One of the most important ethical questions is what the value of life is. Are all lives equal, or are some lives worth more?
This seems like an airy-fairy question, but it’s not. It under-girds how we dole out punishments for crime, how we spend money on healthcare and public services and when and how we go to war. It is at the heart of the NYPD turning their back on New York’s mayor and in their reaction to the killing of two police officers.
And it is at the heart of our societies reaction to the murders at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
If you haven’t seen any of the Charlie cartoons in question, take a moment to do so. Or see this cover, if you’re Christian.
What Charlie was doing was clearly political commentary. It was also clearly intended to be offensive.
As a result three young Muslims killed twelve people. And we are having a collective freakout over it.
I note that during the 90s hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died, and we did not freak out this much.
More people die in car accidents, electrocution or by falling from ladders than die due to “terrorism” in Western nations. Certainly more people die of the flu. Police kill far far more Americans than are killed by terrorists. (Though French policemen are far less trigger happy.) The French led invasion of Libya killed many, and the deaths are ongoing, deaths which quite likely would not have occurred without that invasion. In Syria the insurrection against Assad led to far more deaths than would have occurred otherwise, and that insurrection was supported materially by many Western nations.
9/11 was a huge tragedy, but the western blockade of Iraq in the 90s had killed far, far more people without anyone in the West getting nearly as worked up over it.
Some lives are clearly worth more than others. Our lives, the lives of those we identify with are worth more than their lives, the lives of those we don’t identify with.
So one American life is worth, what, fifty Iraqi lives? A hundred. What’s the metric?
To the police, and most Americans, a police life is worth more than a civilian life. Certainly a police life is worth more than an African-American’s life. And I think it’s clear that to most whites a white life is worth more than a black one.
We are intensely tribal, and we care far more about the deaths of people “like us” than the deaths of people “not like us.”
So, in part, the deaths of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and other workers cause so much outrage because they were white and European.
We spend our time killing brown people and black people and Muslims in large numbers, using paramilitary weapons domestically, and military weapons and economic warfare internationally, killing far more of them than us, then act surprised when, deeply offended, they strike back. (Yes, yes, this was a symbolic target and they really should have killed French politicians or military, but it’s not like we are discriminate (don’t even pretend we are.)) Somehow our outrage is valid, but we don’t grant them the right to theirs, including their vengeance. We attacked Afghanistan and Iraq for 9/11, but bin Laden explicitly said that he attacked the US because of American killings of Muslims, including all those dead Iraqi children.
His vengeance is evil. (It is, actually.) Ours, not so much apparently.
So let us be clear “our lives are worth more than theirs”. A lot more.
If you die a “wrongful death”, and the time comes for monetary compensation, how much your relatives receive will be based on what your income was. The more you made made, the more your relatives have lost in monetary terms, and they will receive more.
People who earn more, are worth more to us, in hard monetary terms. The life of a minimum wage worker just isn’t as big a deal as the death of someone who makes a lot of money. This is based on our actions, not our words.
That doesn’t have anything to do with the Charlie dead, they earned virtually nothing. Apparently the French didn’t feel like paying for the sort of satire they engaged in. Nonetheless, the lives of those who make more money are worth more to us.
In the old days there used to be the idea of “woman and children first” — that their lives were worth more than male lives. That may have been honored more in the breach, as with the Titanic, but one can also find occasions where captains of ships did insist that women and children went on the lifeboats first.
We see children as innocent, and we calculate that they lose more years than adults, so we value their lives more highly. And, perhaps, it also has to do with a parental instinct which most of us have. As for women, the biological “realists” would claim that those who can create new humans are more valuable, but whatever the reason most societies hate the idea of them being killed in war or raped far more than they dislike the idea of either of those fates happening to men.
Many feminists would argue that there are many ways we show that we value women’s lives less than mens—we certainly pay them less and for most of history we gave them less rights.
But tribalism trumps the women and children exception. Half a million dead Iraqi children speak loud and clear on this.
Our children are precious and worth anything. Their children. Whatever.
Is the value of someone’s life based on what they do? Or what they were doing? We would certainly feel more outraged at the death of a search and rescue worker than a gangster. Large parts of our society value police lives over civilian lives, and certainly our legal system, which almost never tries police for killing civilians does.
The Charlie Hebdo victims were engaged in “free speech”. Satire. They were mocking those who values they disagreed with, and doing so in a way intended to offend them as much as possible. (Take a look at those cartoons and try and argue otherwise.)
We claim to value free speech greatly, and since the Charlie victims were engaged in mocking people who didn’t appreciate it, and since that’s “a fundamental value of Western society” we class their deaths and more tragic than those of Iraqi children who died due to lack of medicine they would have had if the West hadn’t been sanctioning and blockading their country.
One might, however, question our commitment to freedom of speech. Oh, the French themselves are pretty good on free speech these days, but Americans with their Free Speech zones and punitive whistleblower prosecutions; the British with their draconian libel law, Official Secrets Act and anti-terrorism legislation; and Australians with their obscene internet censorship laws (to highlight just a few) seem hardly to be icons of “free speech”.
So, are some lives worth more depending on what people are doing? To be sure. But, the French themselves aside, perhaps what the Charlie writers were doing that makes them martyrs wasn’t just “free speech” but the target of their free speech, some of whose members responded violently to the insults: Ilsam. And that isn’t “free speech”, it is “Us vs. Them.”
And, as wonderful as France is on free speech these days, one remembers the Evo Morales incident, when France denied the Bolivian President’s plane right of way because of suspicion that Edward Snowden might be on board, so that the plane was forced down in Austria in an attempt to apprehend the famous whistleblower.
Some free speech is more important than others. Cartoons mocking Islam and Christianity are far more important to protect than a man who has revealed wholesale spying on the citizens of
Western nations.
But perhaps it is more simple, Snowden was only going to be locked up in a maximum security American prison after a trial whose result we all know, in effective isolation, till that drove him insane. The Charlie victims were killed.
And that leads to the final category: are some deaths worse just because of how they happen? Is being beheaded worse than dying in a car accident? Is being shot by terrorists worse than being shot by police? Is death from starvation worse than—oh why bother.
Yes, some deaths are clearly worse than others. I’d rather be shot than tortured to death, or die of starvation. But really what we mean are “deaths out of their time” or perhaps “deaths by violence”. The Charlie victims weren’t “due” to die yet. But then, neither were those Iraqi children, or all the Irakis who died of being shot in a war based lies (no WMD, no ties to 9/11).
But many deaths are preventable: easily preventable, and we fail to do so. Effective public transportation in the US, reducing the use of cars, would prevent a lot of deaths. But Americans like cars, or something, and so those deaths are considered acceptable. More effective restrictions on guns meant for killing people (as opposed to hunting rifles, say) and on ammunition would save a lot of American lives, but many Americans value their guns highly and think the deaths are a worthwhile price to pay.
All of this has been about what lives we, demonstrably, value more than others. It hasn’t been about what lives we should value more.
Perhaps the answer is simple. All lives have equal value, and in the event we are forced to choose between lives in a situation which doesn’t involve self-defense, we should indeed choose the young over the old. Or maybe not even that, the old perhaps not being willing to volunteer.
I, myself, don’t know. But I do know this. As long as Western lives are valued at something approaching infinity to one versus Muslim lives, Muslims are going to continue to be radicalized. John Paul VI once said that those who value peace should work for justice. I believe that. The Charlie killers appear to have been radicalized by the Iraq war. No Iraq war, no radicalization, no Charlie victims.
But that’s a pragmatic argument. The human argument is simpler: those Iraqi children’s lives were worth as much as any white child’s life. Anyone who believes otherwise is a monster acting on tribalism. And one day your tribe will be the weak one, because all Empires fall. And when that day comes, members of your tribe will rail at those who kill your children and don’t care, because your skin is white and theirs isn’t, and they can and you can’t do anything about it.
The only clear justification for killing is self-defense. More on that, perhaps, in another article. But if you must kill, let me suggest some old-fashioned mores: kill military not civilians, kill adults not children; kill those who have actually harmed you (politicians who decided on wars which devastated your country), not those who haven’t.
If you want vengeance, shoot at the guilty and shoot at those who can shoot back.
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Charlton A Butler Jr.
How about we just make an amendment to the Constitution, that demands that if a war is to be started/fought, every politician, who voted for war, must send their progeny first, if they can’t do it, then we send the politicians, if that doesn’t work the common man steps in; and we know the job is done; and the problem people that started it are dead.
Stirling Newberry
kill some normal people in an obscene way, than people will not suggest that people who die for profit are in no way valuable. they are just part of doing business.
EmilianoZ
We need to draw a line here between directly killing people (like putting a gun to their heads) and being indirectly responsible for their deaths (like through the embargo mentioned). If we do not draw a line, where do we stop? Are WallStreeters mass murderers? After all they speculate on commodities, people cannot afford them, people die. Come on, let’s be serious here.
cripes
@emiliano
Seriously?
Embargo has long been considered an act of war, justifying a shooting response. The purpose is to starve (food and other essentials) and kill. So I don’t get your point at all.
In this era of tech warfare, it is somewhat quaint to talk about “directly killing people” as a neatly distinguishable evil that somehow should raise more hackles than slowly killing them or remotely killing them. Or, I dunno, biowarfare, drones, coal mining, denial of medical care, mass imprisonment and deliberate embargo designed to make the population “feel pain” that is, die.
Seems pretty evil to me.
Anyway, to Ian’s point, I agree it is incredible the degree to which supposedly decent people will contort logic to convince themselves it’s ok to kill Iraqis, Fallujans, cubans, agent orange, panamanians, addicts, prisoners, homeless people or loose cigarette sellers.
Sometimes I think all moral, ethical principles flow from the simple premise that we are, as humans (some other animals, too) obliged to alleviate suffering and to share. Anything contrary to that is shunned
deerhunter
” The human argument is simpler: those Iraqi children’s lives were worth as much as any white child’s life. Anyone who believes otherwise is a monster acting on tribalism. And one day your tribe will be the weak one, because all Empires fall. And when that day comes, members of your tribe will rail at those who kill your children and don’t care, because your skin is white and theirs isn’t, and they can and you can’t do anything about it.”
By what metric are arab lives worth the same as whites? Whites are a superior race as evidenced by their creation of Western civilization and their conquest of the planet.
Acting on tribalism makes you a monster? Why? Are jews, blacks or any other minority living in America ‘monsters’ because they advocate and work for their own legitimate group interests? Nah, you reserve that kind of hate for your own co-ethnics apparently.
Ian…Whites are the only ones who play the race blind morality game. Every other race will and are takin us for suckers when we refuse to defend our own people and culture. Muslims see our morality as weakness and will take full advantage of it.
Ian Welsh
So, until the 16th century, at the very earliest, since the Indian and Chinese civilizations were superior to any existing white civilization, they were the superior races.
Do you even think about what you write?
Monster from the Id
I believe that all humans are entitled to equal humane treatment ethically. When I speak of supremacy in the following, I speak of practical power.
The fading practical supremacy of European and European-offshoot nations had nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with the evolution of modern science in Europe. If other peoples are willing to learn and apply science, they can stand as practical equals to us palefaces. The fallacy of a genetic superiority of us palefaces lies rusting with the Czar’s battleships at the bottom of Tsushima Strait.
deerhunter
So you admit races can be classified into a hierarchy…we are getting somewhere lol. How does this match up with your ideas of the moral goodness of imposed equality? M0re importantly the moral necessity of whites prostrating themselves before the colored masses swarming into their great cities, many of which want to see their hosts dead?
Do you think it is ‘fair’ or ‘right’ that whites are becoming a minority in their homelands?
Whats the human argument about the mass rape of white english girls by muslim immigrants in england for instance? What about the mass media black out of black on white hate crimes and murders in america?
And you have the gall to morally browbeat your fellow whites in a time when our race is facing its darkest hour.
Do you even think about what you write?
Ian Welsh
Fascinating. The Racist in full screed. I trust my other readers will be edified.
deerhunter
Whats wrong with racism? At this point its merely self preservation.
I trust your readers will note that you have answered none of my questions and you are now just calling me names.
Fascinating? No, more like typical.
Mary McCurnin
Scientifically/logically there is no such thing as race. That being said, some white people are idiots.
deerhunter
“Scientifically/logically there is no such thing as race. That being said, some white people are idiots.”
Hahah. You are the perfect summation of liberal hypocrisy on race.
“Race isnt real. But fuck white people.”
Btw. Race is very real. If you refuse to believe your lying eyes there is a wealth of scientific literature on the subject. The man who won the noble prize for discovering the structure of DNA has said as much (James Watson).
deerhunter
To answer the question of this post’s title…”Are some lives worth more than others”?
Is an adult who has lived in this world for decades still contemplating this question?
Answer to both questions is yes.
BlizzardOfOz
How do you quantify “how much we freaked out”, anyway? I seem to recall a pretty massive freakout over the Iraq war. BBC says that 6-10 million people protested worldwide.
How many strangers who live on the other side of the world are worth your brother or sister or child’s life? Valuing your kin more than outsiders is endemic to human nature. You can rail against that fact, but it will never change.
This also seems like a kind of utilitarian approach to human lives — who reasons like that? It seems contrived (a bit like the “ticking time bomb” artifice that someone brought up on a previous thread).
You must mean the #WhiteLivesMatter movement … oh wait, that was blacks. Why are you propagating blood libels about your own race?
Indeed, it seems like that day is fast approaching.
Who ever said that races are immutable? The entire point of races is that they arise through genetic and evolutionary processes.
markfromireland
The stuff that crawls out from under a rock …
Thanks for this posting Ian. Wish I could say I was surprised at the reaction but I’m not.
mfi
DMC
There does seem to be an uptick in troll activity lately, though we seem to be getting the volunteers rather than the professionals on this thread.
Larry
“Whites are a superior race as evidenced by their creation of Western civilization and their conquest of the planet.”
Someone doesn’t understand how human knowledge has evolved. Before there was Western civilization there were the great civilizations that Europeans and by default, Americans, built on. Much of the achievements in science, math, medicine, and navigation can be traced back to much earlier Arabian cultures.
But as is happening with science now in the West where Christian zealots are trying to minimize its value, so was the case that effected the decline in Arabian culture as the religious fanatics began to take control in the 13th and 14th centuries.
jump
I think the secondary point of ‘freedom of expression’ is extremely important here (used here in terms of dissenting voices, but acknowledge it too often devolves into offensive attacks). It is not just a question of the weighing of lives, but the weighing of thoughts and values. You cannot take man out of the social context. It seems it is usually a conflict of thoughts and values, or a lack of tolerance to differing opinions and values, that leads to the loss of lives.
Our experiments with civilization have been precarious at best. When times are good we share and help each other, develop science, arts and literature, celebrate differences and otherwise are civil with each other. At least that is possible in times of shared abundance. But when times get tough that skin of civility is too easily shed and we abandon the sharing values and revert to our deep seated tribalism with its inherent weighing of lives and coercive power struggles. Struggle for the dollar is included in the tough times if the social value system created that environment.
I did find it ironic that the MSM trumpeted the freedom of expression card when they themselves self-censor for fear of retaliation from the powers that be.
V. Arnold
What Charlie Hebdo was doing was projecting “western” values on the rest of the world; a world that does not recognize or agree with those values.
This is a fundamental disconnect from a multi-polar, multi-cultural, multi-religious world.
I do not share that universalist, unipolar, one world view. And neither does the world at large.
So, we have a major problem; a problem of intolerance.
It’s pretty clear that Islam is not ISIS. But the MSM would have us believe otherwise.
Personally; I found the anti-Mohammad cartoons very offensive and do not support the demonization of Islam via this venue. I am not Charlie and won’t buy that crap!
A tiny minority of Muslims are causing most of the problems and the west has major culpability in this demonization by there extreme violence towards Muslims. If this isn’t the Crusades, you’ll have to forgive my misunderstanding…
Ian Welsh
The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children who died in the 90s were due to the sanctions. The Iraq war did not start till the 2000’s.
V. Arnold
Oh dear, the fragment, this demonization by there extreme violence; should read, this demonization by their extreme violence.
Stuart Zechman
OK, so…
And how do we know this?
Yet…
Hmm…
What’s the connection between a “collective freakout” and lives mattering?
What does it cost anyone to watch cable television and “freak out”…or not? Is the time spent re-tweeting an already conceived hashtag somehow demonstrative of human value?
In my mind, at least, an actual freak-out would involve something like a major run on ammunition supplies, or another commodity one might expect to factor into at least a partial popular mobilization of some kind.
An actual collective freak-out might be known by, say, a majority population’s almost overnight mass surrender to a quasi-totalitarian state security regime.
As it happens, I can think of a number of phenomena, e.g. migrations, popular violence, general strikes, etc., that I’d consider truly evident of a “mass freakout,” and cable television watching or online editorializing just don’t seem to be in the same category.
Yep, I just can’t see the connection between media consumers (temporarily) “freaking out,” i.e. having a spectacle successfully sold to them, and the degree to which real lives actually matter to anyone.
If you’d care to explain a little further what ordinary people’s cost-free and consequent-less reactions to various images promoted by elites have to do with valuing or not valuing human life, I’d appreciate it, Ian.
Sorry for being obtuse,
Stuart Zechman
Stirling Newberry
EmilianoZ :
“Are WallStreeters mass murderers.”
Yes. Next question?
jump
Stuart,
I think the collective freak out point is that it is state sanctioned freak out and sold to the people, no thought required, just consume the current news meme and repeat after me, as you point out. Real freak out would require some analysis of news bits, critical thought and creative imagination (I would not include a run on ammunition in this as I assume most readers here do not own a firearm) . Too much trouble for most.
The fact that media did not stir up a frenzy of freak out over the the deaths of thousands from an embargo let alone countless more from a war also implicates state sanctioned freak out. Just sayin.
And I am probably on some watch list somewhere for questioning the status quo and dissenting with the PTB.
Mass freak out, as you put it is almost certainly contrived for propaganda and or distraction. Mass freak out for any other purpose is almost certainly outlawed.
Interesting related post by Greenwald: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/06/police-increasingly-monitoring-criminalizing-online-speech/
BlizzardOfOz
This post has me recalling a prior one: Ethics 101: The difference between ethics and morals:
It seems like the current post conflates the two somewhat. The whole reason for the ethics-morals distinction is that humans intrinsically value their kin more than strangers. “All lives are equal” is an ethical principle that would not be necessary if this weren’t true.
But ethics has to do with positions of responsibility, where someone in an official capacity is expected to put aside personal sympathies and act for the good of the group he represents. It is anti-nature in that sense, even if necessary for human societies.
But “getting worked up” about something is a natural response that belongs to the realm of morality. We don’t, and shouldn’t, judge a moral response in the same way as we judge an official decision to be ethical. We would consider a parent monstrous, or at least highly abnormal, who got equally worked up over the death of an own child, and the death of an unknown child on the other side of the world.
The subject of statesmanship seems to lie somewhere between ethics and morality. A national leader is expected to act in the interests of his countrymen, not just his immediate kin (ethics). But he should also value the lives of his countrymen more than those of foreigners. Everyone would hope to never have to make the kind of trade-off that Hiroshima dramatically exemplifies, but ultimately a leader of a country puts that country’s interests first.
One thing should be pretty clear — it makes no sense from self-interest to both continue killing Muslims across the world, and inviting them into our countries en masse (I’d rather do neither, then just the latter, then just the former, in order of preference).
Stirling Newberry
http://symbalitics.blogspot.com/2015/01/canto-y.html
Featuring Ian in one section. Careful, it’s poetry.
Lisa FOS
Standing back a bit, the key thing to remember that whether or not it is a ‘false flag’ or a ‘Blowback/AQ/IS/domestic grievance/etc’ or a ‘grey area’ (security forces knew about it and looked the other way) sort of thing, the AIM is the same.
That is to get the French Govt to demonise and crack down and repress the Muslim community there.
If is NOT a ‘false flag’ then this is classic guerilla tactics (101 in fact), do something to provoke the state to oppress lots of people so they come over to your side.
If it is a ‘false flag’ then this is classic totalitarian state stuff, ‘pick a minority to demonise and repress to justify more state powers and general repression of everyone and justify war, etc’.
So the key thing to watch is what the French state does next. Are they going to be smart or stupid/complicit.
What makes me suspicious is the target was very politically clever. It enrages the left and stirs them up against Muslims whom they nominally support, it seriously damages, maybe finishes, a publication that the far right in France hate (Charlie’s most common target).
The proof, one way or another, will come out over the next few months.
A key thing to watch for is what is NOT covered in any way (non-barking dog thing). There will be endless repetition of various things and an ‘official narrative’, naturally, but there will some critical things to the understanding the ‘who/what/why’ of it all that no one will touch with a barge pole in the MSM (as per Sydney, Boston, 9/11, etc).
Mary McCurnin
Deerhunter
I used the term white people cause I was sure you would know who I was talking about since you believe in W.H.I.T.E. people being so important.
And I would like some credible links on the notion that race is real.
oh and I am a white, raised in the deep south woman, so when I witness the bullshit that a racist spews it is my job to make a fuss.
Bless your little heart.
BlizzardOfOz
@Mary McCurnin, I can’t speak for your interlocutor, but this one is pretty good.
Apneaman
Hey Deerhunter. I come from northern European decent. Vikings were my ancestors. I’m 6 foot, 220lb, blond haired, blue eyed, white as a ghost Aryan poster boy. The love of my life is a half black lady and if you spoke like that in front of her, I would make sure you regretted it. Do not presume to speak for the entirety of white people. Your, join a gang or die, prison mentality is a by product of too much TV and movies (or maybe you’ve done hard time in the U.S.) and does not apply to every single one of the other 7,000,000,000 plus people on the planet; just your particular tribe of inbreds and a small handful like them around the globe. Also do not presume everyone who disagrees with you is automatically a liberal. I’m not. Most people, regardless of their political leanings, do not appreciate the paranoid inbred klan mentality.
Monster from the Id
@Deerhunter and other “race realists” of the Dork Enlightenment (deliberate misspelling):
The 19th Century called. It wants its pseudo-science back. 😛
Mary McCurnin
Thanks Monster Person.
deerhunter
Mary,
If you are truly open-minded you can find it for yourself. The internet is at your finger tips…but somehow i doubt you will be convinced by dry rational arguments at this stage.
“oh and I am a white, raised in the deep south woman, so when I witness the bullshit that a racist spews it is my job to make a fuss.”
Congrats. Actually your job is to keep a home and raise then next generation of your people. Your moral posturing against “racism” is a betrayal to your ancestors, but i’m sure you dont care.
Apneaman,
Hey internet Viking tough guy. No ones cares if you have jungle fever, but im glad you will be exiting the white gene pool! Good riddance. BTW I’m taller than you.
“Your, join a gang or die, prison mentality is a by product of too much TV and movies …blah blah you are the klan and inbred”
Nah dude. I grew up in West LA, raised by liberal parents. I lived multiculturalism. This is a product of my own investigations via the internet/books. I give a shit about the civilization that was sort of passed down to me. That why I care about the integrity of my race. You cant have Western Civilization without White Westerners.
Liberal=Traitor to me. Deal with it.
Monster from the Id
It isn’t white civilization or Western civilization; it’s scientific civilization. Any people who learn science can do it, as the East Asians have demonstrated. Again, Tsushima Strait.
“Liberal = Traitor to me. Deal with it.”
Bigot = Useful idiot for plutocrats who don’t give a damn if the bigots die of deprivation or preventable disease, once the bigots have outlived their usefulness to the plutocrats.
Racism is one variety of bigotry, but the plutocrats and their hired brains can use any variety of bigotry for their purposes.
deerhunter
No such thing as “scientific civilization” Northern Europeans are peculiar for embracing the scientific method. Many other civilizations had the opportunity but didnt do it (why?).
So the Japs have been successful in mimicking our technology? And?
You: Who cares if the 1000+ year civilization that I’m am apart of, that my ancestors died and suffered to create dies out, as long as tech is advancing its all good!
Disgusting.
Did it ever occur to you that racial solidarity is an impediment to Capitalist domination. Money doesnt see color and anything that get in the way must be pushed aside. God you liberals are clueless.
Multiculturalism/globalization fits like a glove with the commercialization of a things and the global dominance of money before all other values. WAKE UP.
Monster from the Id
Actually, in my case, it’s “Why should I give a flying duck about atavistic simian tribal solidarity? I’m going to a better world after I die, and its Proprietor disapproves of racism.” (Although He loves racists, as He loves all sinners, hating only their sins.)” 😀
deerhunter
You presume to know the will of God. Ok.
Monster from the Id
Aw, khest it all! I didn’t mean to italicize ALL of that. 🙄
I can haz eddit feechur, plz?
The Arab/Muslim civilization was making good progress, until the fundamentalist types took over, as Larry mentioned. Also, the Mongol Hordes really set them back. Precisely because the Islamic culture was more advanced at that time–and hence wealthier–they made a more attractive target for the Mongols.
The Chinese had gunpowder, deep-water sailing ships, and blast furnaces first, among other things–but they were too conservative, too smugly satisfied with their civilization. The Chinese empire was too effectively centralized, with its scholar-bureaucrats able to impose a remarkable degree of conformity of thought. They actually laid the ships up to rot, and let the blast furnaces close down. They paid for that error with roughly a century of humiliation at the hands of us “barbarians”. Once Perry’s expedition shocked Japan awake from its long feudal daydream, the Japanese elite looked at the fates of China, Korea, Indochina and decided they had better learn science and technology quickly. They succeeded so well that a certain portion of their elite became arrogantly overconfident, and bit off more than they could chew in 1941.
The strength of Europe lay, to a great extent, in its many geographic barriers to conquest. No one great power was able to conquer the whole continent and impose a stagnant conformity of thought. Any power which tried to strangle science and technology in the name of orthodoxy (religious or not) would leave itself vulnerable to its neighbors who were not so handicapping themselves. This explains why, once Protestantism got off the ground, it didn’t take long for the Catholic powers to decline, except France, and the French had a strong anti-clerical streak.
deerhunter
Eh not bad…
Missing some things though.
A lot of what the Arabs take credit for was really done by White Persians and Greeks they had conquered.
I have heard theories about why the Chinese are so conformist. The culture of rice production and its implication regarding population ‘eugenics’ etc.. Whatever, might be true. Doesnt really matter.
The ‘varied geography of Europe is the reason they won’ argument reminds of fucking Jared Diamond. Please dude, spare me. That fool who slobbers all over savage New Guinea tribesman?
Blood matters. Aryan blood matters. You know it.
Monster from the Id
“Aryan”, eh?
That word belongs to a heritage of losers, pal. Are you sure you want to claim that?
deerhunter
Yes I do.
Just because the Jews told us it was unfashionable or immoral doesn’t change things for me.
Tom W Harris
Yeah, but who cares what you “think”, dh?
aliena
Charlie Hebdo is an institution in France. Blasphemy, profanity, scatology and satire are very important to us. It’s an old tradition against tyranny. It’s not just people that were killed but a part of French culture. It’s like they killed Marianne.
They are our beloved cartoonists. They were anarchist, atheist, anti-war, insolent and were the only one to care about injustice. They weren’t coward. And the journal will continue with new cartoonist, without eulogy, like they’re not dead.
I am tired to hear this meme “they deserved it” from the Anglo sphere. They didn’t. (“Apparently the French didn’t feel like paying for the sort of satire they engaged in.”)
There were not killed as a retribution for war on Muslims but for their critique of an often brutal and oppressive religion that can’t tolerate anything. Free speech isn’t a Western value, it’s a universal value.
You are the one measuring and ranking life while knowing absolutely nothing about those you are judging. I am sorry Ian, but you are just an ignorant, prude and moralistic Anglo. And like all good Anglo, you despise French people, we understand that. Talk about tribalism.
Monster from the Id
Where did Ian say the Charlie Hebdo victims deserved to die? I did not see that in his post.
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As for DH, before he decides to practice what he preaches, he might want to note the fate of the Ratzis, the original “Aryan” partisans.
I hope he is not stupid enough to take it that far. From his description of himself as “raised by liberal parents”, I’m hoping that he’s mentally, even if not chronologically, adolescent, and rebelling against Mommy and Daddy. I hope that he will grow up, and wise up, before he lands in a cell or an early grave.
Disclosure: Since I brought up the subject of age, I am 51.
ks
Amusing but sad. From the “race realist” troll to a crazy accusation that Ian is committing “blood libel!” against his own race, this has turned into quite the spectacle.
Ian’s post is plainly accurate and in a normal world wouldn’t be the least bit controversial but, oh well, that’s not where we are.
Lisa Simeone
“That why I care about the integrity of my race.”
The integrity of your race?? WTF does that mean?
Duncan
Deerhunter: “Do you think it is ‘fair’ or ‘right’ that whites are becoming a minority in their homelands? ”
American whites aren’t in their homelands. They should go back to Europe. That way lies madness, of course, since the human species evidently originated in Africa. Since whites took the Americas by conquest, and on your account might makes right, then you’d better believe it’s both fair and right for us to become a minority. For whites to whine that they’re facing the same fate they happily inflicted on others is merely laughable. Minorities and majorities aren’t set in stone. Today’s minority is tomorrow’s majority, and vice versa.
As for white civilization, it’s largely and avowedly stolen from non-whites — Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Jews, Egyptians — who were civilized when the European savages were painting themselves blue and practicing human sacrifice. I say “avowedly” because of the USAn use of Greek architecture, imagery, and cultural precedent to provide a fake genealogy for our “culture.” Christianity is an “oriental” religion, not a white one. I see that you pretend to regard Persians as white, but that’s clearly a strategic diversion. Most American bigots don’t consider Iranians to be white; they believe them to be Arabs.
Monster from the Id
I thought that the peoples of the Middle East and India are Caucasian (“white”), just swarthy Caucasian (adapted to the intense solar ultraviolet flux of their home regions). The ancient Greeks and Romans, and their descendants, surely are.
BlizzardOfOz
It seems like there you are using “white” interchangeably with “WASP”. But the term “white” belongs to the coarsest-grained categorization, where there are only 5 races. In other words, it doesn’t make sense to pretend that Greeks, Romans, and Jews are not white.
How many of those others were then, as you apparently are now, gleefully cheering their own displacement? I wonder if there was a school of thought in the Indian tribes: “since we stole the land from that other tribe, it is only proper that the paleface steal the land in turn from us. Clearly we have it coming”.
Spinoza
@deerhunter
Please take a DNA test. If you have one drop of non European blood will you do your fascist friends a favor and kindly shoot yourself? Can’t dilute the precious white gene pool, amirite???
Harry
Hi Ian,
hope people like yourself continue to have freedom of speech and that the laws of the universe never stop the truth from been spoken.
Many nations are guilt of profit making wars at the expense of innocent people and it amazes me how they manage to round up support for trivial events in a corrupt world order. When war and terror etc. stop giving superpowers more power then I imagine it will decrease at least.
Thanks to people like yourself we have some hope that the new world order will one day fall into the right hands.
Thank you