Thursday, July 31, 2008

Auster against properly defeating Islam

It's tiresome with the usual swarm of Austerisms aimed at me, such as"deliberate lies", "crazed attacks", etc., but I will just continue ignoring it. So if we could leave Auster's lamenting about how he is unfairly attacked aside for a moment and look at the factual content of the differing positions.

In his answer to me (here and here) Auster pretends that he doesn't know what I mean by defeating Islam. I speak of a total defeat, and have been doing so all the time, not about a temporary or partial defeat. I guess in the eyes of Truman himself he saw it as having won the Korean war, but it was truly just half a victory. And Truman dismissed MacArthur for wanting to properly defeat the Korean Communists. In a similar manner Auster dismiss the idea of properly defeating Islam and and render it terminally harmless. Auster's idea of "defeating" is rather the Cold War concept of limited war. Which surely means defeating the enemy in several battles and holding him back (like in Korea). But Auster is against the idea of a total war and a total victory over Islam.

Surely he's against the idea of destroying Mecca, but he hasn't even suggested the idea of invading Mecca. How could Islam possibly be defeated without invading Mecca? Of course we could speak in terms of having defeated Islam here and there (quite as America can speak of having defeated Communism in... I can't think of a country right now... Afghanistan?), but not in terms of having defeated Islam as such (the Islamic empire), with less than invading Mecca. Islam won't see itself as defeated with less than that Mecca is invaded. That's a minimum. And if we learned anything in 1400 years it is that what is needed here is a Carthaginian peace, that is the destruction of Islam.

But Auster is an outspoken opponent against a total war against Islam as such and Carthaginian peace. He writes:

For us to aim at literally destroying the entire religion of Islam, as some people advocate, would put us in an insane position. No. We must do what is doable, and what will render us and the rest of the non-Islamic world reasonably safe. To aim at eradicating Islam from the earth is like aiming at eradicating evil from the earth. It is a form of hubristic madness, which the Western tradition has repeatedly warned us against. [My emphasis]
And below Auster even describes crushing Islam as "cultural genocide". I guess he wants to imply that there's something morally wrong with it:
Moreover, this containment of the Muslim peoples can be accomplished without violating their dignity and essence as Muslims. If we sought literally to suppress and destroy Islam, we could be justly accused of practicing cultural genocide. But if we simply contain the Muslims in their historic lands where they can have no power over us, that would not be harming them, even under the terms of their own religion.
But the essence of Auster's plan is described here:
It is no shame for a Muslim to accept defeat, because he views it as temporary, and so he waits patiently for future jihadist opportunities to arise. The wait can be very long--centuries, in fact. And that should be just fine with us.
Auster knows that his plan won't be seen as a proper defeat of Islam by the Muslims themselves. So how could a defeat be a proper one, if the enemy does not see it so himself? It can't of course.

Finally regarding how Auster uses the word "monstrous". He complains about what I had written before. He correctly points out that he only used the word to describe the idea of killing all Muslims. But I already had that covered in my qualifier "in some cases". However, the interesting thing is that in the very same answer he says "I don't think we can destroy Islam, short of killing all Muslims on earth or raining total destruction on every Muslim country on earth." So, indeed there seems to be a strong connection in his mind between monstrous and destroying Islam.

[End of post]

3 comments:

awake said...

It is tiring. Although Auster won't admit it, he is indeed tired of it as well.

Everyone is, at least those who are obviously on the same page, most tired of it.

How can we find a way to bring Auster in the fold, because he has SO much to offer, without jeapordizing our principles as non-liberal, sentient human beings?

I hope the answer is far easier than the solution of eradicating Islam and/or PC.

Just my 2 cents,

Afonso Henriques said...

Hi Conservative Swede!

I was saving my favourite blogs as favourites for the first time and I find out your blog. I found out literally because my PC had problems in acessing here, I could not go to the "home page", only directed articles. It seems Okay now.

Now be prepared because I am going to annoy you in your own blog! ... Starting now:

I agree with Lawrance Auster in this one. You simply cannot destroy islam. Islam is too powerfull for us to destroy it. It is the third or fourth greatest Civilisation on Earth and as such is indestructible. It is also stronger than ever, after Colonialism. This new generation of muslims will not aloud themselves to be bullied, especially by whities... You can't destroy islam militarly, it would be catastrophic for us to engage in such... "adventure".

The only way to destroy islam would be trough Multiculturalism but, multiculturalism seems to strenght and radicalise muslims as we can see in Europe, Africa, Thailand, etc, wherever the muslims meat non-muslims. Also, the policies of the GUlf States have been wise (well, normal and sane, I would advance) not offering citizenship or Nationality to Kaffirs or simply non Arabs (our third worlders).

I am current reading Orhan Pamuk's book "Istambul, memories of a city" and I am enjoying it. Two, or even just one year ago I had that romantic Nationalistic idea of expelling the Turks out of Europe and making Constantinople a European city again... 29th May 1453, a terrible date to Europe... but I know now that it can't be done, what about "Defeating Islam".

I am here so to defy you to, one day, whenever you have time for it or, just when you feel to be apropriate write an essay about the "morality"/need/plausibility/method to "defeat islam" because I, honestly, can not figure it out.

For me, defeating islam is to let them live in their lands, with no navy, air force or way to attack us.

Continue with the good work on the blog and with your comments at Gates of Vienna, D. Afonso Henriques.

Nobody said...

Conservative Swede

I agree with you, and disagree with Afonso, that this war cannot be won without taking the fight to the enemy. However, while I'm all for attacking and even capturing Mecca, the importance you are assigning it is somewhat overrated, given that half the ummah is in the Indian subcontinent and the East Indies, and reducing them would be a good first step in deflating that 'billion followers' claim.

I wrote a post about that discussing this on Erich's blog here. Reproducing some of it below:
My implementation of the same process would be different. For starters, instead of nuking, I'd capture Mecca & Medina, and expel all Mohammedans from there, and ban them from going there, period. That alone would heavily demoralize them, since their holiest shrines would be under infidel occupation, and while they may be angered, they'd be demoralized as well. This will take a lot less force than nuking, and at any rate, with the Saudis being militarily the paper tigers that they are, they won't be able to defend Mecca. Just expel all Mohammedans from those cities, and issue shoot at sight orders for all who dare appear. Reason I believe it'll work is that Mohammedans believe that when they destroy infidel churches, synagogues, temples, et al, that infidels would be demoralized. Just as people in the West make assumptions about Islam based on what they see in Christianity or Judaism, similarly, Mohammedans made and continue to make assumptions about Infidels based on how they themselves would react if the shoe was on the other foot. For this reason, I have in the past on JW and DW advocated 'reverse shariah', where we take shariah law, interchange Mohammedan and Infidels, and then apply them, and watch the ummah screech. For this reason, if Mecca and Medina became totally infidel cities, and the Ka'aba and the tombs of Mohammed, Abu Baqr, Aisha, Umar I and Uthman were demolished, they would be sick to their stomachs. Besides, the nukes could then be used elsewhere.

Now, lets go to the ummah that resides outside Mecca and Medina. Since >50% of the Ummah resides in the Indian subcontinent and the East Indies, start there. While I agree with the proposals to take out Iran's nukes, the same has to be done with Pakistan. It does not make sense to argue that Iran can't be a nuclear power, but Pakistan can. The way to do it is to bomb both their military and civilian nuke facilities, as well as take out their air force and command centers. The mistake a lot of people make is that since Pakistan has nukes, if Karachi was bombed, NY or LA would be bombed in response. But this is only a valid concern if the country comtemplating such an attack was India. Because while Paki missile systems would cover most of India, it wouldn't come anywhere near the US, so the US could attack Pakistan and disable them militarily like Israel did its neighbors in 1967, without risking a Paki military counter-strike on US cities. Once this was done, the goal would be to launch major attacks on Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia and make it clear that the only thing that would stop it would be these countries going Infidel. If they refused, it would be followed by nukes on their most heavily populated/major cities, such as Karachi, Dhaka, Rawalpindi, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and a neutron bomb on Lahore (Also, India would need to be read the riot act and told in no uncertain terms that unless they ban the practice of Islam within India, they too risk a fate similar to Pakistan: even they are not likely to put the survival of their Mohammedans above their own). This threat alone would make millions of Mohammedans jettison Islam, and that population would have gone down by about 500k.

Now for the rest of the world's ummah, since they are widely dispersed, the method there would be to read the major populated countries - Egypt, Turkey, Iran, et al the riot act, and maybe even accompanied by bombing major cities, like Teheran, Cairo, in addition to taking out Iran's nuke program. As far as the gulf goes, like I suggested, seizing Mecca, Medina and Arab and Iranian oilfields would accomplish the job of de-funding, as well as demoralizing them. While it's debatable as to how many Mohammedans would jettison Islam simply given a choice, the question of how many of them would do so at the barrel of a gun is another one altogether. And here, their own taqiyya would work against them, since it'll be the Mohammedans who will be at a loss to detect the genuine apostates who would jettison Islam simply given a chance, from the fakes, who may just be practicing taquiyya.

In short, my disagreement with Westerner is more on implementation details, rather than the morality of their goals themselves. I don't agree with either Auster or GoV: if they agree with us that Islam is on the whole evil, then they don't have a leg to stand on by advocating that it's immoral (rather than impractical) to destroy Islam, nuke Mecca, threaten to massacre Mohammedans or actually do it, et al