange for goodies like Prime and Pornhub etc. Our leaders and thinkers have no ability to absorb or understand medieval beliefs and deeds and what they might mean and what kind of response they require.
If I were King of the Israelites I would draw a hard border somewhere, build a 20-foot prison wall across it with barbed wire and armed guards, let the Palestinians know that any bombs will be met with a 10fold response, and try to forget about them. There will never be peace with them or any kind of "2-state solution"—how many times do people have to show you who they are before you believe them?
Ta. If UNRWA was abolished, and the funding not replaced except for the tiny number of people who count as refugees under the UNHCR rules, there might be a change. The choice of making peace or starving would concentrate minds.
Short of that, as you say.
By defunding UNRWA Trump ensures that others, above all the UK, EU and the Gulf are left to finance Resistance Incorporated. If they want endless jihad, they pay for it. This incentivises moderation allround.
Trump's sophistication in diplomacy is quite remarkable.
The two-state solution was implemented long ago with the separation of Transjordan from the British Mandate. What people call the two-state solution is continuously dividing the part with Jews on until there is nothing worthwhile left for them.
land for peace didn't work before and it won't work again
Worked with Egypt, not Hamas or Hezbollah.
$5billion/yr to Egypt from the US helps keep the peace. But I should have been more specific by clarifying this was in reference to handing Gaza over to them which only led to having terrorists in control next door.
From a Nietzschean point of view, the contrast reveals divergent pathways formed by history.
The Palestinians are what happens when Biblical antiquity is consumed and incorporated by Islam, the Israelis by the same when it is adapted and developed under maximum pressures in multiple portions of the Diaspora (Sassanian, European and Islamic).
A believer might say that Providence is at work.
A cheeky, terminally online, consumer of fringe culture might think it all a selective breeding programme by the Anunnaki. Speciation in belief fortified by endogamy with Jews, conquest, forced conversions and slavery with the Sunnis of Syria (aka the Palestinians).
The Pepsi challenge of beliefs, though there is the alternative of Kool Aid from various quarters.
Have posted some threads of my own just now. May or may not be worth reading.
hey u have a link?
i cant find em
https://open.substack.com/pub/lorenzofromoz/p/taking-in-palestinian-refugees-is?r=2pu69&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=91194396
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/taking-in-palestinian-refugees-is/comment/91192546?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2pu69
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/taking-in-palestinian-refugees-is/comment/91189893
A deeply profound rendering of the Middle East. I will have to read this a couple more times, before making some comments, if any.
1. A good article. There was one dimension that you neglected: geopolitics.
Secular Palestinian nationalism was curated by American philanthropy in the classic Wilsonian/ Arabist manner. Charles Richard Crane, a Chicago plutocrat, took a shine to George Antonious and financed him. Antonious, a Chrustian, produced the first works of self-conscious nationalism focussing on the Arabs of the Mandate. Previously they had been Syrian Sunnis.
At the time American interest in the region had been aroused by Lawrence, the greatest psyop in modern history. Enlightened Americans wanted an end to British rule and the US oil industry was keenly interested in exploration rights that were monopolised by the UK.
The UK itself soured on Zionism from the late 20s. In large part because of Lord Passmore (Sydney Webb) and Harry St John Philby (Kim's dad). Philby was an intelligence officer and IMHO was the number one UK man in the region during WW1. Lawrence misdirected attention from Philby's work with the Sa'udis. In the 20s this included the conquest of the emirate of their rivals, the al-Rashidi. The lands Ibn Sa'ud took from the Rashidis are where the oil is. The war is conspicuous by its omission from practically everything written about the region.
Philby told London that the best way to resolve Ibn Sa'ud's controversial image in the wider Muslim world after drivibg the Banu Hashemi from the Hijaz and the iconoclasm of the Ikhwan in Mecca and Medina was for him to become the number one champion of the cause of the Arabs of the Mandate, the proto-Palestinians. Ibn Sa'ud was a client of the UK and London was anxious about Muslim opinion in South Asia.
In the 30s Berlin and Rome also supported the cause of the Arabs in Palestine. The vote at the UN in the 40s was not all about sympathy for Jews. It was also an expression of dislike and suspicion by much of the European political class towards the Arabs who had been pro-Axis.
Ta. I didn’t want to get into what would make the post way more complicated. Also, I am not particularly knowledgeable about the geopolitics of oil.
St John Philby I was aware of. Lawrence’s activities were more directly useful to the British war effort, which, along with him being a fine writer and brilliant self-publicist, is why he gets far more attention.
Lawrence useful for humbugging the US, Philby for state-building and serious intrigue.
Philby met with Eichman in the 30s. The UK was getting seriously anti-Zionist at the time. First shots fired in anger by UK were directed at Jewish refugees attempting to reach Tel Aviv (Tiger Hill incident). Have wondered if Kim's politics and his first marriage were some kind of Oedipal reaction.
You lay down facts, as harsh they sound in this excellent essay. What’s the likelihood of Australia loosening its restrictions on receiving Gazan refugees?
We are doing it a bit, and the Opposition is against it.
https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/help-and-support/hamas-israel-conflict/information-for-palestinian-israeli-nationals-temporary-humanitarian-stay#.
We have an idiot head of ASIO (Aussie HomelandSec/FBI amalgam) who turned out to be an idiot (Mike Burgess if you need the name). He seems to think his job is to act as a problem importer rather than a sentry to keep danger out. If the Liberals promise they will take zero Palestinians they will easily get in.
Worth remembering that Malcolm Fraser disregarded advice from national security crowd and brought in refugees from Lebanon. None met the standard UN criterion, but they were from port cities in Lebanon long haunted by spooks. This is 'French Connection' stuff. The refugees were the foundig stock of the Middle Eastern crime families.
Ever since Jordan Peterson popularized the idea of resentment being destructive to the soul with his "spirit of Cain" bit, my mind immediately associated the idea with the Palestinians. You have eloquently captured the essence of Palestinian identity in your essay.
I wish more people could see past their ideological blinders to get a good look at the folks who have made it their life's mission, quite literally, to eradicate Israel; that's not the end goal, it's the opening act.
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/arab-tourist-in-berlin-provokes-outrage
It was listening to a James Lindsay podcast where he talked about the “woke Right” as acting out the role of Cain, and then, serendipity, watching a Jordan Peterson YT snippet when he talked about Cain, and remembering previous such commentary from him, and listening to a podcast that discussed Israel/Palestine that made me go, aha!
nailed it here. Like in many things, if you stop funding failure, it will eventually fix itself. But the Left, UN, and NGO complex will die on this hill of funding these terrorists.
3. The US made the PLO an American client and forced the Israelis to accept a Palestinian statelet on the West Bank and in Gaza. They bullied Sharon into evacuating Gaza in 2005.
My take is that before Trump the US wanted to keep the jihad going endlessly. Obama was as keen as possible for this.
Then October 7. Biden and Blinken wanted Netanyahu out but were constrained in how they did this. Probably because the US is deeply compromised by its relationship with Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar and by infiktration of its intelligence community by all three.
There is a sub rosa espionage prosecution underway in Israel. On Oct 7 they arrested a spy in the command post of the district adjacent to Gaza. Strict suppression of what is going on.
The charges against Netanyahu and Gallant may well be leverage for Washington to ensure that nothing embarrassing comes to light from the trial. Worth noting that Obama leaked both civilian and military intelligence to Hizbollah. No reason not to think that the Biden Admin was up to serious mischief in this regards too. This fits with the presence of military grade weapons on the aid convoy organised by World Central Kitchen (which was not checked by US military because State Dep't had vouched for them).
Trump's re-election transformed the dynamic. We live in interesting times.
The Lebanese discovered that firsthand in the 1980s.
I'll offer a third explanation: at least since progressives of the ACLU fought the Skokie case, being on the right side of history has been very lucrative. Pretending to be a principled human rights lawyer signals that you will work for anyone, no matter how depraved. And international migration causes a lot of legal complexity which makes work for said lawyers.
In the UK context, the intifada was considered the sister struggle of Irish republicanism, which came in handy when shipping weapons and explosives from the Middle East. And so hard left champagne socialists like Jeremy Corbyn never met a terrorist they didn't like.
Progressives have long argued that asylum seekers (including people fleeing justice) are not economic migrants. That is, any right to remain does not depend on making an economic contribution, or even a commitment to integrate with the host society. I think your analysis demonstrates that to be true.
Previous generations of migrants, without state support, generally had no alternative but to work and make a living for themselves, except the horror of the Dickensian workhouse. See my recent article on reparations for examples of successful integration by Russian-speaking Jews in London.
Any crime which results from failures of social integration creates more work for lawyers. It's a win-win for them.
As for high land prices and excessive regulation being the cause of housing shortages, please see my recent essays on British and Australian housing; comments welcome.
Foisting Palestinians on the West, or on Egypt, or on Jordan is unfair. But so is leaving them in place on Israel's border to attack once they have regrouped. Is there a half-way reasonable solution?
It may be an insoluble problem. Stop paying them not to make peace with Israel would be a good start. I cannot see any chance of a solution while that is still happening.
Excellent Lorenzo. Thank you. This one is a keeper.
💯 agreed.
Do you support a two-state solution then? If the Middle East won’t take them, and the West shouldn’t take them, and their current status as perpetually aggrieved and forever homeless is untenable, what are they supposed to do?
Or a three state solution: one in Gaza, one in the West Bank plus Israel. (Four, it you count Jordan.) It is all a bit moot while the Palestinians continue to be paid not to make peace with Israel.
Israel will never accept a foreign state in the West Bank because it is a landing place for invasion across the water.
They have offered such a state at least twice. Once under Barak and again under Olmert.
They could try something they've never tried before. Stop being fucking terrorists. Start acting like they want a functioning state instead of a terrorist haven. Start being responsible citizens of the world in the 21st century, instead of medieval barbarians. Maybe then they'd have some decent options.
We just need to teach boys not to rape!
Disappear. It’s quite normal.
Which they will, they’re a relic of the Progressive age which is passing, not fast enough.
When one reads Razib Khan's discussions about populations migrating and disappearing, like in this article https://www.razibkhan.com/p/we-are-what-we-speak-indo-european , the theme repeats over and over again. None of these civilizations, at their peak, ever imagined that a few hundred, a few thousand, or even ten thousand years later, they would merely be archaeological and genetic data representing one of many major or minor tribes, cultures, or civilizations.
So it will be for us. Someone in the far future will say our epitaph. I'm curious what it could be. Most likely the epitaphs we give to these past people: "They were long time ago and they lost and disappeared, and there was nothing they could have done. Now it is different."
actually, they did. 'the wheel of history' was a normal belief in pagan societies. They knew that every empire died.
Sudetentlanders hold occasional get together but are not allowed to form armies or set up militias. It is amazing how well things work when Wilsonianism is honoured in rhetoric but not practice.
Our continent 🇺🇸 has many centuries- and Space, the solar system- in front of us. Indeed we will ultimately birth our Doom, not the others. For all the Dross we 🇺🇸 have the steel of the others.
"Most non-monotheist societies have strict rules against marrying within one’s kin-group. The problem with monotheism is that its notion of a unified moral and ritual order breaks the ritual boundaries around kin-groups."
Ha-ha.
An otherwise excellent piece, but seriously, do you think the Arabian tribes, or Celtic tribes, *started* endogamous marriage when they became monotheistic? No, that is the default state of clans: the Hindus and Romani being modern examples. One of the advantages of having the Jewish scriptures is we have a record of how that can change; the near annihilation of the Tribe of Benjamin required marriages with the other tribes, flipping the entire nation over to exogamous relations - and dramatically changing the entire nature of the nation, going from the tribal rule of the judges to the age of the kings.
Most is not all. Across East Asia and upland South-East Asia, for instance, the rules were very much you marry outside your patrilineal group.
One of the reasons for so many male-only secret societies in New Guinea and Sub-Saharan Africa was so the men could plot without the women warning their kin-folk, the women having married in from precisely the groups you might go to war with. If you have marriages inside the kin-group, that wasn’t a problem.
Marrying inside your ethnicity was utterly normal: that is not the form of endogamy which is at issue.
The Germanics and the Steppe peoples were also very much, do not marry inside your kin group. The Germanic resistance to marrying kin was one of the reasons the Latin Church could get so finicky: it was partly pushing at an open door. They both had armed women, which would have made out-kin marriage less threatening.
The Middle East proper does seem to have been a bit of a different case. Can’t comment on the Celts, don’t know the story there: though they also had armed women.
One of the reasons that anthropologists made quite a fuss about Dravidian patterns is precisely the tendency for uncle-niece marriages. It was a strikingly unusual pattern. Though, that was only an in-kin-group pattern if the kin-group was matrilineal.
Look you’re being replaced.
What the Muslims bring to the table is your head.
That’s it.
That’s their social capital, that’s their “per capita” literally.
Now you either are too civilized (weak) to survive, or you aren’t.
Laws and reason and talk and writing got you into this, they won’t get you out. They will get you extinct. You’re on your way.
Force or Farce. Survive or perish.
All safety and owning anything including yourself is Force, the rest Farce and betrayal.
The West's weakness is that we have set ourselves the standard that we must treat the barbarian according to the same standard we grant to the civilized. The barbarian however is free to rape & pillage in return. Look at Ukraine with Russians benefiting from the same asymmetry.
In the olden days powers didn't mess around - atrocities such as Oct7 would have ended with killing all men and enslavement of the women & children, just like the Turks did at Chios. There is room for magnanimity but extending civilized treatment to the barbarian is suicidal.
Wasting civilised behaviour on barbarians is a perennial error. If the lapse into barbarism is temporary—e.g., Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan—civilised behaviour from a position of overwhelming strength can demonstrably work. Other than that …
exactly right. Just like rules of war don't apply to fighting terrorists.