the future of Europe: liberal or Islamic?

Assuming that Muslims go on increasing as a proportion of the population in western Europe it’s obvious that eventually there will have to be a showdown. Islam and liberalism are mutually incompatible belief systems. The question is, which system will win?

The European elites are sure that liberalism will win out, and that within a generation or two Muslims will become atheist liberals. The elites are composed of people who simply cannot comprehend religious belief. It is inconceivable to them that anyone, faced with the choice between actual religion and the prevailing secular religion of hedonism and consumerism, could possibly choose religion. The elites are sure that Islam will gradually fade away the way Christianity did. If the elites are wrong about this they are in big big trouble.

The other possibility is that Islam triumphs. In a recent comment at Oz Conservative Mark suggested that if Islam wins elite women will convert to Islam because they have zero commitment to Christianity. That is certainly possible. I can imagine quite a few liberals, especially the ones who dominate the media, bureaucracy and academia, converting because basically they’re people who are willing to adopt any set of beliefs that will help their careers and allow them to curry favour with the people who really run things. Because liberals in the media, bureaucracy and academia might think of themselves as being members of the elite they aren’t really - they’re just members of the Outer Party. And the Inner Party members are not going to give up their devotion to their chosen religion - the pursuit of power and money.

The problem with this scenario is that it’s not going to be very attractive to the Inner Party. The super-rich globalists of the Inner Party want a population that is docile and easily controlled and that will fulfill its allotted functions - which means a population dedicated to hedonism and consumerism. An Islamic population is unlikely to be docile and easily controlled and is unlikely to dedicate itself to hedonism and consumerism. And that would be a threat to the profits and to the power of the global capitalists. That would mean that the elites would have to take active steps to undermine and ultimately to destroy Islam. They would use the same methods that were so successful in destroying Christianity.

Liberalism is essential to global capitalism because it is the one belief system perfectly suited to producing a population of compliant mindless consumers.

Islam is not likely to submit as meekly as Christianity did. The stage would be set for another culture war but this time it’s not going to be a cold war - it’s going to be a very hot war.

Islam and liberalism cannot co-exist in the long term. One must destroy the other. I don’t believe that Islam and capitalism (at least capitalism of the sort that currently dominates the planet) are compatible either.

Christians and social conservatives will therefore face a choice. We can watch from the sidelines, or we can enlist as allies on one side or the other. We’re in the same situation that small nations are in when Great Powers start assembling alliances in preparation for war, having to choose which alliance to join and desperately hoping to choose the winning side. Islam and liberalism are the ideological superpowers. We’re one of the minor powers but our very survival depends on making the right choice. If we stay on the sidelines we’re not going to be very popular with either side.

My own view is that liberalism is by nature totalitarian. Liberals will not stop until every Christian and every social conservative has been hunted down and sent to a re-education camp (and a re-education camp is the best we can hope for). In the long term liberalism intends to stamp out every single ember of dissent. Under triumphal liberalism we have no future at all.

As for Islam, it’s a crap shoot. We might get lucky and find ourselves living under a reasonably tolerant Islamic regime. Or we might get something like Saudi Arabia.

Sometimes in life you have a number of choices but the trouble is they’re all bad.

The Dreyfus Affair

Hundreds of books have been written about the Dreyfus Affair. Piers Paul Read’s 2012 The Dreyfus Affair is perhaps a little unusual in that it tries to be as even-handed as possible. Read is a Catholic but this is not really a Catholic account of the affair. On the other hand it is at least not an anti-Catholic account, unlike most books on the subject.

In 1894 French counter-intelligence obtained a letter (stolen from the German Embassy in Paris) which indicated that a French officer was selling military secrets to the Germans. The stolen letter had been written by the spy and it also included details of the secrets involved, which substantially narrowed down the list of suspects. It soon became apparent that the most likely suspect was an Alsatian Jew, Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus had access to the documents concerned and the hand-writing on the letter seemed to resemble Dreyfus’s hand-writing rather closely. Dreyfus was arrested after an investigation which was not as thorough as it should have been. The officers involved in the investigation sincerely believed that Dreyfus was guilty but the actual evidence was a little thin. Dreyfus was found guilty by a court-martial and sent to Devil’s Island.

The entire proceedings were characterised by excessive haste, excessive zeal and considerable carelessness. The result would be a controversy that would rock the country for years to come.

France was split into two warring camps, the Dreyfusards (who believed Dreyfus was the victim of a miscarriage of justice) and the Anti-Dreyfusards (who were convinced of his guilt). The Anti-Dreyfusards tended to be fanatical supporters of the Army while the Dreyfusards were more likely to be equally fanatical supporters of the secular Republic.

Of course the issue that has dominated the affair for most historians has been the allegation that Dreyfus was a victim of anti-semitism. This might appear to be quite plausible except that it does not take into account the situation in late 19th century France. French Jews at that time were wealthy and powerful and privileged. It is not very likely that Dreyfus was victimised because he was a Jew - in fact it’s perhaps more likely he was accused in spite of the fact that he was Jewish, it being known that Jews had powerful protectors.

While the accusations against Dreyfus do not appear to have had any anti-semitic component the aggressive tactics of the Dreyfusards, especially after Émile Zola took a break from writing his loathsome degenerate novels to throw himself into the fray, did unleash a real wave of anti-semitism. This was however rather minor stuff compared to the vitriolic anti-Catholic campaign that was to follow.

There was a very great deal of discrimination on the grounds of religious in late 19th century France but it was directly almost entirely at Catholics. Catholics had been persecuted intermittently but brutally since the Revolution. It’s possible that as many as 170,000 Catholics were slaughtered in the Vendée in the 1790s). The Third Republic established in 1870 was fiercely anti-Catholic.

The fact that Anti-Dreyfusards were likely to be Catholics while Dreyfusards were much more likely to be Jews, Protestants or atheists made the Dreyfus Affair a significant event in the religious Cold War of the time.

There was in fact a culture war being waged in France, with the anti-Catholic forces determined to utterly destroy the Catholic religion in France. Unfortunately the fallout from the Dreyfus Affair strengthened their hand and the result was another round of persecution. The pettiness, the vindictiveness and the viciousness of the French Third republic almost defies belief. All combined with staggering levels of corruption and incompetence. It’s not difficult to understand the modern French enthusiasm for national self-destruction when you consider that the French have been trying to destroy themselves for more than two centuries.

As for the case of Dreyfus himself it seems that he was the victim of the extraordinary incompetence and duplicity of the French intelligence service. The trouble with spies is that they grow so used to deception that they end up lying to everyone, including their own government. The cynicism of self-serving peacetime senior officers concerned purely with protecting their own interests also contributed.

Read’s book is interesting enough as an account of the Dreyfus case itself but it’s much more fascinating as an examination of a fateful and squalid period of French history that has considerable relevance to the culture wars of today. Recommended.

Adam Tooze’s The Deluge

British historian Adam Tooze’s 2014 book The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 takes an original and distinctive approach to the First World War. Tooze is not interested in how the war started nor in how it was fought. Only one thing really mattered - the entry of the United States into the war. US intervention had virtually no effect on the course of the actual war itself but it had a profound effect on the peace negotiations and on the postwar world. It changed everything. From that moment on the US was the world’s dominant power. The only question was how the US would exercise that power.

President Woodrow Wilson had very definite ideas on the subject. The failure of Wilson’s version of global internationalism has obscured the fact that the US, even under the supposedly isolationist Republican administrations of the 1920s, was not only the world’s dominant economic power but also the dominant political power.

For the other European powers, bankrupted by the war and reduced to financial dependence on the US, the question was what could they do about the situation? In Tooze’s view Soviet communism and the various strands of fascism represented an attempt to confront this problem.

For Britain the situation was exceptionally complex. Britain appeared to have emerged from the war stronger than ever but this was an illusion. Britain’s Empire was a large part of the problem. Maintaining and defending the Empire was far beyond Britain’s resources. The Empire had been a potential source of wealth but no British government had ever figured out how to make this potential actual. The rising tide of nationalism made it unlikely that Britain could hold on to its imperial possessions in the long term but no government was prepared to admit this. By the 1920s the Empire was largely an illusion, but despite this Britain very unwisely embarked on fresh imperial adventures in the Middle East.

Tooze (who is essentially an economic historian) focuses on some of the lesser known economic problems confronting the world during this period, such as the catastrophic American recession of 1920. He also points out that hyper-inflation was by no means confined to the Weimar Republic. Overshadowing everything else was the problem of how to pay for the First World War. The US had in fact bankrolled the war efforts of the French, the British and the Italians but now the debts were going to have to be repaid and the US was determined that every red cent would be repaid. This was a problem for the French, with much of their country in ruins and their economy in a shambles. Of course it seemed like a very attractive idea for the French to make the Germans pay for their war damage, but with the German economy in an even bigger shambles that was only going to lead to more problems and in any case Germany was simply not in a position to pay what was demanded.

The war had serious unbalanced the world economy in other ways as well, inflation was a problem everywhere, and the prospects for Europe were undecidedly unpleasant. 

The war also unleashed political problems. Wilson’s ideas on self-determination were not quite as crazy and unrealistic as they’re often portrayed but breaking up the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires was in retrospect a reckless step. The war also led to demands for greater democracy throughout the world, democracy being seen as some sort of magical answer to political problems (in practice it naturally produced ever more corrupt and ever more incompetent governments).

Tooze also mentions a number of fascinating events that seem to have disappeared down the memory hole, such as the French invasion of Germany in 1923. The 1920s was actually quite a tumultuous period in terms of the foreign policies of the various powers. There was a sense that a new world order was emerging but it was not clear what shape it would take.

Tooze is no great literary stylist but his writing is generally clear and workmanlike.

Most books on the interwar period focus on the 1930s so it’s interesting to find a really in-depth study of the 20s. Tooze offers plenty of food for thought. Highly recommended.

was the Reformation a bad idea from the start?

I’ve been reading Hilaire Belloc’s The Great Heresies, published in 1938. The whole book is thought-provoking but I was particularly interested in the chapter on the Reformation. Books in English on this subject tend to have a subtle (or in many cases totally unsubtle) anti-Catholic bias so it was stimulating to read an account written from an avowedly and completely uncompromising Catholic viewpoint.

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) was a colourful French-English man of letters who gained immense popularity with his light verse for children although he also made a huge impact as an historian, a Catholic apologist, a literary critic, an essayist and a travel writer. As the years passed his unyielding belief that Catholicism was the mainstay of European civilisation put him more and more out of favour in an increasingly secular world.

The Great Heresies, written in 1938, Belloc deals with the five greatest threats that the Catholic Church has faced in the course of its history. These threats were the Arian heresy, the rise of Islam, the Albigensian heresy, the Reformation and the assault of modernism.

Belloc makes his position on the Reformation crystal clear from the start. While he admits that reform of some sort was desperately required he sees the actual results of the Reformation as an unmitigated disaster for western civilisation. His reasons for taking this view are provocative but rather persuasive.

Belloc believes that the unity of Christendom was essential to western civilisation. The Reformation permanently shattered that unity, with results that could not possibly have been foreseen. 

One interesting point he makes is that the original reformers had no intention of splitting the Church or of establishing a separate religion. Their intention was to reform the entire Church, which would remain a single united universal Church. Until well into the seventeenth century both the Protestant and Catholic camps still intended to maintain the unity of the Church which would be either a universal Catholic Church or a universal Protestant Church. It was not until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that both sides accepted that the split was going to be permanent.

Of course the Reformation did not merely split the Church. The Protestant side kept on splitting. In Belloc’s view once you have countless churches all with their own doctrines then you have opened the door to scepticism. People will think to themselves that if there are dozens of churches all of which disagree on crucial questions then they cannot all be correct, which leads naturally to the idea that maybe all of them are wrong. Thus does scepticism gain a foothold. And that of course is exactly what happened. By the mid-18th century scepticism was firmly established as the outlook of a very large proportion of the ruling classes, and almost the entirety of the intellectual class. Once scepticism takes hold the inevitable long-term outcome will be atheism. 

Belloc also blames the Reformation for encouraging the growth of capitalism. Belloc was no mere conservative - he was a thorough-going reactionary who despised socialism, liberalism and capitalism. The Protestant churches took a more relaxed view of usury than did the Catholic Church and this stimulated the growth of banking and the accumulation of capital and all the other preconditions necessary for large-scale capitalism. Most mainstream historians writing in English are inclined to see this as a good thing. Even Marxist historians are likely to see this as a positive thing, capitalism being the necessary first step towards socialism. Belloc however sees the rise of capitalism as being entirely a bad thing. He is more inclined to regard feudalism in a positive light, as being less dehumanising than capitalism or socialism. Belloc does not share the modern horror of hierarchical societies.

Belloc also has some very perceptive observations to offer on the nature of reforming zeal and why reforms so rarely end well. He also points out, quite correctly, that the elites of the time were happy to support the Protestant cause since it gave them the opportunity to transfer the wealth of the Church into their own pockets (elites haven’t changed much). The Reformation has been described as a rising of the rich against the poor.

In Belloc’s view the Reformation indirectly led to the fatal weakening of all traditional values and beliefs. 

Belloc of course does see all this very much from a Catholic viewpoint but his approach makes a refreshing change from the mainstream of Whig and Marxist historians. Belloc was not merely writing as a Catholic but also as a political and social reactionary, a man who understood that the destruction of traditional beliefs and values and structures will result in a society with no foundation and no moral compass.

Even if like me you’re not a Catholic Belloc is still a remarkably stimulating and provocative writer. He’s very much out of fashion, which is all the more reason to seek out his writings. The Great Heresies is most definitely worth reading.

the secularist bias in history

The victory of King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem at Montgisard, 1177

All historians are biased, just as all journalists are biased. Everyone has a bias of some sort or another and becoming an historian or a journalist does not free a person from this basic ingredient that makes us human.

As long as there are lots of different voices each expressing a particular bias there’s no real problem. Of course the situation we have today is that unless you have one specific political bias you aren’t going to get a job as an historian or a journalist, and that is a problem.

A bias is most dangerous when it’s unacknowledged, or even in some cases unconscious. If the reader is aware of the bias of the historian or the journalist he can make allowances for it. When it comes to history one of the biggest unacknowledged biases is the secularist bias. Christianity is a minority faith to start with but over the course of the past hundred years the world of academia has become a rather unfriendly place for Christians. It is an even more unfriendly place for Christians who write history from an explicitly Christian point of view. As a result it has slowly but surely become the norm for history to be written from a secularist perspective. 

The trouble with this is that a great deal of our history is in fact religious history. In some cases - the Crusades, the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, the French Wars of Religion - this is self-evident. In other cases it is a less obvious but equally important factor.

The weakness of the secularist bias is that it assumes that religious disputes are really quite unimportant. Religious motivations are given insufficient weight, and are regarded as being futile and trivial. It’s not just Marxist historians who marginalise the role of religion in history - it’s an almost universal tendency.

Of course in our secular world the idea that kingdoms might be torn apart or wars fought over matters of religious doctrine is both embarrassing and incomprehensible. This is rather odd. We take it for granted that men are prepared to fight and to die for political ideologies, for the destruction of economic rivals, for reasons of patriotism, or even out of paranoid fears that the other side is plotting to attack. Surely religion is an infinitely weightier matter than any of these things. If you’re not prepared to die for your faith do you even have a faith worthy speaking of? Perhaps the men who fought for their faith in the French Wars of Religion were more worthy of respect than the men who fought the Crimean War to satisfy the bloodlust of public opinion manipulated by the press?

I’m not suggesting that one should fight wars over matters of religion but I am pointing out that it’s a perfectly understandable thing for people to do, although an historian blinkered by the secularist bias is scarcely likely to comprehend that.

a tolerant religion is a dead religion

A great deal of the controversy between atheists and religious folks, and between Christians and Muslims, comes down to the question of tolerance. Atheists accuse anyone who believes in religion of intolerance while Christians preen themselves on their astounding levels of tolerance. 

There is one thing that one can’t help noticing. The most tolerant religions are the ones that are completely dead. No-one ever complains about the bigotry of mithraists. No-one ever accuses mithraists of racism or sexism or homophobia. There’s a very good reason for this. There aren’t any mithraists any more.

The more a religion declines the more tolerant it becomes. The tolerance displayed by Christianity is not a sign of virtue - it’s a sign of irrelevance. Even Christians don’t care what Christians believe any more. Christianity is, for most Christians, a harmless hobby. Like stamp-collecting. And like stamp-collecting it’s a hobby that is slowly but surely dying out.

That’s one of the reason so many people are so freaked out by Islam. Say what you like about it, you can’t accuse it of being a dead or dying religion. It’s frightening because it’s a living religion.

Back in the days when it was still a living religion Christianity could be pretty intolerant as well. And we need to remember that intolerance is not always a bad thing. After all why shouldn’t we be intolerant of Sin? Or intolerant of injustice? Or intolerant of dangerous and deluded heresies? We’re intolerant of murder - is that a bad thing? Most of us are pretty intolerant of thieving.

If Christianity is ever going to stage a successful revival it’s going to have to stop being so nice. If you’re going to be a Christian in our society you’re going to be hated anyway. The one thing worse than being hated is being despised.

Tolerance is just another way of saying that we simply don’t care. Perhaps that will be our civilisation’s epitaph - they just didn’t care.

making people feel unnecessary

I came across an extremely interesting comment during an online discussion elsewhere yesterday. The gist of it was that the hardest thing for people to cope with is not dealing with disasters, but being made to feel not necessary. And that modern western society is remarkably good at making people feel unnecessary.

I’m inclined to agree.