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Home Savages of Stockholm

Savages of Stockholm

Europe has many fine traditions. Its newest tradition is the burning car. Why burn cars? Because, as George Mallory once said of mountains, they're there. There are lots of cars around and if you're a member of a perpetually unemployed tribe that wandered up north and forages on social services, you might as well do something to pass the time.

Burning houses is a lot of work and house fires spread. Car fires are simpler. In a welfare state
everyone has houses but not everyone has cars. Burning cars is a way to stick it to those who work for a living. It's also a way to drive off the members of the sickly Swedish tribe and claim the area for your own. And it's also fun.

Either you have a plan for buying a car or for burning a car. Considering the Muslim unemployment rates in Sweden, France and everywhere else, it's safe to say the car burners don't have future plans that involve saving up for a car or taking out a loan for a car or finding work. Cars are things that they steal, either the usual way or by defrauding social services. They might get a car by dealing drugs, but those cars are disposable. One day they'll have to burn them anyway.

If you're the product of an industrialized culture, then you think of a car as a product of work. You realize that it's the product of countless raw materials, that the metals had to be dug out of the earth, that the machines that make it had to be assembled and that men had to stand around putting that into place. And you might be one of those men. And if you aren't, then you might know someone who is.

But if you come from a pre-industrial culture which may have factories, PhDs and cars, but no sense of the connection between product, innovation and effort, then why not burn a car or a city? Things fall into the category of that which you and your family own... and that which they do not. Anything in the latter category may be stolen or vandalized because it has no value.

The notion of a painting in a museum or a scientific principle or an eagle soaring over a lake having value is an abstract notion to you. Value to you is your own identity. A painting is valuable if you own it. If it sits in a museum, then you can either steal it or burn down the museum. The principle is worthless unless you can cash in on it. The eagle is worthless unless you can kill it or identify with it.

Some people would call that savagery, but that sort of talk is politically incorrect. And we all know that there are no such things as savages. The true savages are the people who use scientific principles to make cars and then use the money to commission paintings of soaring eagles for museums because they are greedy exploiters of the planet. On the other hand, the noble savages whose herds of sheep and goats turn fertile land into desert, who burned the great libraries of civilization and who believe that the hair of women emits rays that passing airplanes have to be protected from are close to nature.

A car is just a metaphor. You drive it to work because you work somewhere. You drive it on family vacations because you don't get to spend enough time with your family because you and they are all doing things. You're not sitting around your house with your two wives and eleven kids plotting new ways to scam social services. You go places because you're still the product of a culture that likes the idea of new frontiers. Your car isn't exactly Columbus' flagship, but it takes you places. It's a sign of progress. That's why you own a car, instead of burning them.

Civilization is not a product, it's a process. You can't export it. You can ship a bunch of cars to Somalia, but you can't ship the process that makes a culture build a car. You can hand out PhD's to them based on knowledge and test taking skills, but you can't endow them with a respect for ideas. You can set up democratic elections in Afghanistan and Egypt, but you can't export the process that explains why the elections shouldn't be abolished after the side with the most guns wins.

That's just as true of a lot of the second and third generation immigrants who are no more Swedes than the South Africans became Africans or the English settlers of the American Colonies became Indians. They may own iPhones, dye their hair and listen to the same music that you do, but they often don't have the same assumptions. They bought the product, but not the process. They can drive cars and when they get bored, they can burn them, because they aren't their cars. They're your cars.

And the hair dye and the music and the democratic elections aren't theirs either. Those are things they took from you and if they get bored with them, they'll put on Hijabs, ban music and go back to tyranny, because what they have is a product, not a process. They walked into the movie in the middle and they like some of it, but it's confusing and they don't understand why the hero doesn't just shoot the villain in the head, take his woman and then raise a dozen children in his lair.

After the riots die down and the fires are put out, there will be more talk about integrating them, but what are they being integrated into; a culture that doesn't resist when their cars are torched? Why would they want to join a culture that leaves you unable to protect what is yours? Why would anyone join a culture that makes you so weak and impotent that anyone can come and take what belongs to you?

It's a movie that makes sense if you were there back in the 19th, but not if you suddenly walked in around 1965 or 1995. It's the outcome of a historical process that is hard to explain to people who were never part of the process. They know how the story came out, but not why it matters. And even if they could, their priorities are different. They didn't come here to meld into some gelatinous brotherhood of man but to make life better for their clans.

Most people plan for the future, they just do it in different ways. In Sweden, they plan to buy a car. In Iraq or Somalia, they plan to have eight kids. In Sweden, there isn't supposed to be a biological tribe anymore. Everyone is meant to belong to the progressive transnational tribe which lets you have the good things in life so long as you make some kind of vague commitment to pay more and share them with others. But the savages of Stockholm already have a tribe. And their tribe isn't big on sharing and is a lot more useful in a tight spot.

While the Swedes save up for cars, the Iraqis scam social services for their eight kids. And the demographics suggest that eight kids and no cars beats two cars and one child. Keep multiplying those numbers and the future will have fewer Swedes and fewer cars and a lot more bored Iraqi kids running through what used to be genteel suburbs looking for Swedes or cars to burn.

The native multiculturalists are post-tribal, but the multiple cultures settling there aren't. It's a war that can't be discussed except with the usual accusations of xenophobia and oppression. But those are useless crutches of dogma. They don't do much to restore a burned Audi. This is a conflict between cultures that make things and cultures that take them, between cultures that live for the moment and cultures that live for the next thousand years of manifest destiny.

The Western ideal has been reduced to a personal technocratic utopia built on efficiency and it has collided in the night with an Eastern ideal of the clan and a theocratic utopia built on total purity. That is the kind of conflict that the creed of good fences for good neighbors was meant for, but there are no fences tall enough to work it out within a single nation.

Both West and East have their own processes. And both processes are colliding. The Swedes bring their cars and the savages bring their flames. The burning cars are a metaphor for the impact of Muslim immigration on Sweden and the West.

Comments

  1. The Israeli press (including the clueless religious papers that just copy stuff off the Net) are reporting the riots as "Anti-Muslim". Anybody know what's really going on?

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  2. chillis27/5/13

    Excellent work.
    You sir, are a beast.

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  3. "It's a movie that makes sense if you were there back in the 19th, but not if you suddenly walked in around 1965 or 1995. It's the outcome of a historical process that is hard to explain to people who were never part of the process. They know how the story came out, but not why it matters. And even if they could, their priorities are different. They didn't come here to meld into some gelatinous brotherhood of man but to make life better for their clans."

    This is a brilliant insight, Daniel. I think it also applies to the way Obama is exploiting people's ignorance of US history — or discrediting the history in the minds of those who aren't completely ignorant of it — in his effort to tear down the system (as you describe so well in "Partisan Nation").

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  4. I wonder if European governments will put up much of a fight once a few national museums are burned to the ground. It will be interesting to see what Sweden, the UK or France do when/if a thousand years of their stored up culture is incinerated. I suspect nearly nothing at all.

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  5. Anonymous27/5/13

    A sad yet beautiful article once again, and a personal one at least for me.

    "Value to you is your own identity." I've thought often of that eagle you right of because of its represents--American freedom. Key to that is the First Amendment. Expression, press, religion, assembly, but ultimately freedom and thought. That is the worst thing these savages can destroy, our thoughts. Take away thought and you take away all freedoms, all innovation, all notion of the sky's the limit.

    Islam has altered thoughts in the West, one step away from taking critical thinking away from us.

    Yes, I have contemplated that eagle for nearly a year:(

    Can America and the West in particular live without that eagle? Or the creativity that created that painting? or destroy the freedom a car, even a junker, symbolizes?

    Orwell in 1984 created Room 101 to torture men and women with what they fear most. Perhaps he should have also included a room where people were threatened with the loss of what they value most.

    Side note: We had a punishment room in HS in room 101. It was for kids who ditched classes. I had one day in room 101 though I didn't ditch class at all. Basically it meant being stuck in a small room with kids I hardly knew and wasn't friends with. Lunch with these kids and not the kids in my regular lunch group which began at 11 a.m. No socialization at all. Well, not with anyone I'd care to socialize with.

    Not even a study hall. Think of it as an eight hour study hall without the ability to take a snooze for a few minutes when you got bored.

    An Islamic society would be much like that room and its lack of choice.

    Just some thoughts on your wonderful article on Memorial Day.

    Keliata

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  6. fsy, third worlders burning things

    chillis, thanks

    Doug, it's important to remember the difference between the process and the outcome

    Trudy, they'll shut them down themselves first

    K.A., it would be the boot forever pressing down on a human face

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  7. The Swedish press has dismissed the riots as inconsequential because they occur in places that most Swedes don't visit, because they are similar to what had happened in France and England, and because they are caused by boredom and segregation. Nobody is allowed to question the rioters motives in an honest way, because those who do are blacklisted. This is a very peculiar pathology, former Christians who are now atheists not only wanting to turn the other cheek, but exposing their neck asking for their head to be cut off and blessing their own executioners in the process.

    Morality has it's roots in the natural order of things. You cannot chose not to defend yourself against the enemies and survive. Either the Swedes will learn to defend themselves or they will not survive. I don't think this story has been fully written. The propensity of cultures towards violence can change quickly. The Germans were turned into remorseless killers in less than a decade, the Hutus had no history of killing Tutsis until they exploded. I don't know how this will end, but I don't think it will simply end with gradual outbreeding of the Swedes by the Muslims, and not cars left in Sweden due to burnings.

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  8. Anonymous27/5/13

    Well, they're celebrating diversity....That is untill the folks from Skane step into the picture...

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  9. This is an interesting article about a no-go area in The Hague. But notice it's getting visits from far-right politicians. How long will things remain as they are, gradually evolving towards full Sahriah acceptance?

    http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/dutch-anxiety-over-sharia-triangle-police-no-go-area-in-the-hague-1.1404541

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  10. Anonymous27/5/13

    "Trees with no fruit are fit for the fire."

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  11. The English Defence League is behaving as I expected.

    "[C]oncerns about rising Islamophobia in Britain grew amid anti-Muslim protests and attacks targeting mosques", "members of the Grimsby Islamic Cultural Centre expressed fear on its Facebook page over the EDL's announcement of Saturday's protest.", "Reports of anti-Islamic incidents surged after Rigby's gruesome killing, according to Fiyaz Mughal, who operates a hotline for Muslims under attack. In the 48 hours after the murder, he received 162 reports from victims saying people had called them names, assaulted them or thrown things at them.",

    "Many EDL sympathizers seen at demonstrations have similar appearances to those of right-wing extremist groups. Almost all of them are young, white men. Many of them have shaved heads typical of skinheads and wear nationalist symbols.

    But the group focuses strictly on Islam. It claims to oppose racism and to promote democracy and diversity. It brags that it has support from gay rights groups, Sikhs and Hindus.

    The EDL even links to a "Jewish Division" on its Facebook page and posts messages of support for people of color it feels have fallen victim to Islamist extremists.

    Members of the EDL clashed with police near the scene of Ribgy's killing last week. A tweet from its official account proclaimed then that "it's fair to say that finally the country is waking up!:-) NO SURRENDER!"

    "In a demonstration in Newcastle on Saturday, angry supporters cried out for Muslims to leave the country."

    http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/27/world/europe/uk-mosque-fire/index.html

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  12. @Trudy,

    I have been very impressed that so many French have stood up on their hind legs and said "a child deserves a mother and a father". I'm ashamed that we in the US go like lambs to the family slaughter.

    And sharia?

    Charlie Hebdo? Where is our Charlie Hebdo? Remember when we celebrated "Everybody Draw Muhammed Day" a couple of years ago? The girl who thought that up is in hiding now. Nobody drew Muhammed in these United States.

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  13. Anonymous28/5/13

    *write

    Keliata

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  14. Each day I search the media and the interwebs for news of Mosques burning.

    None so far.

    However, methinks the time for playing Cowboys and Muslims may be drawing closer.
    ( politicians not withstanding )

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  15. Anonymous29/5/13

    I spoke with a lefty friend from Sweden today and he absolutely recognizes the threat that islam represents to the Western world, starting with his beloved country.

    That really makes me think that there is hope.

    Here's what puzzles me, we all recognize the problem ... most of us get paid to provide solutions.

    Have you seen anything viable yet?

    Once again Daniel, the content is horrifying but the presentation is impeccable.

    Mike

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  16. Solutions begin with awareness. You can't have political change until enough people accept that there is a problem that needs fixing

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  17. Anonymous30/5/13

    Certainly the entire right side of politics has awareness of the problem and if my lefty Swedish friend is aware .... we have more to work with than expected.

    An earnest question here, short of changing our US belief system (Constitutional freedom of religion), how do we stop "them"?

    Shall we designate islam as a political system and not a religion?

    Or is the time nigh for all of us to invoke Jagger and Richards in a type of "Street Fighting Man"?

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  18. I don't think the 'category' debate is all that important. What is importing is getting through to people what they already sense, that Islam is destructive and incompatible with our way of life.

    The rest will follow.

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  19. Anonymous30/5/13

    Perhaps if it gets bad enough in Europe we will have a chance of enough people recognizing the danger and doing something before we get any more of them here.

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