Moral Choices

The recent TOO article by Dr. Lasha Darkmoon on Rachel Corrie is indicative of the emotional appeal of the Palestinian cause. There is a powerful moral message: An attractive young woman motivated by a sense of moral idealism brutally murdered while trying to help an oppressed people — people who are ethnically and religiously different from herself. On the face of it, it would appear to be a case of self-sacrificing altruism.

There are other similar examples of what Christopher Donovan labels the “Amy Biehl Syndrome,” after the young woman who was murdered by a crowd of South African Blacks she had come to help. This syndrome exemplifies the moral idealism that, while certainly not true of all Whites, seems to be far more common among us than other groups, quite possibly as concomitant of evolution for individualism among Northern hunter-gatherers.

The problem with moral universalism is that it makes it impossible to develop a similar moral sense on behalf of one’s people. As Westerners, a big part of our psychological baggage lies with post-Enlightenment universalist ideologies. They feel natural to us, whereas reasoning on the basis of what’s good for us doesn’t have any moral standing at all. It’s very difficult for us to get into the mode of “Is it good for Europeans?”

Imagine this moral dilemma. Right now in Europe, quite a few politicians are getting on the anti-Muslim bandwagon. Many have made pilgrimages to Israel to express solidarity with the far right settler movement and its program of ethnic cleansing—the same people who have made it a point to make gruesome, bloody examples of people like Rachel Corrie. For example, Geert Wilders, while visiting a far-right, pro-settler member of the Knesset says that the Palestinians have a homeland—Jordan. In Israel, he was hosted by Aryeh Eldad, head of the Hatikva faction of the National Union Party, which opposes the creation of a Palestinian state and believes that the West Bank is part of Israel. Other anti-Muslim political figures (Heinz-Christian Strache, head of the German Freedom Party—quite possibly the next chancellor of Austria, Filip Dewinter, spokesman for Belgium’s Vlaams Belang party and a member of the Flemish Parliament, and René Stadtkewitz, a former member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union who recently established the Freedom Party in Germany with an explicitly anti-Muslim, pro-Israel line) have traveled to Israel to express solidarity with the settler movement.

The implicit logic of this is that there is a natural alliance between anti-Muslim groups in Europe and the settler groups fighting to dispossess the Palestinians in Israel. One could therefore imagine in a very hypothetical world that the European anti-Muslim politicians would make a deal with the Jewish community in Europe: Support us in our campaign against Islam and we will support the settler movement in Israel. (Needless to say, other steps would be needed to remove other non-Whites from Europe.) This would mean that the organized Jewish community in Europe would end its promotion of non-White immigration and multiculturalism; they would exert pressure on Jewish political figures and Jewish-owned media as well, ostracizing them if need be. This would likely have dramatic effect on support for anti-Muslim parties in Europe, at least partly because it would disinhibit non-Jews, many of whom have been cowed into accepting the encroachments of Islam for fear of offending the post-Holocaust moral order that is vigorously enforced by the organized Jewish community and by Israel. For example, in 2000, Israel threatened to withdraw its ambassador if Jörg Haider joined the government coalition. The Mossad closely monitored Haider and in 2008 Israel expressed its concern when his party polled 29% in the Austrian elections, stating “We are very concerned over the rise to power of people who promote hatred of foreigners and Holocaust denial, and befriend Neo-Nazis.”  The assumption here, which I think is correct, is that the Jewish community is quite influential on all issues related to immigration and multiculturalism.

In fact, of course, the organized Jewish community and the vast majority of Jews have not supported these parties and are vastly unlikely to do so, preferring to support multiculturalism and massive non-White immigration in the Diaspora in the West while also supporting an apartheid, ethnonationalist Israel bent on ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Although Geert Wilders was hosted by one pro-settler member of the Knesset, the other European anti-Muslim politicians were not hosted by any member of the Knesset. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to entertain the implicit moral trade-off. In a radio interview with Tom Sunic, I expressed support for an alliance with Zionists against Muslims. A comment on the Reason Radio website notes that “The remarks that MacDonald made during this show on the topic of Geert Wilders and Wilder’s support of Zionism have been generating some discussion around the Internet.” To my knowledge, these comments have been on email discussion lists, the main issue being the moral standing of supporting the Zionist program of ethnic cleansing.

When White advocates discuss how to accomplish their goal of repatriating the millions of non-White immigrants, the usual line is that repatriation would be accomplished without violence. Immigrants would be given financial inducements to leave (e.g., Geert Wilders) and governments would completely cease to subsidize immigrants with welfare, housing, or jobs.

It would be wonderful if it was that easy, and I certainly hope that a non-violent method could be found. But I rather doubt that this would be sufficient. Europe would still offer very attractive economic prospects compared to the Muslim immigrant-sending countries. The sheer number of Muslims (16,000,000 in the EU as of 2007) makes voluntary repatriation a financial and logistical nightmare. Even if further immigration was stopped, the high fertility of Muslims compared to White Europeans would mean they would become a steadily increasing presence and eventually a majority. (In the US, the numbers of non-White post-1965 immigrants (= 32.3 million) and their descendants number at least 50,000,000, making the problem even more intractable. As with the European anti-Muslim parties, voluntary repatriation with financial incentives is advocated by the American Third Position.)

Moreover, it’s unlikely that the immigrant-sending countries would want them back because it would produce further economic problems in societies with chronically underperforming economies. Further, just as in America where there are voices of Reconquista among the Mexican immigrants, many of the more radical Muslims see their presence in Europe as a divinely ordained beginning of the establishment of a Muslim Europe. They won’t leave without a great deal of conflict with the immigrants and the immigrant-sending countries.

And it’s obvious that the Muslims are not going to become good Europeans and simply submerge themselves in European cultures, start attending church, and identify with European culture and history. Just recently, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey, urged Turks in Germany to preserve their language and culture—to integrate but not assimilate. Not that Muslims in Europe need much encouragement to remain separate, given as they are to public displays of religious and cultural difference, not to mention calls for the establishment of sharia law in European countries.

So suppose that an anti-Muslim political party comes to power, say in the Netherlands. It really doesn’t matter if this comes about with the full support of the Jewish community and Israel which, as noted, is very unlikely. The point is that we have to suppose that Muslims will refuse to assimilate and they will refuse to leave voluntarily, just as the Palestinians refuse to leave the West Bank.

What’s next?

A crisis of Western universalism for starters. Universalism always presupposed substantial homogeneity, at least of culture and, quite possibly in the end, of race, given that universalism remains a uniquely Western creation. That’s why the ideals of the Enlightenment implied that Judaism would wither away and that Jews would commit to the atomized citizenship of an individualist culture without the primordial ties that have bound them together over the centuries. When this failed to happen, Enlightenment intellectuals like Voltaire became “anti-Semites,” and Jews, rather than giving up their groupness, eventually responded in three main ways: by promoting Zionism beginning in the late 19th century; by masquerading as leftist universalists while maintaining their Jewish identities, also beginning in the late 19th century; and by inventing multiculturalism as the new paradigm for Western societies in which groups could retain their culture, a movement that came to fruition in the 1960s. (The last two of these are themes of The Culture of Critique.)

We are how witnessing the failure of Muslim assimilation just as the last 250 years of European history has shown the ultimate failure of Jewish assimilation. Ultimately, Jewish intellectual and political efforts were aimed at changing the nature of Europe and developing a national homeland outside of Europe rather than at changing the primordial collectivist nature of Judaism. It is becoming obvious that multiculturalism is incompatible with Western universalism. They simply can’t both exist, at least in the aggressive form exemplified by Muslims in Europe and increasingly in the US.

So in the end, Europeans are likely to have to choose. In the same way that the Israeli right has chosen to expropriate the land of the Palestinians and to degrade their lives to the point that they voluntarily leave — perhaps followed ultimately with expulsion if the political climate is right, Europeans will likely have to choose whether to do the same. Granted that Europeans as aboriginal peoples may be seen as having more legitimacy than their opponents, it would still result in a crisis of moral universalism. The law of nature is expediency — whatever works, not whether one has lived up to an abstract idea.

According to a newspaper report, Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the US, in a recent speech in Colorado noted that “Coloradans and Israelis share a legacy as ‘frontier societies’ whose early people faced many dangers.” Philip Weiss comments, “Notice how Oren plays on the ethnic cleansing of the U.S., the unstated message is, ‘Hey you committed genocide, who are you to judge?’”

Exactly. Pretty much around the world, peoples have been displaced over the course of history. Europeans are now in the process of being displaced from lands they have held for centuries (the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand) or for millennia (in Europe). It really doesn’t matter if the displacement is the result of a military invasion or as a result of a war of ideas carried out by hostile elites that dominate the media and the political process. The end result is the same: Evolutionary death.

Surprisingly perhaps, some White advocates suppose that what they seek can be accomplished without violating universalist moral principles. But real life is seldom so convenient, and to survive it may be that one must reject moral universalism. Whatever works.