The revolt of the slaves or why I don’t want to get into bed with Douglas Murray
There are many religious persons on our globe, that is to say people who get comfort from prayer. Murray is an atheist, he is not a religious person, but backing some of the venues which pay him to speak are US fundamentalists, fumbling in the wardrobe for gowns not quite Klu Klux Klan. In order to pray, religious people have an object called god. Populated by their particular belief structure (elaborated from the practice of praying) god is surrounded by supernatural persons and is the source of edicts and beliefs.
Like Murray I recoil instinctively from islamic absolutism; a system without doubt seems inhumane to me. But I am conscious that my atheist reaction is coloured by my background: many generations of Protestant pastors. You might ask why I won’t get into bed with Murray and other like-minded telly people? I ask that question myself and so far the only answer I have is my feeling that behind his islam hate there is thwarted passion. He doesn’t show the rude, honest racism of the proletariat mob. There is a dry-drunk quality to his discourse.
From my perspective the grisly one-size-coverall of islam is slipping indefatigably over the globe; seductive as suicide, the more you push against it (like any drug) the more you feel it gripping you at the edge of your being, pulling you in. Why poke the musselmen with sticks Douglas? We know how excitable they are, having little of the neanderthal gene for stability that we have. I go for benevolent neutrality and a refusal to be cowed or browbeaten in individual encounters. Is it possible to respect a person if you do not respect their beliefs? Surely for an atheist like me it must be since I have no alternative axe to grind. But I would expect an islamist to deny this.
I watch a clip of a man ranting: we’re anglo-saxons, go back to where you came from. A hooded figure flits past saying: you’re just jealous because we are taking over. A shrewd dart, it forced me to imagine my ranting, puffy, Londoner as a Briton on the sea shore when the little boats full of, errr, anglo saxons arrived, which then turned into a vision of Sunak, his twinkle toes in the cold grey surf, trying to stop the tide. Most of history is war and migration. As the Yanks like (too much) to say: get over it…
*
The surge of european inventiveness, picked up and amplified by the US is now doubled by the rest of the world. They’ve found lying around what the Christian west made. They are hunter gatherers of the artefacts produced by a thousand years of ingenuity unrestrained by fatalism. But the day of the varicoloured hair people is over. Black hair people are habituating us to live in an overpopulated world, for they long ago broke out some solutions. In their societies the individual counts for less and to protect the line the women are walled off. Demographically this looks like a winning hand; objections by whites to metisization are short-sighted and futile. They had no objection to plantation affairs; most US blacks have at least one white ancestor whose domination is still a load to carry.
The telly polemicists insist that all peoples enslaved others. True, but the europeans built a system with typical ingenuity. On the ships that sailed the middle passage (according to Quarles) a procedure was invented to minimise suicide : … a ceremony known as dancing the slaves … … they were forced to jump up and down to the tune of fiddle, harp or bagpipes. (Bored Nazis did the same with Jews). They were maltreated in an industrious, european, fashion. Whether jazz would have otherwise come about we shall never know. Whether it was worth the price, including the popular music that flowed from it, might be a debate.
The Atlantic current is still running deep and now, suddenly, things have got hot. Just as Gutenberg stimulated a rush of free discussion outside the walls of privilege so generic iphones have stimulated mass tunneled reflexes, twitch responses to micro-action captures. Just as LLM learn from unlimited examples so new grade humans are learning to behave like each other. Many click bait newspaper paragraphs contain a phrase like: what everybody is saying about xxx… — the message is, learn to be the same within your assigned cluster.
Dip that complex socio-techno instrument into the hot lava of the immigration flow and you find that (as far as a near monoglot can tell) the West has constructed better theatricals: tv channels, podcasts, structured information. There may be a countervailing migrants-as-heros source of infotainment but I haven’t come across it. And yet, when you pull back and look at the longer time scale that is what some people might see them as.
It is just as likely that the unifying factor for Europe will be islam as that it should be festung europa. In that scenario China’s influence with the Eastern states will make them a transitional/translation belt back and forwards between the Russian vastness, a cultural railway gauge change, cooling both sides like a Korean style DMZ.
