The Islamic Mind vs. The Church/White Guilt/Colonialism/White Man's Burden

The Muslims Are Restless***

Four thoughts. The first three from commenters at Gates of Vienna:

From Rita Malik:

I am an Iranian ex-pat, and I want to tell you my perspective on these issues as an outsider to Western culture: 

As I have observed you Westerners now for close to twenty years that I have lived amongst you, I have learned that you are a people that think you are responsible for all the things that go on in the world. 

You are obsessively solution-oriented people, which means you think for any problem that we have in this world, there must be a solution, and you implement various solutions to international problems that you see around you. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. 

You also are a highly responsible people, and when even the slightest thing goes wrong, you are very angry and indignant about it and you quickly want to find the one responsible for it and punish him. You quickly look for someone to sue. 

Being a guilt-oriented culture (as oppose to shame- and honour- oriented) also you are very quick to take responsibility when you feel (real or imagined) that you did something wrong and quickly start to beat your chests in a public mea culpa and engage in proverbial self-flagellation. 

All of the above make you incapable of understanding people from my neck of the woods, and your and our tendencies have made a really toxic combination on the world stage. 

Why? Because we in the Middle East are a very irresponsible and fatalistic lot. When things go wrong for us (as they often do) we never fuss too much over why they went wrong. We expect things to go wrong all the time as part of the natural process of things, and when they do we don’t try to find the guilty party to sue him. Analysis and self-reflection and making sure it will never happen again and stuff like that are highly alien activities to us. 

Unless of course what went wrong causes us shame and embarrassment, in which case we will do anything possible to deflect blame from ourselves, especially if we have a hunch that it actually was our fault. We will make a lot of noise, give lots of excuses and engage in a lot of blame-shifting. We roll up in a fetal position and pretend that we are actually the prime victims of what went wrong, all the while knowing full well that we have caused the damned thing to go wrong ourselves! 

All of that dysfunctional behaviour is highly exacerbated if there is a willing person (or country or culture) who is gladly taking all the blame for our behaviour on himself and has the peculiar tendency to totally disregard our role in what went wrong. 

Now this toxic mix applies to the politics and wars in the Middle East and in the Third World in general in this following way: 

We in the Middle East have a problem. For example we have a brutal dictator like Saddam. Then you see that we are suffering and people are being tortured in his prison and you wonder how you could help. Then Saddam invades Kuwait. You decide, enough is enough, and attack and free Kuwait, but you decide not to go all the way in and remove Saddam. Then Saddam, angrier than ever, lashes out even more at his own people and kills lots of dissidents and gasses the Kurds. 

Now all of this becomes your fault, because you didn’t finish the job and didn’t remove Saddam. Then Saddam continues his bad behaviour and now he is even trying to develop WMDs. This time you say, enough is enough, and you go in and remove him. You offer democracy and financial aid on a platter to the Iraqis. Now in post-Saddam Iraq, Shias and Sunnis start to fight and chaos starts to reign, and no matter how much you try you cannot properly pacify the country. 

So now all of this chaos becomes your fault. Everybody says that you should not have intervened and removed Saddam because even though he was brutal, he was keeping everyone in line and preventing Shias and Sunnis from killing each other. So now what do you do? You say OK! Enough is enough, we leave and won’t intervene again because we just made a mess. So you pull out your troops, and now what? The Shia vs. Sunni fight is exacerbated, and even war and chaos spreads to the rest of the region. In Syria you decided not to intervene and now ISIS has taken over. So now you assume that the rise of ISIS was somehow your fault as well. But had you actually intervened and tried to put in a regime that was a bit more manageable than ISIS, you would have been blaming yourself for having installed a puppet regime that would predictably torture everyone and make people miserable and want to leave their country. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t seems to be the destiny of any policy that you pursue in the Third World. 

People are still blaming the West for not having intervened in Rwanda in the ’90s when 800,000 people were killed, while simultaneously blaming the West for intervening in Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere. 

In all of these blame and regrets one thing is missing: assigning responsibility to the people of the Third World themselves, who are actually the primary causes of the chaos and mayhem in their own countries. As if we are passive objects that if you push the wrong button in us we will inevitably act in a certain way. The West was notat fault for the genocide in Rwanda! The Rwandans were! The West is not at fault for the chaos in the Middle East, we Middle Easterners are! We are the ones who have a bloodlust and long to shed each other’s blood for silly reasons. Your “failure” to stop us from destroying ourselves IS NOT YOUR FAULT!! We are a confusing and hard to deal with lot! Please get that!! 

In dealing with us, the people of the Middle East, you have had, and will have one long series of lose-lose options. There are no win-lose options! None! When dealing with irresponsible and bloodthirsty cultures you cannot have good outcomes, no matter how much you wrack your heads and try to come up with a policy that would work and bring peace and prosperity to us. It will not happen! We are the ones who have to change and do some self-reflection and soul-searching in order to maybe… just maybe, learn to be a bit more civilised! 

Meanwhile, all that I ask of you is that, whether you decide to intervene or not in our affairs, keep your expectation of the outcome low. Accept no responsibility for the outcome. Put the blame for the negative outcome of whatever policy you pursued where it belongs (on us!) so that we won’t have the chance to save face despite our countries’ being in an embarrassing mess, and feel like victims when we should be soul-searching. And, for the sake of anything that you hold holy and dear, please don’t wreck your nice and orderly and civilised societies and advanced cultures by taking millions of refugees, in order to save us from the mess that has nothing to do with you and came about despite your best efforts, that we have caused with our own hands, and given half the chance, we will cause in your countries as well as soon as we settle down here, or even sooner!

 The second:

MC in Sderot: The ‘Christian white male’ is guilty until proven innocent, this is the ‘prime directive’ of the federation. Think of a new National Socialism but on a worldwide scale, but for Jews and Slavs, substitute the ‘Christian white male’ ( It is difficult to see the problem clearly when you ARE the problem, because YOU caused all the wars, and YOU stole all the resources….). 

So what will be the final solution to the ‘Christian white male’ problem? Well, we get the white male ‘Judenrat/papacy’ to collaborate by collating and assigning all white Christian males to economic ‘debt’ ghettos, we then bankrupt/liquidate each ghetto piecemeal, and in turn, replacing the ‘Christian white males’ with the more desirable brown or black pagan males. 

Problem solved, world peace reigns…..

Second third:

I have noticed the collective western narcissism which used to manifest itself as imperialism (“we are superior, so lets invade all these mismanaged areas as bring our superior order to those places”) and now tend to manifest as some sort of colonialist guilt which works like this: We are superior, all powerful, and everything revolves around us, so if there is a problem in the world then we are guilty 

because either: 

1) we didn’t do anything to stop it or 

2) we must have caused it ourselves 

This attitude is common at universities where every single conflict or problem anywhere is blamed on “colonialism”. In other words, white people must have caused all problems. 

About 2 years ago met a girl who was an “International Studies” major about to graduate She was from a wealthy family, and had even lived in different countries. I asked her why she majored in international studies. Did she want to work for the state department? 

No. She wanted to go negotiate peace between groups in Africa. She had been there to see the dead bodies. 

She started talking about some essay she had written and I mentioned: “you know, these sorts of conflicts have been going on there for thousands of years.” She immediately had nothing more to say, probably because this would involve a politically incorrect discussion about how every problem in Africa might not be caused by white people, but various cultural problems might be present there. 

I imagine that the people in Africa that she was talking about would be laughing their [nether regions] off at the idea of some white princess showing up to negotiate peace. I mean, what does some white girl have to do with anything? Then if she did show up they’d be thinking this person has nothing to do with this, but maybe we can exploit this situation somehow to better achieve our objectives, crush our enemies, etc. 

With no structural-functional understanding of what was going on, her Marxist conflict theory beliefs would just be exploited by people who didn’t buy into such ideas except as something else to exploit. 

Anyway, the psychology of this person, after sufficient indoctrination, was probably something like: 

1) I’m white and wealthy 

2) everything happens because of white wealthy people 

3) therefore everything is my fault 

4) therefore I should fix it and go negotiate peace in Africa 

This narcissistic causality belief is typical of very young children, but westerners seem to have embraced it at a cultural level. Whether the idea is one of conquering the world or saving it, both are based on the narcissistic notion that the whole world is somehow the responsibility of white people. 

The other thing that is going on is that major powers like the U.S., China, and Russia are fighting it out with each other. So if some sort of action is desired somewhere in order to combat Russian influence, it becomes easy to use “we need to save the people of X!” as a casus belli that the average western citizen will accept. People in smaller countries are always ending up stuck in a conflict between major powers who either don’t know what they’re doing, don’t care, or both aside from how it affects the other major power.

And then this, from Midnight Rider:

There is an old quip that goes "I'm Catholic. I can feel guilty about anything." You can substitute Christian for Catholic and it applies to Western civilization. It comes from 2 millennia of the Church's fathers and thinkers (often misguidedly) interpreting the teachings of the Old and New Testaments often to fit their own needs and in centuries past keep a control on the people and keep them from thinking on their own. We may now be more enlightened" but that thinking and teaching has permeated our very DNA. 

You can apply Malik's comment in a microcosmic way: 

2 families. 1 often arguing and possibly physically abusive father (or mother). Should the other family sit back and do nothing or alert authorities (or step in on their own if it's dire enough) to bring an end to the abuse? And when they do, and the children say "You made them take our father away" do you feel guilt for causing such action or tell yourself had the man behaved like a civilized person this would not have happened. He caused it I didn't. Or perhaps in that same family we have some particularly squirrelly characters who for one reason or another don't like you and yours. It comes to your attention that they are planning on setting fire to your home or attack and beat your wife as she is walking to her car. Do you wait for them to do it and retaliate or do you preemptively attack them (or bring it to authorities attention)? And then would you feel guilty about doing so because these squirrelly characters, possibly breadwinners, have been removed form the family and now the family is having financial problems? 

Is that your fault or theirs? 

Of course you can flip that around and it's your family. And you are having a loud (but non-physical) argument with your spouse. A neighbor decides to knock on your door or have the cops do so. What's going on here? they say. Possible try to take the kids away. How do you respond? Give them the details or tell them it's none of their fucking business? Knowing that as soon as the threat is to your family you and the spouse are likely to put away your petty grievance and unite against the ones interjecting themselves into something that is not theirs to worry about? 

Now of course if your argument escalates and you start waiving a pistol around the neighborhood pointing it at passersby then you absolutely ought to expect to be put down AND THE FAULT IS ALL YOUR OWN. 

In none of the above scenarios should you feel guilty about you actions, even if financial ruin comes to the family because the abuser and breadwinner is cooling his/her heels in the county prison. But you will. 2,000 years of teaching have taught us we are our brother's keeper, the strong should defend the weak but also we are responsible for our actions and their consequences. 

So we'll feel guilty if we do nothing and something bad happens to someone in that family and we'll feel guilty if we do something and our actions precipitate something bad happening to that family. And we ignore the third option that none of this would have happened IF the abuser was not abusive or IF he settles down and allows calm to remain. 

Yours is a REACTION to his action, not the action that causes it. Knowing and being comfortable with the difference is crucial. Reaction (even preemptive) is often necessary for our survival or that of others but we are reacting, not acting, and therefore not causing the problem or it's consequences. 

All of this, of course, has nothing to do with being white other than western culture is largely white. And it has nothing to do with being wealthy other than we have had the gumption over the years to use our culture to make us wealthier and thus stronger. 

Neither of these should we fell guilty about. But we do, of course, because the Church has drilled into us that Jesus loved the meek. Lived and dined among sinners. Detested the rich folks. Which, of course, to anyone who reads the New Testament is rubbish. He just wants everyone, rich poor young old etc to behave as normal decent human beings.

*** And we need to stop thinking of ourselves as Martyrs upon whom the guilt of the world is laid.