Know Your Military Colonists
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
"Military Colonist" is a term that has gone out
of fashion in this brave new world of "No Human
Being is Illegal" and "Every Refugee Deserves to be
Resettled."
The university history professor with an office
full of fake Indian jewelery and a view of the
parking lot will lecture on the military colonies of
the Roman period, always careful to emphasize their
eventual fate. And he may even get up to the 16th
century. But he'll stay away from the present.
But if you are going to take land or seize power,
you will need military colonists to hold it. The
military colonist may be an ex-soldier, but he's
more likely to be someone the empire, present or
future, doesn't particularly need or have a use for.
The Czars used serfs. The present day military
colonist who shows up at JFK or LAX may also be a
peasant with even less value to his culture.
Mexico's military colonists are not military. Often
they aren't even Mexican. But they have managed to
take back California without firing a shot. Unless
you count the occasional drive by shooting.
While the United States sent tens of thousands of
soldiers to try and hold Iraq and Afghanistan only
to fail; Mexico took California with a small army of
underpaid handymen who claim entire cities and send
back some 20 billion dollars a year. As conquests
go, it's not hard to see who did more with less.
In 2009, 417 Mexican migrants died trying to reach
America, and 317 American soldiers died in
Afghanistan. But Mexico has more to show for it than
America does. Every Mexican who settles across the
border is a net gain who sends back money and
spreads political influence. Meanwhile America is
spending trillions on a much smaller army in a
country whose land no one actually wants.
In 2009, the year Obama approved a 30,000 man troop
surge, 3,195 Afghans received permanent legal status
in the United States.
In the decade since the US invaded Afghanistan,
24,710 Afghans successfully invaded the United
States and received permanent legal status. That is
an occupying force larger than US troop numbers were
at any point in time in Afghanistan until the very
end of the George W. Bush's second term.
During this same period there were also 19,000
Afghan non-immigrant admissions. As invasions go,
the Afghan invasion of America was far more
successful than the American invasion of
Afghanistan.
That is even more true when you consider birth
rates. Military colonists are not a mere invading
army. They are generational footholds.
The American birth rate was at 13.5. The Afghan
birth rate was at 37.3 at the time. American
soldiers go home when their time is up. Sometimes
they come home with a Muslim wife after converting
to marry her. Afghan immigrants come with a birth
rate that is nearly three times that of the country
they are invading.
Across the ocean, the Algerian War is still going
strong and France is losing badly. There are fewer
bombs and bullets. Only men and women showing up and
expecting to be taken care of. An army of millions
could not have landed in France and begun pillaging
the countryside. Not unless they came as immigrants.
If you are going to invade a Socialist country, the
best way to do it is as a charity case.
Unfortunately that holds true for us as well.
The military colonists flooding our shores are part
of an unacknowledged partnership between their
political leaders and ours. Their political leaders
are fighting a war to redress the wrongs of
centuries or millennia. Our political leaders are
looking to shift the voting balances in a ward or a
district for the next election. When they resettle
the next shipment of Afghans in an otherwise
conservative area with a view to tilting the
electoral balance, they are using them as military
colonists for the short term while their homelands
use them as military colonists in the long term.
War is about controlling land, resources and
populations. Land just sits there. It's the
populations that cause the trouble. The military
colonist makes a more enduring occupation possible
by settling the land and giving the conquering power
a deeper foothold in the enemy territory.
There was a time when American settlers acted as
military colonists holding down lands in Florida and
Texas. Today America is being colonized by the
settlers of other nations and ideologies. And we
will find ourselves in the same position as the
Spanish did in Florida and the Mexicans did in
Texas.
Mexico invited American settlers to move in to Texas
on the understanding that they would learn Spanish
and otherwise fit in. Instead language and culture
proved to be stronger than land and oaths of
citizenship. Many of the Texas settlers might not
have had much use for the United States at the time,
but creed and culture made them American military
colonists whether they knew it or not. The same
holds true for the present state of affairs there
today.
It's more than just cultural or ethnic differences
that make one a military colonist. It's a cause.
Whether it's Manifest Destiny or the Reconquista or
the Caliphate. Underlying it all is that sense of
destiny. The power of an exceptionalism that makes
it impossible for the settler to sink in and abandon
his roots and beliefs to the tidal pull of a new
culture when his grudge against it is more than the
mere personal dissatisfaction of the new immigrant
or his children caught between two worlds.
Integration is hopeless in the face of that sense
of destiny. European nations struggling to defend
some notion of secular space misunderstand the
problem as one of extremism. Some of the more
visible terror attacks may indeed be associated with
what can be described as extremism in the sense that
its participants are willing to push the envelope
harder and further in more violent ways.
But Islamic terrorism is only the foam on the
surface. It's the bubbles at the edge of the pot. A
minor symptom of a much bigger problem. Ir's simply
the most violent expression of a widely shared
belief that Islamic law is superior to Western law.
Most peoples feel that their ways and customs are
best. It doesn't become a problem until they become
the majority and won't take no for an answer.
American liberalism and European republicanism have
no answers to Islamic terrorism. Their embrace of
the Arab Spring was motivated by the need to believe
that the Muslim world was ready to "advance" to the
same postmodern level of existence eliminating the
need to worry about women in Burkas or Al Qaeda. The
same misreading of the power of tribe and religion
that led to the foolish belief that Saudi Arabia's
military colonists could safely be turned into
Labour voters led to the Arab Spring's equally
misplaced confidence that the Muslim Brotherhood
wanted to be just like Europe.
It isn't only a tiny minority of extremists who
believe that Islamic values are superior to Western
values and who would like the law to recognize that
assumption. It's a tiny minority of extremists who
try to prove their devoutness by jumping the gun and
killing people over it before the full demographic
impact of the military colonists would make a Burka
ban into the next Syrian Civil War.
Think of two armies maneuvering into position. The
extremist is the one who fires before the enemy is
fully in range ruining the strategic effect of the
surprise attack. Trying to understand the extremist
not only misses the point, it misses the whole chain
of events in motion. The schemes for integrating the
disgruntled youth and countering violent extremism
is symptom control.
Terrorism is an early warning in the clash of
civilizations and all our leaders can think to do is
hold a meeting with the heads of the opposing army
asking them to get their hotheads to stop shooting
at us because it's bringing our civilizations into
conflict. Our civilizations are in conflict and have
been as far back as they have both existed. The
occasional plane hijacker is the first snowflake of
a winter storm. Instead of preparing for a storm,
we're trying to figure out how to stop snowflakes.
The conflict is primal. It isn't about American
foreign policy or War X or Country Y or Cause Z.
These are all "arguments" that explain the conflict
once it's already under way. It's simpler than that.
It's about the incompatibility of cultures,
religions, political and economic systems. And it's
about countries with a lot of oil and not much else
trying to buy their way to an empire by using their
own impoverished brethren as cannon fodder. And
finally it's about what happens when birth rates
fall.
Western countries have achieved individual
comforts with an unsustainable system.
This unsuistainability is both economic and
demographic as budgets and children are both
lacking. Meanwhile the countries and cultures that
have failed have achieved a perfectly sustainable
state of misery. They may not have much income, but
they also don't have much to eat. They may have high
infant mortality rates, but they have even higher
childbirth rates.
America of 2013 cannot go on being this way
indefinitely. It probably can't even manage another
two decades without major changes of some kind.
Afghanistan 2013 however can go on being the way it
is indefinitely. And that sustainability is what
makes its people effective military colonists.
Living the Afghan lifestyle in London or Los Angeles
is even sustainable because food and housing are
free.
That just leaves large packs of nomadic youths
roaming the streets, selling drugs and rioting at
the slightest provocation until it's time for them
to get married and make more nomadic youths of their
own. It's not that different from Afghanistan. It's
the tribal life transplanted to the West. It's a
culture with no real purpose except to produce young
males eager to fight and expand tribal power and a
religion with no real purpose except to affirm that
as a religious duty.
Islam embodies expansionism. Its directives of male
violence and female subjugation have no other end.
They protect the tribal imperatives of endogamy and
violence, of inbreeding and the feud. It has no
ideas except to get bigger and that makes its
followers into ideal military colonists.