Mailvox: deportation is not war

Asked asked about the abandonment of multiculturalism:

Vox, your position seems to abandon multi-culturalism.. how do you envision this practically? France has 4-5 million Muslims, it’s not possible to deport them without a MAJOR war. The other alternative would be forceful conversions to Christianity/atheism… yeah.. be ready to strike France out of the map.

This is a false dichotomy. Of course it is possible to deport 5 million people. It’s neither difficult to accomplish nor likely to inspire war, let alone a MAJOR war. The oft-heard insistence that mass deportation is either a) impossible or b) necessarily violent is intrinsically ignorant. One has to literally know nothing about 20th century history in order to make the assertion, as one’s knowledge of the subject does not even rise to the level of Wikipedia.

  1. Eastern Europe, 1945: German Reichsdeutsche and citizens of other European states who claimed German ethnicity were forced out of many Eastern Europe countries to Germany and Austria, and to Australia or the United States from there for many, during the later stages of World War II and the post-war period. The areas of expulsion included former eastern territories of Germany, which were transferred to Poland and the Soviet Union after the war, as well as areas annexed or occupied by Nazi Germany in pre-war Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, northern Yugoslavia and other states of Central and Eastern Europe. By 1950, a total of approximately 12 million Germans had fled or been expelled from east-central Europe into the areas which would become post-war Germany and Allied-occupied Austria. Some sources put the total at 14 million, including migrants to Germany after 1950 and the children born to expelled parents. The largest numbers came from territories ultimately ceded to Poland and the Soviet Union (about 7 million), and from Czechoslovakia (about 3 million).
  2. Soviet Union, 1932: Population transfer in the Soviet Union may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of “anti-Soviet” categories of population, often classified as “enemies of workers,” deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill the ethnically cleansed territories. In most cases their destinations were underpopulated remote areas (see Forced settlements in the Soviet Union). This includes deportations to the Soviet Union of non-Soviet citizens from countries outside the USSR. It has been estimated that, in their entirety, internal forced migrations affected some 6 million people.
  3. USA, 2011: Nearly 400,000 people were deported from the United States in the past
    fiscal year, the largest number in the history of the U.S. Immigration
    and Customs Enforcement agency, the government announced Tuesday. Overall in fiscal year 2011, immigration officials said, 396,906 individuals were removed.
  4. USA, 1954: Overall, there were 1,078,168 apprehensions made in the first year of
    Operation Wetback, with 170,000 being captured from May to July 1954.

It is simply false to claim that it is impossible to deport 5 million people from any country without a war. It can certainly be argued whether a mass repatriation policy is desirable or not, and it can be debated precisely how such a policy would be best and most civilly enacted, but it’s utterly ridiculous to claim that such a policy would necessarily lead to war when it has never before done so in all of military history. In general, mass deportations tend to be a postcursor to war rather than a precursor. Note that an immigration regime no stricter than that presently practiced by the current US ICE agency could send every Muslim in France back to the Dar al-Islam by 2025. That’s hardly a blueprint for Armageddon.

Of course, the first step in abandoning multiculturalism is to stop the bleeding. Which is to say, shut down all immigration immediately. Shut down all income redistribution from the native population to the non-native population. That alone will address one-third to one-half of the problem. Then the question of repatriation can be reasonably debated.

The alternative is not much of an option, as it should be abundantly clear by now that going further down the multiculturalism and diversity path will lead to civil war followed by vicious and violent ethnic cleansing. If you genuinely wish to avoid violence across the West, an approach that involves closing the borders, ending the income subsidies, and repatriation is the only civilized answer.

Posted without comment

Study: Men Who Post Selfies Show Psychopathic Tendencies

Men who regularly posted photos of themselves online scored higher on a measure for narcissism and psychopathy…. The study also found that men who edited their pictures before posting
also scored higher on the scales of narcissism and self-objectification.

For no particular reason, you understand. And in other SFWA-related news, it appears that the services of the Toad of Tor may no longer be required by Tor Books:

Teresa Nielsen Hayden, aka the repugnant and infamous cyberbully “Hapisofi” on Absolute Write, has been officially fired from the Tor staff. We received the following note from someone connected to the publisher (who must remain anonymous to prevent retaliation by Nielsen’s husband Patrick who is still a big shot at Tor Books and who has supported his wife regardless of her vitriolic and unprovoked assaults on writers, presses, and organizations using her anonymous ID on Absolute Write):

Teresa Nielsen Hayden is now officially off the Tor staff page. She has been removed permanently. A source close to the staff reports that the sheer amount of negative information about her on the web was the reason.

There is, however, some reason to doubt the accuracy of this report, given that the link is to the Tor.com staff page, not the Tor Books staff page. The two are related, but distinct corporate entities. I will update this once news of the Toad’s firing is either publicly confirmed or confirmed to be false.

The pride of the self-gelded

Guy Gavriel Kay is one of the better fantasy authors writing today. I posted a review of his The Lions of Al-Rassan, which is my favorite of his books, at Recommend. But it is a shame, bordering on a tragedy, that he doesn’t see how his inclination towards atheistic secularism will prevent him from ever approaching literary greatness:

The Canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay has explored the issues of faith and religious intolerance in several of his fantasy books, such as his duology “The Sarantine Mosaic,” set in a world modelled on Byzantium during the time of the Emperor Justinian. Kay’s stories echo the conflict that arose historically between such religions as paganism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

. . . there has been a natural progression from Fionavar, through Tigana and [A Song for] Arbonne, to The Lions of Al-Rassan, away from the mythic and the fantastical, and towards the human and the historical. The progression from myth to religion is another way to describe it, not that the books are religious, but that we move away from what, in Fionavar, I’ve sometimes called a Homeric world; the gods intervene in the affairs of men, they have their own squabbles and feuds amongst themselves, and yet they’re physically present, men can sleep with the goddess, men can battle with words with the gods – the gods are present. In Tigana, magic is still there, but, for the most part, magic and its use was employed as a sustained metaphor for the eradication of culture. The major use of magic in the novel Tigana is the elimination of the name of the country Tigana, which for me was very much metaphorical. In A Song for Arbonne, we’re into a story about how religion, the organized religion, the clergy, manipulates the people with their beliefs about gods and goddesses. By the time we get to The Lions of Al-Rassan, it’s mainly about how organized religion takes away the freedom and the breathing space of individuals. So there is a natural progression, which is not to say that I know where the next book is going, that that progression is necessarily continuing.

It certainly seems however that the religious dimension is not going to disappear; it’s been very strong in the last two books, and certainly The Fionavar Tapestry has, in a sense, a proto-religion at the heart of it. Can you conceive of writing a book which does not have religion as a factor?

Yes, I’m sure I can; I am not a religious man, what I think I am is a person keenly interested in history. When you talk about proto-religion, you’re talking about, as I said, the Homeric idea of gods and goddesses incarnate, and the progression in history away from that. I think that, if I would characterize my interest, it’s very much in the historical and mythical roots of what we have become as cultures. When I say “we”, I mean Western men and women, because that’s the culture that I feel most at home in, it’s the culture that most of us are, to some degree, shaped by. So, in that sense, the four books (treating Fionavar as one) have been incorporating that tension, but it’s not in any huge sense central to my thinking or my own work.

Does that mean you might write a novel about the Enlightenment, about skepticism coming to the fore?

I think skepticism comes to the fore in the last two books to a great degree. I think that it’s part of the movement from myth to religion. In The Lions of Al-Rassan, one of the reasons the book is a fantasy, rather than a story about medieval Spain, even though it’s very closely modelled on real history, is that I wanted to see what would happen to people’s preconceptions and prejudices about cultures: Christian, Moslem, Jewish, if the names were changed and if the religious beliefs were rendered virtually banal: one religion worships the Sun, another worships the Moon, and another worships the stars. And out of that relatively banal conflict of ideologies, you have crushingly brutal military and psychological conflict. When you speak of skepticism, it seems to me that The Lions of Al-Rassan should be very clear for the readers: the point that underlies the detaching of these religious conflicts from their real underpinnings is that, if we step back a bit, we can start to see how much violence, how much conflict is generated by something that may be no more complex than whether you worship the Sun rising in the morning or the stars beginning to shine at night.

It’s rather remarkable that such an intelligent and talented man can be so brutally foolish as a result of his anti-religious bias. The sad thing is that he transforms what could have been a great book into one that is merely good, and is dishonest to boot. The amusing thing is that he appears to think that his obvious biases are not readily apparent to the intelligent reader; faithless ecumenicism is the romantic ideal he portrays in the novel.

The mere fact that I could write the following while knowing nothing of the author’s religious faith, or lack there of, demonstrates the intrinsic problem of the irreligious attempting to meaningfully address religious themes.


This surfeit of excellence might have been excused as a stylistic
statement on medieval panegyrics were it not for the author’s
excessively modern take on religion. Despite the plot being dependent
upon the conflict between the star-worshipping Asherites (Muslims),
sun-worshipping Jaddites (Christians) and moon-worshipping Kindath
(Jews), the author’s own apparent lack of religious sensibility prevents
the book from being as rich and moving as it easily could have been. (A
moment’s research confirms that Kay is not, by his own statement, a
religious man; it definitely shows throughout.)

Note that the interview proves that Kay’s portrayal of religion in the book is intentionally false and shallow. He does not recognize that by rendering such a false account of religion, he has undermined his own attempt to make a case against it. By detaching the “religious conflicts” from their real underpinnings, what he proves is that religion doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with violent conflicts that arise from the normal historical reasons of ambition, pride, greed, and the desire for power.

Like most secular writers, Kay fails to grasp that if he wishes to successfully attack religion, he must portray it with absolutely rigorous honesty. Because, in The Lions of Al-Rassan, all he has managed to accomplish in this regard is to reduce the literary value of his own work in order to demolish a strawman of his own construction. In this way, he is the anti-Eco, as Eco, despite his own secular inclinations, does his fictional characters the courtesy of taking their beliefs seriously and at face value, which is why he is the better and more memorable writer.

I have never forgotten the genuine anger in Umberto Eco’s voice when he corrected me concerning a question I asked him about the “villain” of The Name of the Rose: “Jorge is not the villain, he is one of the heroes … He is expressing
certain attitudes of his time, but I don’t consider him a villain. It is
a confrontation between two worldviews, and a worldview is a system of
ideas.”

That is the difference between a great writer and one who is merely a fine literary technician with a bent for storytelling. The great writer is willing to permit his characters to speak for themselves, according to their worldviews. The technician, on the other hand, insists on reducing his characters to puppets intended to express his worldview.

It takes two to tango

But only one party to wage war. This is honest, but remarkably stupid commentary on the current European situation from the Mayor of London:

About 10 years ago, the whole Danish cartoon controversy blew up – and I remember distinctly concluding that I would never have published them in The Spectator, which I edited, not just because they were gratuitously inflammatory, but because I didn’t see how I could justify my decision to the widows and orphans of my staff, in the event of an attack on our offices (and I note that one of the German publications to use the Charlie Hebdo cartoons has just been fire-bombed).

It is essential to admit this element of fear (and several editors have been candid enough to do so), because fear is a very bad and corrosive thing. Fear leads to anger. Fear leads to mistrust. Fear can make you irrational, and in the case of Islamist terrorism, the resulting fear can obviously encourage prejudice and division. Fear leads to hatred – and that is exactly what those terrorists hope to provoke. They want to see anti-Muslim marches of the kind that are now appearing in Germany; they want an anti-Muslim backlash; they want war; and it would be absolutely fatal if we were to allow ourselves to fall for it.

Imagine if, instead of his famous call to “fight them on the beaches”, Winston Churchill had said something like this back in 1940. “Fear leads to hatred and that is exactly what the Nazis hope to provoke. They want to see us sending out warships to guard the Channel. They want an anti-German backlash; they want war and it would be absolutely fatal if we were to allow ourselves to fall for it.”

The astonishing thing is that Boris Johnson knows his history. He and other self-admitted cowards know that Chamberlain was wrong to attempt to appease Hitler, just as FDR was wrong to attempt to appease Stalin, and yet they are making precisely the same mistake by trying to pretend that Islam can be won over if they are sufficiently accommodating.

Everything about the multicultural status quo is a lie. The headline in the Telegraph says: “Paris march of unity: after a minute’s silence the crowd roared ‘We are not afraid!'”

They lie. They are most certainly afraid. They are afraid of the Muslims in their midst, and they are afraid of the nationalist forces that are rising. They are right to be afraid, because it is primarily their fault that the Reconquista 2.0 is now both necessary and inevitable.

Divisional playoffs, Day 2

The New England-Baltimore game was as good as the Seattle-Carolina game was bad. I turned the latter off after Seattle went up 7-0 as it was obvious that Carolina had no chance whatsoever. That pass from Edelman to Amendola was a fantastic call and executed almost flawlessly. John Harbaugh is a very good coach, but Belichick clearly outcoached him yesterday. The chess match was fun to watch; it was the exact opposite of watching a Denny Green-coached team in the playoffs.

Dallas-Green Bay should be a good game too, although I don’t think Green Bay will have too much trouble putting the Cowboys away on the frozen tundra unless Rodgers gets hurt. Dallas’s best option is to ride Demarco Murray hard.

The Denver-Indy game shouldn’t be as bad as Seattle-Carolina, but I can’t see the Colts hanging with the Broncos. The Broncos run better, pass better, have a better defense, and they’re playing at home.

More than books

We have some new offerings in the Castalia House store:

Castalia House is a publisher of books, but we are also a developer of games. So that is why we are pleased to be able to announce that the Castalia House bookstore will also be carrying digital versions of various games we consider to be of high quality and potential interest to our readers in the new Games section. The first games we are offering here are published by Castalia House author Ken Burnside of Ad Astra Games, who contributed “The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military Science Fiction” to Riding the Red Horse. Ken is also Castalia’s newest blogger, where he’ll be focusing on various aspects of game development, from general analysis and history to in-depth design and mechanics.

Our long-term goal for Castalia House is to become a major destination site for all high-quality Blue SF/F-related activity, including books, boardgames, and electronic games. This is another small step towards that objective.

Multiculturalism’s last gasp

The march in Paris today is a pathetic and pointless globalist fart in the wind of the resurgent nationalism that will scour Europe in the next decade:

One million people were today preparing to march through the streets of Paris in tribute to the 17 victims of massacre in the city. British Prime Minister David Cameron was one of approximately 40 world leaders scheduled to take part in the solidarity march in the French capital. In a show of support for the French people, Mr Cameron was to stand alongside French President Francois Hollande in sympathy for the victims executed by terrorists….

Security services across the world have reportedly received intelligence that more terror attacks are ‘highly likely’, as a ring of steel was placed around the French capital for today’s march. There are fears that Al Qaeda and Islamic State-linked terror cells will be activated as the city prepares to host the rally this afternoon.

By mid-morning, approximately 2,000 police officers and 1,400 soldiers were deployed across Paris in an atmosphere described by one officer on the scene as ‘extremely tense’. French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said ‘exceptional measures’ were being taken to try and prevent further attacks, including deploying snipers on roofs.

This is nothing more than a futile demonstration meant to prop up the failing status quo, which is so fragile that a single jihadist could render it all moot in seconds today. None of this will end until the genie is again returned to the bottle, which is to say, until Islam has been forcibly expelled from the continent for the third time.

The multiculturalist position consists of lies stacked upon more lies. When Angela Merkel claims there is no place for anti-Muslim intolerance, she is attacking more than TWO-THIRDS of the German electorate that is not Muslim. In a November poll by the Bertelsmann Foundation, 61 percent of the German people said: “Islam has no place in the West”.

61 percent is not an outlier. That is the mainstream position. That is the will of the people. That was before PEGIDA, before the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and before the Jewish deli murders. It is probably over 70 percent by now. What there is no place for is traitorous, anti-democratic “leaders” like Merkel, Hollande, Cameron, and the other anti-nationalists who are marching in Paris today.

Islam is not compatible with the West. Islam is literally at war with the West, which is part of the Dar al-Harb, “the House of War”. As Mizanur Rahman has declared, Britain is the enemy of Islam. So is France. So is Germany. So is Italy. So is the United States of America. Samuel Huntington warned of this coming great clash of civilizations back in 1993. Enoch Powell warned of the rivers of blood that would flow if mass immigration from non-European countries was permitted back in 1968.

That long-predicted day has finally arrived. If the situation is not adequately addressed in the next decade, then the Rotherhams and Parises will eventually become Peshawars and Bagas. Now the victims of Islam in the West are numbered in double-digits, eventually they will be numbered in the hundreds and the thousands, if the Reconquista 2.0 does not begin sooner rather than later.

Sooner or later, it will begin. All of this could have been easily prevented, but the Left preached its lies of open borders and immigration and tolerance and diversity, and the people of the West stupidly believed them. Some fools still believe them, although most who claim to do so primarily cling to them out of fear and desperate hope against hope. But prevention is no longer an option. The choice is now between Charlie Hebdo and Charlie Martel.

As for those who claim that we cannot hold all Muslims responsible for the actions of their military wing, I will remind them that the free people of the West had absolutely no problem holding all Germans responsible for the actions of a few National Socialists. I note that the French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, has already declared that France is at war with “radical Islam”, even though the vast majority of radical Muslims did not kill anyone in Paris this week.

The fact is that Islam is already at war with the West, regardless of what its “moderate” Fifth Columnists falsely claim. It has always been at war with the West, it simply hasn’t always had the ability to effectively wage that war. But the West gave it that ability and now the people of the West are paying the price through fear, crime, taxes, the loss of liberty, and blood.

“This bloodbath proves that those who laughed at or ignored the fears of so many people about a looming danger of Islamism were wrong,” said Alexander Gauland, a regional leader of AfD, which has its roots in the euro crisis and is currently riding at 25% in nationwide polls, on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. “This gives new weight to Pegida demands.”

In France the leader of the far-right Front National, Marine Le Pen, went further. “We must be in a position to respond to the war that has been declared by Islamist fundamentalism,” she said after a meeting on Friday of party leaders called at the Élysée Palace by the president, François Hollande.

“I regret that word has not been uttered by [Hollande] nor other politicians. The first thing when one is fighting a war is to be able to know what we’re fighting. We’re fighting an ideology, Islamist fundamentalism. Not to say it is a proof of weakness.”

NFL divisional round

Good game so far in Foxboro. Ravens started hot, but settled down, and Brady has been picking apart the Baltimore secondary with his slot receivers. But the Ravens are getting some solid hits on Brady and that could slow down New England in the second half.

Out-of-season shape

There are no two ways around it. I am getting old. I’m one of the two oldest guys on my veteran’s team and it’s not even close; the average age is more than ten years younger than me. In the weight room, I’m usually one of the three oldest guys there. And the gradual weight of age and injuries is accumulating to the point that there are days when there are more exercises that I can’t do at full weight than those that I can.

And yet, ironically, in some ways I’m in better shape than I’ve been for fifteen years. I started stretching regularly and I’m back up to 130 degrees on the leg machine, which isn’t as good as the 150 degrees it was when I could kick six-footers in the face, but it’s a lot better than the 90 degrees it was when I first broke it out again. I definitely recovered a modicum of my lost speed through increasing my stride length. I’m not only able to play complete games when necessary, but I’m also the only player that the captain feels able to take out and put back in again, knowing that I’ll still be at something close to full speed by the end of the game.

What I’ve done is back down on the heavier weight exercises, increase the lighter ones, and increase my running. I run at least one 5k per week, ideally one 40-minute session that covers between 5.5k and 6k, and if I can find the time, a second 20-minute session doing 2.5k to 3k. It’s the time that matters, not the distance; we play 40-minute halves and I’m trying to keep my body accustomed to that time frame.

Despite the running, I’m at 192 these days, and I’m topping out my curls with 5-rep sets using the 60-pound dumbbells. I think I need to get down to 185 to really get ripped, but that’s not too bad considering all the holiday feasting of the last six weeks.

Three lifting days, two running days, and seven stretching days per week seems to be doing the trick. There is no fooling Father Time, but at least one can hope to mitigate some of his more deleterious effects.

Last season ended pretty well, as I got our only goal in the last game and ended up on five in seven fall games. I’d likely have had a second goal if the ball hadn’t abruptly stopped in a mud patch in the area when I was breaking on goal again.  But I’d really like to make it to the ten-goal mark in a half-season, so I’m training hard in order to try and make that possible. At the very least, I’d like to be sure I end up in double-digits for the full season as it’s already clear that playing a spoiler role is the most we can do.

We’ve actually played very well against the better teams, garnering ties against two of the top three teams, but we’ve also been playing down to the level of the lesser teams and failing to put them away. I’d like to win one more championship before I stop playing for good, but it won’t happen this year.

Cracks in the narrative

The transnational establishment is deeply worried about the way the most recent Muslim murders are upsetting the electorate:

Farage cannot divide us: Fury at ‘sickening’ attempt by Ukip to use Paris shootings to score political points on multiculturalism. Britain must stand united against attempts by Nigel Farage to use the Paris terror massacre to score political points, senior politicians said today. Tories including David Cameron, Eric Pickles, Theresa May and Grant Shapps joined Labour’s Ed Miliband and Dame Tessa Jowell and Lib Dem Nick Clegg in condemning the ‘sickening’ attempt to exploit the atrocity in which 12 people died.

The reason the atrocities can be effectively exploited by UKIP is because they only happened due to the immigration policies of the French parties that happen to be very, very similar to the policies of the Tory, Labour, and Liberal Democrat parties. The European establishment parties are afraid, and rightly so, that the attacks are assisting the gradual redrawing the European political lines where they rightly belong: between the pro-EU, pro-Muslim, pro-immigration forces and the more numerous nationalist, anti-Muslim, anti-immigration forces:

A day after terror struck Paris, Europe’s resurgent far-right and anti-immigrant parties trumpeted a unified message: I told you so.

Populist movements warning of the “Islamization” of Europe have been gaining ground across the continent, in small countries like Denmark and large ones like Britain, Germany and France. The attack on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo could win more supporters to their cause.

Fears of precisely the kind of commando-style attack that struck the newspaper on Wednesday, killing 12 people, have risen sharply in recent months as home-grown fighters return from Syria and Iraq. Such warnings have been aired across the political spectrum, but it’s the anti-immigrant parties that have reaped the biggest benefits. 

What has been ruled out of bounds for more than three decades is finally becoming the political fault line. And the line is not going to be drawn in the favor of those with blood on their hands, in the favor of those whom history will one day damn far more fervently than the Chamberlains and Quislings of a previous generation. Names like Merkel, Hollande, Cameron, and Blair will be reviled across Europe as long as they are remembered.

At the train station, I heard one schoolgirl telling her friends that World War III has started and she doesn’t care if anyone calls her racist. There is a perception that something has dramatically changed in the last week, and indeed, the way in which people are not being hysterical about it over here, but are speaking out rather calmly, strikes me as being all the more ominous for the establishment. As is the fact that #JeSuisCharlieMartel is beginning to trend.

The more the politicians of the major parties attempt to pressure the people into accepting the unacceptable, the more likely it is that the major parties will be replaced by true people’s parties. And I suspect Marine Le Pen’s protests at Front National being excluded from tomorrow’s French “unity” rallies are about as serious as Bre’r Rabbit’s pleas not to be thrown in the briar patch.

All of the nationalist parties will do well to turn their backs on the false, antinational unity being offered by the champions of diversity. Consider the PEGIDA statement leading up to what looks to be a record rally on Monday: The Islamists, which PEGIDA has been warning about for 12 weeks, showed France that they are not capable of democracy but rather look to violence and death as an answer,” it said. “Our politicians want us to believe the opposite. Must such a tragedy happen here in Germany first???” 

“61 percent of non-Muslim Germans said Islam had no place in the West according to the study released by the Bertelsmann Foundation think tank.” And that was prior to the Paris murders.