Pundita: [Re your comment about the tone of my letter -- see previous post] "... I guess she assumed were soothing words of comfort"??? No, I was just giving a serious reply to a serious question.
For the Fjordman series, look down the left sidebar at the Gates of Vienna blog page. The cumulative effect is powerful, because it's as though the clapper keeps striking the bell, and the reverberations are amplifying each other. The sum is a portrait of disaster looming. I wasn't kidding about it being one of my focal concerns; if the Vikings' descendants fight like their forebears, what will the berserker rage look like this time? And if they don't wake up in time to fight, how would that conceivably be better?
Nonetheless, I believe -- not think, believe -- we will win. The only questions are how and how long, which is another way of asking how much it will cost us.
Annlee Hines"
Dear Annlee:
Exactly, to your last observation. It doesn't help to think, while being blown up by a suitcase bomb on the Metro, "Well, we're gonna win eventually." That kind of scenario is what scares me right now. However, what is also scary is that there is something other than a win or a loss.
A large number of Muslims are bent on racial suicide, although it took a chapter in Anna Prouse's book (Two Birthdays in Baghdad) to bring this into the public spotlight. (See my post Clans.) The Muslims in Iraq have the practice of marriage among close relatives, with the high rate of serious birth defects that affect the offspring of such unions.
The Muslims Prouse dealt with were clearly aware of the connection between the high rate of infant deformities among their clans and inbreeding, yet they were determined to continue in the 'old' ways. When you connect this suicidal practice with polygamy, you can see why I titled a post The Name of the Four Horsemen's Squire is Polygamy. I was not taking dramatic license; I was stating a bald fact.
However, the other option is that the Muslims who cling to suicidal practices will be destroyed without the values of Western civilization coming out a winner. The means of destruction could be devastating to all. The ancestors who watch over this race are terribly ruthless, Annlee. They have to be. I am reminded of that every week while taking in the grim lessons of Meerkat Manor.
It is the survival of the human race that is important to the ancestors, not the religious beliefs and secular values of the civilizations we have raised up. For as I've warned before, our ancestors did not claw their way out of the trees to see their descendants give up -- or commit suicide. One way or another humanity will be snatched from the jaws of annihilation, but some ways are unbearable for all but the cruelest to ponder.
Yet humanity is always in the position of Youssarian, the strangest meerkat in Flower's clan -- strange because he is so terribly human in his thinking.* For weeks we assumed that he was a neurotic idiot, only to discover that his strangest actions were a desperate, compassionate attempt to ward off wholesale infanticide. Yet for the survival of the clan, Flower could not allow all those grandchildren of hers to live.
On the other hand, Flower's decision to move the clan to another burrow instead of outright slaughtering the babies, and her daughter Daisy's attempt to save two babies, suggest that Youssarian's bid for compassion was not entirely ignored.
As above, so below. The dilemmas of those tiny creatures, their attempts to balance highly socialized 'family' values with the demands of survival, mirror our own dilemmas. Humanity, gifted with the awful responsibility of conscience, does not have much choice in certain matters except to muddle through as best we can, and pray the outcome brings the balm of hope.
* If you have not watched the Meerkat Manor series from the beginning, trying to understand Youssarian is akin to trying to comprehend Hamlet if you haven't seen his encounter with the ghost.
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