Are We Falling Prey to our Own Arrogance?

Women in Kabul

If you had told an Afghan woman in the 1960s that her granddaughters would wear a veil she would have laughed you out of the door. Women in Kabul wore skimpy dresses, make up and high heels. The occasional headscarf or even Burka could be seen, but was very uncommon. Out in the countryside women wouldn’t have dreamed to ever wear something as clumsy as a veil. They were working in the fields and had no patience for fancy prudery virtue signalling.

The picture was very similar in Tehran, in Cairo, Algeria, in Pakistan and in many other places. Women of the sixties were so sure of themselves, they had not to worry.

I think we see the same again in the West right now. The only argument why things could not become worse is that “nah, not us”. In other words, the argument is no argument. It’s arrogance.

Things slowly dawn on the left, but they are too self-righteous to admit it. The new antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein demanded that the crime statistics be “reconstructed”. He says what we all know. They must stop lying. Specifically, he spoke about the lie that 95% of all antisemitic crimes were associated with the political right.

But the pace is slow and whether his words will have any effect is yet to be seen.

The real problem is the lack of education, particularly history classes. The multiculturalism and “we are immune to downfall” mantra can only be pushed because people lack actual information. They don’t realize how deep a culture can fall.

What we have seen in the Islamic world so far might not even be the worst outcome. We also might see that the moral relativism could result in a complete breakdown of virtues. The left does not fear that because it claims that all cultures are equal.

Even a very superficial look at history should give you a break. The Mongols under Genghis Khan slaughtered about 40 million people, estimated to have been a tenth of the world population at the time. That is even more people than Adolf Hitler killed.

The fall of the Roman Republic resulted in a rapid and utter destruction of gender roles and a blood lust that spawned the golden age of gladiator games. That shift is so strong that I could write an entire article about it. By the time of Cicero, a strong and well-rounded sense of masculinity was still prevalent and the chivalry that came with it resulted in an unparallelled influence of women in premodern times. By the time of Nero, a mere century later, killing was a popular game, the Emperor castrated and married another men and Pompeii was inundated in pornography (Sodom was probably prude in comparison). Infanticide (postnatal abortion) became common.

The Japanese were in constant war for ages. Their samurai soldiers were out to collect heads. The more heads you collected the more money and prestige you earned. Some cheated and chopped off the heads of women. The heads were examined to find out the shenanigans. This is what happens when chopping off heads is rewarded in a culture.

The Maori of New Zealand are a bit touchy when one speaks of their warrior past. They have changed dramatically since and hide what was. Was it all about a quaint warrior dance and fancy tattoos? It was also about collecting heads. There was also a game that resembled tin knock down – only with stacked up heads.

Some Indians famously burnt widows to death. Many cultures practiced cannibalism. Idi Amin, President of Uganda from 1971 to 1979, was very proud of his habit of eating humans and drinking their blood.

The Inca were so much into killing that they basically fought wars for fun. The game was that you proved your warrior skills by catching your opponents alive. Only a captive could make your wife and children enjoy the presence of his death as a public human sacrifice. The captive was slit open alive and his pounding heart was ripped out by the priest, displayed to the public and flung into a fire. The thrill was appreciated so much that it let to regular unjustified attacks on surrounding tribes. We are supposed to feel sorry that they are boring Catholics now.

Whenever we hear about colonialism we are on the defence. Most of us roll over. A few know that Europeans were also colonialised by Muslims and in a very brutal fashion. Muslims have a longer and more devastating history of colonialism committed against Europeans than the other way around. But also the motivation of the European colonialists are derided and dismissed. Did Christian missionaries not serve a good role? Just think of the examples of savage cultures above.

The left defines colonialism only by its lowest points, the most brutal battles, the most unjust rulers, the unfairest treatment of subordinates. Are we also supposed to be ashamed about streets, hospitals, and schools? With the attack on colonialism the left says that savagery does not exist. If savagery does not exist, you have nothing to lose. If you feel so safe to think that you have nothing to lose, you also cannot comprehend that your granddaughter will wear a Burka. And maybe it doesn’t matter because all cultures are equal. She may also be a cannibal by then.

Nobody says that our culture is better than others. This is now considered racism. Where the Christian missionaries racists? Why would they care about the souls of the savages if they were racists? We are constantly on the defence and not even that. Douglas Murray said quite rightly that we are first and foremost intellectually lazy. It is very easy to roll over and take on the chin every accusation against our groups because we don’t have to research why they are wrong.

How do people explain the world and history if they know absolutely nothing about it? The answer is historical materialism. I notice that we are so doused with Marxism that you will not even find many on the conservative side who have the balls to rip it apart. Historical materialism simplifies the world for dummies. You don’t know what happened but you know that some struggle for money and power is enough to explain it. Whatever does not fit, the rituals, from widow-burning to human sacrifice, is at best something that was implemented or “abused” by those who seek material wealth. At worst the fact is ignored. That’s all. Neither human nature nor cultural aspects are allowed to explain history so we could actually learn from it.

Its charm is the intellectual laziness. It actually erases all history and saves you from looking it up. The left is aggressively telling us that we should look forward anyway. Nothing to be seen here. They mirror the attitude of Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, famous for his terracotta army. He was not only burning all writings and mass murdering at least one million people, he also demanded that people forget about the past. This is the theme all totalitarians have in common.

The left claims that it does want to remember the Holocaust. I fear that they have lost their entire religiously bequeathed moral systems and historic roots so thoroughly that the superficial memory of the Nazi era is the only reference their moral compass has. All the world must be looked at through the prism of how much it resembles the Third Reich. But with only one data point, one cannot learn from history. If you want to prevent something like the Shoah to happen ever again, you must talk about Genghis Khan, Stalin, Mao and so on and honestly find the similarities and differences.

People don’t do this because of the shame that came with the Holocaust. But our memory of the dead does not serve the purpose of instilling shame. We honor the victims because they deserve it. It is a question of basic humanity. We also want that the Holocaust like other mass murders teach us to stop this from ever happening again. As a human being I’m also ashamed of the Holocaust. I’m also ashamed of the slave trade. But I’m equally ashamed of crimes that were committed by non-Europeans.

Shame is a dangerous emotion. Two German words have gone almost extinct because they were over-used by Adolf Hitler: Schande (like shanda) and Schmach. Both mean shame. The emotion was one of the main drivers that called Hitler to revenge the loss of the WWI. Do we really want to douse people with emotions of guilt and shame without putting things into perspective? I am the last to relativize the Holocaust. I know how many morons want to play it down. I call for redemption. We humans have enough reason to be ashamed. Learning from it is how we can redeem ourselves. But learning and redemption is a continuous process. Those Germans who say “we learnt from the past” usually want to close the case. If you continue to learn from the past, you will continue to find redemption.