[part 2]
One of the primary goals of the Islamic State and other radical Islamist groups is to drive a wedge between Sunni Muslims and the wider world, to fuel alienation as a recruiting tool.
There are a lot of people saying this, and none of them bother to back it up.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t be. Radicalizing minorities is one of the most common ways of disrupting a foreign country. The US with the Catholics in Poland, the US with everyone in Yugoslavia, the US with Chechens in Russia, Russia with Abkhazians and Ossetes in Georgia, the US with Uyghurs and Tibetans in China, the US with gays in Russia and its allies, the British Empire and the US with Beng–um, Rohingya in Burma, lord only knows who’s backing all the other ethnic separatists in Burma and how did Casa Pound end up involved with the KNLA?, the USSR with the blacks, Jews, and Finns (yes, really) in the US, the US with the Hmong in Indochina (hence Hmong refugees), the Nazis with ethnic minorities in the USSR, Libya under Gaddafi tried with the Maori in New Zealand but it didn’t work, the US will try with the Koreans in Japan if it ever loses control but it won’t work, Russia with the ~Red Tribe~ in the US…
(as I’ve said before, I bet the reason there are so many Muslims in France is that someone somewhere went ‘gee, France has a pretty big sphere of influence and could conceivably become a significant power [i.e. threat]’ and installed a kill switch while they still could)
(which could explain both the migrant crisis as a whole and the US alliance with Saudi Arabia — Iran, unlike KSA, has a population that could easily reach first-world levels of prosperity, but most Muslims are Sunni and KSA’s entire shtick is using Sunni radicalism as a kill switch, so if you want to tile a country with kill switches…)
(…of course, USG thought it could work with both Khomeini and the Taliban, and look how they turned out)
(and notice that the US isn’t taking in many Muslim refugees, and the ones it does take are either backup politicians and their families [Fethullah Gülen, Ruslan Tsarni, Seddique Mateen] or US proxy forces [Somalis])
(…because mass immigration in the US isn’t about installing a kill switch. kill switches are contingency plans; they aren’t designed to be used immediately)
(…which is one of the reasons why certain elements within these European countries are willing to cooperate with the plans to install kill switches)
…and that’s why nationalism is not and will not within the foreseeable future be “outdated”. It’s not about ‘prejudice’; it’s about national security. If there were no Muslims in the West, the West wouldn’t have to worry about radicalized Muslims.
Irish immigrants to America are often held up as models of successful assimilation, so we can use their history to predict the consequences of mass immigration today.
Mass Irish Catholic immigration to America began around 1830. Almost immediately, Irish immigrants established or revitalized political machines like Tammany Hall and gave them the votes that they needed for dominance—and the ethnic gang alliances, which were needed for intimidating voters and stuffing ballot boxes. There were a lot of Irish gangs, but the most notorious was the Winter Hill Gang, which smuggled weapons to the IRA, infiltrated the FBI, and went to war with another Irish gang—in the 1960s and 1970s.
Irish-Americans were an important source of funding for the IRA, and several Irish congressmen, like Peter King, backed it—until at least the 1980s.
To make the calculations easier, let’s say mass Hispanic immigration to America and mass Muslim immigration to Western Europe began in 2000. Judging by the experience of the Irish, we should expect Hispanic and Muslim gang activity, mass support for corrupt political machines, and perhaps even funding of foreign terrorist groups (which, in the case of the Muslims, are much worse than the IRA) to continue until at least 2150. And this is an unrealistically optimistic estimate: the Irish were more culturally similar to the founding population of America than the Hispanics are, and vastly more so than the Muslims are to the native peoples of Western Europe.
2150. Is it worth it?
Noah Smith says: “The Trump thesis is, basically, that the American experiment is over.”
What is this American experiment? Well, there are two. The first is the post-secession experiment in governance. This experiment ended in failure almost immediately, was replaced with a new one, and whatever else you might think about that government, it’s now one of the oldest on Earth.
The second, and the one Noah Smith is talking about, is the bizarre ideological innovation that the United States of America is a “nation of immigrants, where ideals and institutions matter more than race or religion.” Google Ngrams can tell you that this mutation is recent: the phrase “nation of immigrants” is essentially unused until the 20th century and only takes off in the ’60s.
In 1958, John F. Kennedy, then a senator, wrote a booklet called A Nation of Immigrants “for the One Nation Library series of the AntiDefamation League of B’nai B’rith”. He “attacked the national origins quota system as discriminatory and called for a generous, fair and flexible policy”. Kennedy lobbied for mass immigration until Lee Harvey Oswald, a Communist active in pro-Castro groups, shot him dead, possibly over the issue of Cuba. Two years later, the 1965 Immigration Act was proposed by Emanuel Celler, a pro-mass immigration ideologue from New York, and Philip Hart, the son of a banker, and helped along by Ted Kennedy.
Before 1965, the American population was 85.4% non-Hispanic white and 10.5% black. Most of America’s white population came from Western and Central Europe, especially the Germanic countries. There were some Irishmen and Italians in addition to the Englishmen, Germans, and Scandinavians, but this was no rainbow nation, nor had it ever been one.
In the early 1960s, the successful efforts of people like Theodore Roosevelt to end hyphenated-Americanism had largely succeeded. (Was Theodore Roosevelt anti-American? Apparently. Who knew.) Hyphenation was especially dead among the Germans, the largest ethnic minority at the time, partially as a result of America’s two wars against Germany; and especially not dead among the Irish, many of whom passed the hat in the pubs for the IRA. Maybe a few wars against Ireland would’ve helped, but if they hadn’t assimilated enough not to fund foreign terrorist groups…
These days, a lot of people—especially the intelligentsia, who are used to thinking of themselves as a separate class, detached from and foreign to the population as a whole, living in bubbles believed to be impregnable to the disgusting outside world—seem to think America has always been a ‘nation of immigrants’, and that the memorial that the friends of a mediocre Zionist poet had erected in her memory somewhere in New York after she died may as well be part of the Constitution. Since these people are a phyle of their own, since they already see themselves as minorities in an essentially foreign country, they have no problem with the prospect of those who are phyletically American having their homeland taken from them and used as grist for the mill of their ideological fantasies, nor with the idea that our homeland was intended as such.
(By the way, Noah, you do know what’s up with the néo-réactionnaires, right? It turns out that multiculturalism isn’t so great for the Jews. At least not the French Jews, many of whom have fled to Israel. Oops.)
20.7% of the population of the United States.
12.9% of the population speaks Spanish at home. In other words, over half of the people who don’t speak English at home speak Spanish at home. 3.7% of the population speaks another Indo-European language; the most common of these are French (0.43%) and German (0.36%).
How many people speak a European language other than Spanish at home? I’ll take ‘European languages’ to include French, Cajun, Italian, Portuguese, German, Luxembourgish, Yiddish, Pennsylvania German, Dutch, Frisian, all Scandinavian, Celtic, and Balto-Slavic languages, Greek, Romanian, Albanian, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and Basque. This comes out to about seven million people, or 2.4%. French and German make up slightly more than two million of that figure, as do the Slavic languages.
0.62% speak an Indic language other than Urdu at home. The most common are Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, and Punjabi.
0.99% speak Chinese at home, 0.55% Tagalog, 0.48% Vietnamese, and 0.38% Korean. For Asian languages as a whole, the figure is 3.3%.
Native American languages don’t make up a significant part of the statistic: only 0.12% of the population speak one at home, and 45.8% of them speak Navajo.
Almost as many people speak Arabic at home as French, and almost as many people speak an African language at home as Arabic.
8.6% of the population speak English less than “very well”.
Looking only at the part of the population that doesn’t speak English at home: 62.1% speak Spanish, 4.8% speak a Sinitic language (i.e. a “dialect of Chinese”), 2.7% speak Tagalog, 2.3% speak Vietnamese, and 2.1% speak French. These are the most common languages non-English languages spoken at home in the US; the only others with more than a million people are Korean and German. 17.8% speak an Indo-European language other than Spanish, and 11.8% speak a European language. 0.28% speak Navajo and 0.33% speak another Native American language.
Oddly, the Census Bureau considers “Paleo-siberian” (i.e. the Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Yukaghir languages, Ket, Nivkh, and Ainu) to be one language. 530 people speak it at home.
The USA comes out slightly better. English is only the second most popular language on Duolingo here. The only other first-world countries where the official language is the second most popular on Duolingo are Norway and Austria.
Duolingo’s Swedish course turns out to be the most popular in Sweden itself: 27% of all users in Sweden are learning Swedish.
Why would that be the case? Immigration to Sweden has been skyrocketing in recent years: one in six Swedish residents in 2015 was born outside of Sweden. The fastest growing foreign-born groups are from Syria and Afghanistan, reflecting a recent increase in the refugee population. Duolingo recently released a Swedish course for Arabic speakers, which will hopefully help!
But it’s not just Sweden. There are several other countries where immigrants are using Duolingo to learn the language of their new home.
In the United States, immigrants constitute 13.1% of the total population. But even more — over 20% of the population — speak a language other than English at home, and over 25 million people speak English less than “Very Well”. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, English is the second most popular language in the United States, attracting 21% of the country’s Duolingo users.
Another case is Norway, where Norwegian is the second most popular language (with 18% of all users). Similarly to Sweden, Norway has been recently accepting many migrants and refugees. According to the data from the beginning of the year, immigrants constitute 13.4% of the total population in Norway.
Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticulously, the workforce can virtually halt production. In the same fashion, the simplified rules animating plans for, say, a city, a village, or a collective farm were inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a functioning social order. The formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain. To the degree that the formal scheme made no allowance for these processes or actually suppressed them, it failed both its intended beneficiaries and ultimately its designers as well.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, via Isegoria.
If the informal processes aren’t intuitively obvious to most of the bell curve, they will have to be passed down. If enough new people come into the same place at the same time, the processes are unlikely to be passed down, or even to survive — as happened in Usenet’s eternal September. The same thing applies if there’s no need to learn those processes — why put in the effort if there’s no payoff?
What sorts of informal processes animate a city or a village?
Some of these processes are negatively affected by increases in diversity, as Robert Putnam has shown. And they would be: one process is the existence of homogeneity itself. Thedish homogeneity increases both the ability to coordinate and the likelihood of coordination: ability because less inferential distance, more similar cognitive styles, and greater ability to mentally model others, and likelihood because it fosters a sense that “we’re all in this together”, whereas thedish diversity gives rise to competing factions, a principle demonstrated most vividly by the well-known but rarely-considered phenomenon of the ethnic gang war.
Scott compares capitalism to the high-modernist bureaucratic-totalitarian states of the last century:
Large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is, with the difference being that, for capitalists, simplification must pay. A market necessarily reduces quality to quantity via the price mechanism and promotes standardization; in markets, money talks, not people. Today, global capitalism is perhaps the most powerful force for homogenization, whereas the state may in some instances be the defender of local difference and variety. (In Enlightenment’s Wake, John Gray makes a similar case for liberalism, which he regards as self-limiting because it rests on cultural and institutional capital that it is bound to undermine.) The “interruption,” forced by widespread strikes, of France’s structural adjustments to accommodate a common European currency is perhaps a straw in the wind. Put bluntly, my bill of particulars against a certain kind of state is by no means a case for politically unfettered market coordination as urged by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. As we shall see, the conclusions that can be drawn from the failures of modern projects of social engineering are as applicable to market-driven standardization as they are to bureaucratic homogeneity.
The high-modernist states often saw community and civil society as threats to their power: consider the Communists’ attacks on the churches, networks of hidden informants and spies, and attempts to incorporate all of civil society into the state in order to control and monitor it.
One of the oft-repeated phenomena of great empires is the influx of foreigners to the capital city. Roman historians often complain of the number of Asians and Africans in Rome. Baghdad, in its prime in the ninth century, was international in its population—Persians, Turks, Arabs, Armenians, Egyptians, Africans and Greeks mingled in its streets. In London today, Cypriots, Greeks, Italians, Russians, Africans, Germans and Indians jostle one another on the buses and in the underground, so that it sometimes seems difficult to find any British. The same applies to New York, perhaps even more so. This problem does not consist in any inferiority of one race as compared with another, but simply in the differences between them.
In the age of the first outburst and the subsequent Age of Conquests, the race is normally ethnically more or less homogeneous. This state of affairs facilitates a feeling of solidarity and comradeship. But in the Ages of Commerce and Affluence, every type of foreigner floods into the great city, the streets of which are reputed to be paved with gold. As, in most cases, this great city is also the capital of the empire, the cosmopolitan crowd at the seat of empire exercises a political influence greatly in excess of its relative numbers.
Second- or third-generation foreign immigrants may appear outwardly to be entirely assimilated, but they often constitute a weakness in two directions. First, their basic human nature often differs from that of the original imperial stock. If the earlier imperial race was stubborn and slow-moving, the immigrants might come from more emotional races, thereby introducing cracks and schisms into the national policies, even if all were equally loyal.
Second, while the nation is still affluent, all the diverse races may appear equally loyal. But in an acute emergency, the immigrants will often be less willing to sacrifice their lives and their property than will be the original descendants of the founder race.
Third, the immigrants are liable to form communities of their own, protecting primarily their own interests, and only in the second degree that of the nation as a whole.
Fourth, many of the foreign immigrants will probably belong to races originally conquered by and absorbed into the empire. While the empire is enjoying its High Noon of prosperity, all these people are proud and glad to be imperial citizens. But when decline sets in, it is extraordinary how the memory of ancient wars, perhaps centuries before, is suddenly revived, and local or provincial movements appear demanding secession or independence. Some day this phenomenon will doubtless appear in the now apparently monolithic and authoritarian Soviet empire. It is amazing for how long such provincial sentiments can survive.
John Glubb, The Fate of Empires.
nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst 
Recent Comments