You Can't Beat Something With Nothing

John C. Wright:

A reader has a question about this statement, which I quoted with favor: "When a civilization can't even take pride in a fight related to its own survival, that civilization is in a heap of trouble." He asks:

"How is our survival in jeopardy? Radical Islamists are the equivalent of White Anarchists. Neither is likely to have so much impact as to endanger our very survival. If you're reference is to more potential attacks on our soil wouldn't you agree that nearly 1M deaths (retribution in Iraq / Afghanistan?) is pride enough?"

The fight in question was driving the Moors from Andalusia, which was indeed a fight for survival. If the Spaniards cannot take pride in that, they are in a heap of trouble.

But a larger question is raised about the degree of the threat to the West posed by the Jihad.

Our survival is in jeopardy because this war is entirely psywar, not a physical war except in the most trivial sense. If I may be permitted the expression, it is a spiritual war.

See, for example, this comment by Mark Steyn:
link

A while back I mentioned Harvard's decision to ban men from its pool and fitness center six times a week in the interests of "accommodating" Muslim women. Our pal Michael Graham picks up the theme:

In the old days, Harvard would have laughed if some Catholic or evangelical mother urged “girls-only” campus workouts in the name of modesty. Today, Harvard happily implements Sharia swim times in the name of Mohammed.

At Harvard, that’s called progress.

Well put. And thus "progress" comes full circle. In Minneapolis last year, the airport licensing authority, faced with a mainly Muslim crew of cab drivers refusing to carry the blind, persons with six-packs of Bud, slatternly women, etc, proposed instituting two types of taxis with differently colored lights, one of which would indicate the driver was prepared to carry members of identity groups that offend Islam. Forty years ago, advocating separate drinking fountains made you a racist. Today, advocating separate taxi cabs or separate swimming sessions makes you a multiculturalist.

Note there was is going on. The Jihadists do not need to take and hold territory by military means. All they need do is cow a sufficient number of people to make a sufficient number of concessions to them, in order to propagate their culture as the norm, and relegate our culture to a secondary status. They can afford to wait for demographics to do the rest.

Do you think of the Anarchists of the last century had been facing a culture as morally and mentally bankrupt as ours, and had been funded by oil money, and had been aided and applauded at every turn by appeasers, fellow travelers, and useful idiots, that they would have had so little impact on history? Myself, I would think the Bolsheviks to be a closer parallel than the Anarchists, and Islam is a larger and older religion than the Communist movement ever commanded, and build on sounder principles than Communism.

The Muslim Jihad are an existential threat in the same way the German barbarians were a threat to the Roman empire. The German tribes simply did not have the manpower or military might to defeat the Empire, until the years came when the Empire, split in two, economically crippled, overtaxed and overregulated, was dying of myriad internal causes. The difference is that the Germans were willing to adopt the laws and religion of Rome, and to be civilized. The Jihad does not want that, they want the opposite.

The fellow-travelers and collaborators among the West who favor the Jihad, also want the downfall, not of civilization, but of the traditions, virtues, philosophies and values that are necessary preconditions to civilization, but which the they, for some odd reason, regard as optional, or even dismiss as a barrier to progress.

So, your question is a red herring. The survival of the West is not in jeopardy, if by that we mean the Jihadists will wipe out the White Races as sailors wiped out the dodo. The survival of the West as an institution, as a culture, as a people, is very much in question, particularly if we examine, not what is likely to happen within a decade, but what is likely to happen in a century.

We do not have the will to fight. The dominant social philosophy of the West is no longer Christianity, which can serve, if need be, as a fine warrior's religion, but is hedonism, which can never serve, by its very nature, as anything but a peacetime philosophy forever operating toward the disunion and disintegration of society.

Three hundred epicureans and playboys cannot face three hundred Spartans, because the epicureans are only individuals, atoms without bonds, whereas the Spartans are a machine.

The war is a spiritual one, fought by ideas. Islam is an ancient religion with a backbone of strength to it. Modern secular humanism is a threadbare philosophy, a hulk of exhausted promises and lies, that inspires neither loyalty nor zeal.

Do you think three hundred men who think that they are no better than monkeys or meat-robots, men loyal to no ideal nobler than self-interest rightly understood, can face three hundred Holy Warriors animated by an unearthly hope of paradise? Their eyes are set on nothing of this world; therefore nothing in the world can deter them.