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The Fall of Two Empires

Moscow
 The Cold War between the economic empire of the West and the socialist tyrannies of the East made it seem as if the future would belong to the coalition with the best industrial machine and largest military. In he 21st century though the industrial machine has been traded off to China, and ICBM's and armies haven't managed to settle the brewing low tech conflicts of both empires with the Muslim world.

The scene above is Moscow at Eid al-Fitr, as Muslims protest the lack of additional mosques with street prayers. But it could just as easily be London, Paris, New York or dozens of other cities. While the two empires were stacking up ICBM's, the Muslim world was stacking up babies. The empires suffer from low birth rates, and are experiencing an invasion that they have no defense against. 

Islam is demographically set to dominate Russia and Europe, reversing five centuries of history, and seizing control of the heartland for which the old empires fought. West Berlin, East Berlin, it makes no difference when Turkey's birth rate is double that of Germany. To the east, in Moscow and to the west in London, the overall picture is the same.

The Soviet Union and the Pax Americana both attempted to win the allegiance of the Muslim world with money, weapons and technology. And they are still at it today internationally and domestically. America, Russia and Europe all keep dividing 'good' Muslims who are loyal citizens or allies from 'bad' Muslims who set off bombs in schools and buses.

Russia's 'good' state controlled mosques preach Jihad against the West, just as our 'good' Muslims were the ones who killed Russians. But we're not the ones playing divide and conquer, they are.

Russian leaders, like their European counterparts, act as if the rising Muslim population is nothing to worry about. So long as they remain loyal citizens of Mother Russia, it will make no difference if Moscow ends up with more mosques than churches. But what exactly is Russia, if it is not the land of the Russian people.

Ask the workers on Russky Island, where a ban on Vodka during Eid al-Fitr resulted in violent riots between Muslims and Russians. Or the residents of Volga Street who managed to keep a mosque out of their neighborhood. Or Daniil Sysoyev, a Russian priest who criticized Islam and was shot in his own church. Just don't ask Putin or Medvedev, who like their Czarist and Communist predecessors, are still thinking in terms of empire.

But what is it an empire of-- besides oil and gas, trade monopolies and secret police? If the USSR embraced a larger revolutionary socialist identity, a Russia without Russians is absolutely nothing at all. What exactly are Russian Muslims to give their allegiance to besides the broken symbols of the Czarist and Soviet eras that have become kitsch in a vulgar oligarchy? The same question can easily be asked of the United Kingdom or America who have discarded their heritage and culture for political correctness and cheap consumer goods.

Can there be a Russia without Russians, or an England without the English or France without the French? In the same way that there can be a Constantinople without the Greeks. The buildings can remain, but without the people, there is no nation. National cultures are elastic, but not infinitely so. Immigrants can be absorbed or accommodated, but it is a two way street, and when the majority is too different from the people who defined the nation, then Constantinople becomes Istanbul.



The Cold War showdown was not really about economic systems, it was a continuation of the old power struggles in Europe. Communism and Capitalism were frosting on the cake, but the cake was nationalistic. The conflict continues today even now that Communism and Capitalism are dead, as a Russian oligarchy faces off against a European oligarchy. At stake are the same old prizes, but they're not really theirs to win anymore.

Holding Europe no longer comes down to ideologies or armies. No amount of American tanks in Berlin will outweigh a thousand Turkish women in the hospital wards. And no amount of debates over class and revolution will drown out the cry of the Muezzin. There are no more new ideas anymore. Only two oligarchies wrestling over the crumbs of a continent and populaces taught to run up their credit cards for tomorrow they will die.

The ideologies have all been worn through. The leftist domination of the West is a faint shadow of the vicious energy of the early 20th century Reds. Its political correctness is an academic repression, the sound of a librarian shushing noisy patrons. But the great empty libraries of the West face the same fate as the Library of Alexandria, torched by Muslims because it contents contradicted the Koran. The librarians are acting as caretakers for the last generation of a culture, and overseeing an orderly transition of power to the arsonists of the stacks.

Short term wars come down to skill and industry. Long term wars come down to staying power and to the question of who wants it more. The West could win a short term war against any combination of Muslim enemies-- but it cannot win the long term war unless it learns to want to win more. Not in Iraq or Afghanistan or London or Los Angeles-- or anywhere else.

In Afghanistan and Londonistan, the enemy has made up for its deficits with determination. Theirs is the long term struggle, and they are winning it, not because they are any better in any way, but because in our majorities we don't want it nearly as bad as they do.

Short term wars are games of skill, long term wars are games of chicken. The first party to sue for peace loses. And we sued for peace a long time ago, and have never stopped suing for it. We make a point of announcing how badly we want peace at every occasion. And we lose over and over again.

Forget all the humanistic twaddle you ever heard. Suing for people does not mean you are nobler-- it means you are weaker. The more eager you are for peace, the weaker you really are. Backing down when important things are at stake does not make you the better man, it makes you the worse man. The more important the things at stake are, the worse of a man you are.

There is nothing wrong with being a pacifist, so long as you are also willing to be a slave. And there is nothing wrong with being a slave, so long as you are also a pacifist. The slave who is not a pacifist may one day be a free man-- but the pacifist who does not understand that he is a slave is in denial about the consequences of his moral cowardice.

But few people in the falling West and East are pacifists, nor are their leaders. They are quite willing to send planes to bomb one country or another for one reason or another. What they are unwilling to do is assert national interests. This isn't pacifism, it's the moral laziness of people who have come to believe in Stability Ãœber Alles because it is convenient.

The vision of a global state administered by bureaucrats in Brussels, advanced degrees for everyone and cradle to grave social services, the end of any harsh or unsightly beliefs and a one world society is the cultural equivalent of a child imagining a giant cake covered in chocolate frosting and cherries. There's nothing moral about it, it's sugar plum gluttony with no consequences. Worse it's lazy. Its big vision is a world where no one has to do much of anything except tinker with abstract sculpture and learn how to love themselves.

And that's the worst part of it-- we've given up. The ambition and drive that took us this far has failed and we sit on the beach, toss petals and wonder when the tide will come in. Our stories are so often about apocalypse because we're waiting to die.

If the Cold War tested our determination to exhaustion, then the exhaustion has left us too weak to stand up for ourselves anymore. One empire has fallen and the other is falling swiftly into the ocean. And when it's gone there will be nothing but the ragged edge of civilization, fallen skyscrapers, burning books and mosques on every corner.


We haven't lost yet, but that's only because of the weight of resources on our side lends us an inertia that will not last forever. But the real problem isn't that we're losing, it's that we have forgotten how to fight. Worse, we have forgotten what fighting even means.

A war that doesn't involve us rebuilding the enemy and trying to turn them into allies has become as alien to us as the notion that wars aren't fought to bring peace, but to protect ourselves by savaging or destroying an enemy badly enough that he is no longer a threat. Our war hawks talk of soft power and we listen and nod along.

The thing to remember above all else is to remember that we are here because we came from men and women who wanted it badly enough. Who did what they had to do to survive. That staying power is inside us-- it's a matter of wanting it badly enough.

Forget nations and empires, flags and seals, all these things are names, ways to channel the strength of a people. It is the staying power of the people, its determination to hold on to its land, to have children and imbue them with their culture that matters. A people that refuses to be moved can hold while politicians come and go murmuring about peace. All conflicts are ultimately personal. They come down to each and every person using whatever strength they have in the best way they can to stand firm and hold on to the land. Empires come and go, but the people remain.

Comments

  1. There are some who are prepared to avoid "the ragged edge of civilization, fallen skyscrapers, burning books and mosques on every corner." and are not waiting to die. This is not 1936.

    Meet some of them for a Sukkot like no other. Learn to shoot (NRA Instructor), learn to prepare. No cost. The Festival of Tabernacles in tents. See jewishpreppers.blogspot.com

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  2. Anonymous6/9/11

    As questioning the ideology can leave you open to being shot/blown up &. spread this very useful link, as if they aren't funded then their weaponry is reduced:

    http://www.aish.com/v/hoi/86748722.html

    Also, last evening I watched a very brave short series on Channel 4 (uk) called "The 4 Lions" - it may just work in limiting homegrown, British terrorism. In short it parodies jihad. The 4 lions are the 4 types of Mujahideen: the zealous British convert, the intellectually devout, the nice but dim and the thoughtless, malleable magical thinker.

    The programme was 'laugh out loud' funny, although it was very sad to see a boy actor having to observe/say the lines he needed to say, the shocking story line made you ignore the bad language. Suffice to say the 4 lions got their come-uppance.

    The 4 Lions will, I suspect have 2 outcomes: those without a bent towards mass murder will have found it funny, the fanatically religious will not watch it for themselves but will listen to their imam who says they must not see it, it is haram and must be avenged.....with their blood kate b

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  3. Halycon6/9/11

    Good stuff Mr Knish.

    Nobody ever looks at the history of appeasing Muslims because it would simply reflect the reality of incurring retaliation.

    The West helped to create Pakistan and Bosnia and as a result, there were terrorists dedicated to fighting and conquering the West.

    Sudan has now been split into two countries: North and South Sudan. The North is run by Muslims and the South by Christians. Once again the West have done ceded territory to Muslims which will do nothing but create a long-term hostility between the two nations. Perhaps it is done so that the two nations will want weapons which the West is happy to provide.

    But the Muslim world doesn't want much aside from weapons. They ban music, movies and art for belonging to the "decadent West" and they are considered immoral. Muslims are more than willing to boycott Western goods if their demands aren't met and even then, they will probably choose their own haram goods over those of the infidel.

    Appeasing Muslims is simply as good as appeasing any fascists. It only encourages them to become worse, rather than temper them.

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  4. Sultan, stop writing, go forth and multiply spread your genetic material so that from your offspring once in the bleak future of a Muslim dominated world the seeds of liberty can perhaps bloom again to create a new enlightenment.
    It happens to be that no people cherish peace more than us Jews, yet the inner strength to remain a free nation and fight for that privilege has also been the strongest in us, because once we where slaves in Egypt and did not appreciate that position to have it ever repeated.

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  5. Kiwi6/9/11

    “There is nothing wrong with being a pacifist, so long as you are also willing to be a slave.”
    Pacifism is one thing; denial and complacency are an entirely different mindset.

    In the biographical film, “The Gathering Storm”, which portrays the years just prior to World War II, Winston Churchill recites the following verse:

    ‘Who is in charge of the clattering train?
    The axles creak and the couplings strain;
    The pace is hot and the points are near,
    And sleep has deadened the driver’s ear;
    And the signals flash through the night in vain,
    For Death is in charge of the clattering train.’

    On that occasion the civilized world won the day, just. I’m not so sure we’ll win next time round; this time, although it’s a different destination on the same railway, not only is the driver sleeping, so are all the passengers!

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  6. While the two empires were stacking up ICBM's, the Muslim world was stacking up babies.


    Maybe we can start now, perhaps too late, to see where the West's mistake lay. A generation or two ago, it was actually not so unreasonable to imagine that all these babies were just that, harmless children who almost certainly would grow up influenced by the advanced culture of the First World. Who dreamt that Islam would be able to recruit them all for its retrograde program?

    What to do now? Pray.

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  7. Another excellent, if somewhat depressing, article. I gather you see very little hope for our future and I am inclined to agree. I suppose this means that Scottie will never achieve Warp Factor 20, future Dr. McCoy's will not heal body traumas with the use of hand held devices and we will all be 'boldly going' backwards. The Starship 'Political Correctness' is on collision course with no-one to 'beam us up'.

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  8. tenquid6/9/11

    Push will come to shove. Europe and America will awaken. One can only hope there will be time to fight back before being overwhelmed.

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  9. Mayer Kahane was right, and that's why he and his son were murdered by islamic jackals.

    @Pat, it's too bad we didn't have "Warp Factor 20" technology now -- then we could all leave this earth behind to the lieberals and the islamonazis they seem to admire.

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  10. Thanks for another disturbing and depressing read Daniel because I'd rather have the ugly truth than the lies, spin and propaganda the MSM and our politicos report as the truth.

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  11. Anonymous6/9/11

    Islam [today] is a parasite on the western culture. It scares the west because of its cruelty and not because it has some advantage. This bleak picture can change when the west wakes up.

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  12. Indeed, if the West wakes up, the left topples and then the game changes.

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  13. But the great empty libraries of the West face the same fate as the Library of Alexandria, torched by Muslims because it contents contracted the Koran.


    "contradicted"

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  14. Mr. Greenfield,
    Michael Savage has for many years stated this very same idea to no avail. Language, Borders, Culture. That is what makes a country the country it is. No one listens and this is what we are now faced with.

    Our PC'd world is now a need to PC/302 ourselves! Its over.. they just forgot to turn out the lights! G-d bless my friend!

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  15. The first party to sue for peace wins


    "loses"

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  16. "Can there be a Russia without Russians, or an England without the English or France without the French? In the same way that there can be a Constantinople without the Greeks. The buildings can remain, but without the people, there is no nation. National cultures are elastic, but not infinitely so. Immigrants can be absorbed or accommodated, but it is a two way street, and when the majority is too different from the people who defined the nation, then Constantinople becomes Istanbul."

    This one of your best articles.

    I kept thinking of the wonderful national anthem composed by Mikhail Glinka. IMO it is the most powerful and beautifully composed national anthem in the world. Before the fall of the USSR it was instrumental. Putin wanted lyrics to inspire people.

    The new version in the 1990s includes lyrics aout the holy nation and native land protected G-d, holy nation.

    I'd hate to think of wonderful Russian music replaced with the Muslim call to prayer. No doubt they would stop all music.

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  17. "Humanistic twaddle" does not lead to suing for peace.
    Without humans, there can be no culture or economy or military. Human babies are the key to victory and that is a humanistic activity. Unless you believe that angels can procreate? Some kind of "immaculate conception" or maybe the stork?

    We should be talking about humanism and the real world,
    not some fantasy mysticism you apparently propose as an alternate to Islamic mysticism. In that respect, you seem to favor the GOP approach but apply to philosophy--mysticism lite instead of socialism lite.

    However mysticism tends to lead to tyranny. The world will chose between humanism with liberty, or mysticism with tyranny.

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  18. Anonymous6/9/11

    While the two empires were stacking up ICBM's, the Muslim world was stacking up babies.

    crazy retarded inbred babies from massive cousin on cousin action that makes hillbillies isolated in the holler with only the cousin in the next valley over the only date for the church social look like a mixer for Einsteins peers.

    thier is a magical way of thinking going on in the west for which I see no antidote and that is our tilting at imaginary windmills of life threatening danger like globull warming and not only completely ignoring the clash of culture going on, with the muslims wanting to consign all of western philosophy, law freedom, liberty and culture to the dustbin of history, but actively and angrily denying their is a culture threat.

    this video of goerge carlin pissing on the whole notion of saving the planet and worrying about nonsensical threats puts the point on this upside down reality and meshes nicdely with the real threat as illuminated by sultan kinish

    http://rumcrook.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/we-face-real-threats-to-our-civilization-globull-warming-isnt-one-of-them/

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  19. So will our Sudeten appeasement this time around be East Jerusalem, East London, East Berlin, East LA, East ground zero, or what? When I see the jihadist mobilize to occupy the present-day Sudetan (Bosnia? Vienna?) I will know your assessment is correct.
    As for the land thing, I've got my 1.6 acres in the Appalachians, where I now sit, with rusty shotgun packed away somewhere, and ponder your prescient counsel. How 'bout you? What little quarter-acre of the planet will you be defending, Miss Scarlett style? Maybe a block on the upper east side, or perhaps just your Constitutional right to exercise such Churchillian resolve?

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  20. "Humanistic twaddle" does not lead to suing for peace.
    Without humans, there can be no culture or economy or military. Human babies are the key to victory and that is a humanistic activity.


    SK has merely pointed out the facts: The "humanistic" cultures are the ones involved today in surrender and collective suicide in a way which is unprecedented.

    The real question is "What does it mean to be human?" "Humanistic" thinkers have been telling us for a couple of centuries now that we are just a weird species of monkey without fur. Why should anyone care what happens to this strange animal? Without the "mystical" concept of a soul, nothing matters at all.

    Maybe you should reconsider your deceptive dichotomy of mysticism vs. liberty.

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  21. "Worse, we have forgotten what fighting even means."

    Well said there. Most of the citizens of the western world have been mentally programmed to become helpless and dependent, like sheep, who are proud of how easy it is for wolves to devour them.

    A perfect citizenry for weak, cowardly bureaucrats to rule, but a terrible one when a single barbarian with a club appears at the gates.

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  22. "Soylent Green is PEOPLE!"

    "It's a COOKBOOK!" (To Serve Man)

    The solution isn't "immigration", it's "automation". Watch the Japanese build expensive robots to do jobs done by $50/day illegal labor in the USA. Robots don't get sick, protest in the streets, or join MS-13. Robots don't have babies that need $500K in medical care before getting $20K/yr subsidy before making their own babies at 14. Robots can work as long as the power plants don't melt down. Robots don't take scarce places in university. Robots MAKE GOOD JOBS FOR PEOPLE just by being robots at work.

    Gotta love automata.

    Cheers.

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  23. JCS "The higher birth rates of Muslims would be entirely irrelevant if Western countries weren't so desperate to import as many of them as possible. They're here because our elites wanted them here. Otherwise there's no way they could have ever established themselves in Europe in such large numbers."

    Europe hasn't reproduced herself. Almost all the countries have lower than replacement-level birth rates. So who's going to keep these societies going given that there aren't many young citizens.

    Mark Steyn's two books both cover this. I think the number is something like 120 grandparents generate 43 grandkids in Italy.

    So it's not (just) the evil elites that are importing Muzzies out of a desire to destroy their own civilization, it's actually a response to the failure of Europe.

    And of course it's made worse by the cradle-to-grave Socialism of Europe, all those old people expect The State to take care of them, but The State has fewer citizens to provide taxes to pay for the upside down pyramid.

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  24. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  25. Sultan: Given that you are an Israeli I can understand your concern with Muslims, and I also see the huge problem that Europe has with them.

    But I don't see that the USA is in danger of falling to the New Caliphate, and I think those who are constantly selling this proposition are misguided.

    I cerainly agree that Islam is a huge problem worldwide, but the USA is much more insulated from it than almost anywhere else.

    The solution for us to the problem of Islam is very simple: end immigration to the USA of Muslims.

    It's strange to me that the most public American "Muslim Obsessives", Robert Spencer and Pam Geller are unwilling to state or support this very obvious answer. (Liberalism trumps even the Muslim Obsession as a powerful meme I guess!)

    If America is in danger of becoming a 3rd world nation it will be because of massive immigration of Mexicans, South Americans, and other third world peoples. Is LA even part of America anymore?

    LA is far more likely to be our "Istanbul" than any other city in America, if it isn't already. And it won't be joining the New Caliphate, it will be the capital of Aztlan.

    It's deluded to spend 90% of one's problem solving on something that is 1% of the problem, while ignoring the larger problems all around us.

    More Americans are killed by unlicensed Mexican drunk-drivers, a charming cultural marker, on any given weekend than all Muslim terrorists have killed in the USA since 9/11.

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  26. I've written about the importance of the immigration issue repeatedly.

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  27. Cultural difference is a result of genetic difference.

    Now if SK would stop screwing around and explicitly state the fact that the colonisation of the west is primarily racial instead of "Islamic", then this blog would significantly improve by dint of having a worldview that doesn't hit the brick wall of "Cultural" difference.

    Cultures don't come from a vacuum. They come from genetic heritage. "Islam" is an ideology, it has no demography; only genetically defined populations do.

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  28. @Vlad Z.

    Pamela Geller has an excellent article detailing islamonazi infiltration and subversion of the DOJ. Maybe you should read that and then get back to us on the nothing to fear from islamonazism angle.

    There's evidence to suggest Presidents were being bought off by islamonazi petrodollars (in particular Carter and the Clintonistas).

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  29. Anonymous7/9/11

    So how do we get the West to wake up? Librals control the mainstream media and are warping our kid's minds via the educational system. I can't help but wonder that we often preach to the choir. But, I suppose, what is the alternative? To remain silent? Surely not. Still, the challenges that lie before us often seem impossible to overcome because throngs of people have such a profoundly uninformed view of reality.

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  30. Jesus Christ Supercop said (9/07/2011)
    "... China has a crazy amount of people, but you don't see Chinese immigrants overwhelming Western nations ..."
    = = = = = =

    Funny; just in the last day or two I saw an article in the paper about pregnant Chinese women coming to the USA; they stay a couple of months, have their babies, and go back home with their new LEGAL US CITIZENS. Those little citizens guarantee them entry any time they want to come back...

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  31. @A_Nonny_Mouse

    China's star is on the rise, while that of the US is in spectacular decline. Our roads and bridges are rusting and decaying while China builds a transportation infrastructure that will exceed anything the US has ever had. China has recently built the largest hydroelectric dam in the world. One which makes Hoover dam look like a big nothing. In short, why would anyone want to immigrate from China to the US?

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  32. Anonymous8/9/11

    Yeah! What the hell is wrong with the West. It's like the worst thing in the world is to demand civilized behavior from people you are trying not to have a conflict with, because it might offend their culture. Everything about their culture is offensive to Western values. What the hell about not being offensives to ourselves. Shame on the West for such spineless and feeble minded behavior. To wish harm or assimilation of your enemy is the struggle of civilizations. The Arabs get that very well. It's normal to hate your enemies. It's not normal to turn the other cheek as aliens cry for you extermination in your own streets, and then pay them welfare checks for their 8 little bastards, while you hold a real job, and they procreate and preach hate all day!

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