Sultan Knish
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 car 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.
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