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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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I've noticed the alt-right (specifically the Richard Spencer wing) is blaming Christianity for cucking Whites and making them accept non-whites in their country. To me this isn't even close to being true and can be dismissed outright as nonsense.

We know from genetics that modern Europeans separated from sub saharan African 30 to 40 thousand years ago. We also know that Western Europeans didn't have any meaningful contact with Blacks until the 15th century when Portugal "discovered" West Africa during the Age of Exploration. By accepting this, we can see that Western Europe has had over 500 years of contact with Blacks.

I've specifically been looking into England, but the same is true for other nations. The highest count of non-whites I can find on Google Scholar recently is 2.6% in 1951. Interestingly, 2.2% of those 2.6% were first generation immigrants. This is by far the highest I've seen with other estimates putting it close to 99%.

So at this point, we have pretty clear data that when Europe was Christian (and America), there was almost 0 non-white immigration to Europe. We also know places like France put in racist laws like Code Noir that explicitly put Whites at the top of the social hierarchy.

When we look at when this changed, it was really the 1960's. But at this point, Christianity was starting to decline due to science and especially Darwin (and in my opinion became obviously not true). The increased immigration and anti-racist views correlates with Christianity's decline, so the idea that Christianity having everyone's soul being equal can be equally dismissed. In fact, I would argue the pro non-white immigration came from the secular left or if you want to argue it's the right neoliberalism. I see zero evidence of this that Richard Spencer and his allies argue to be true. In fact, the evidence shows the complete opposite.

The elements of Christianity which would lead one to believe that antiracism is important to the faith were historically counterbalanced with deeper readings of the text and studies in ancient history and philosophy. The ones steering politics were exclusively men who were well-educated in these texts. The decline of Christian literacy coincides with the decline in the emphasis on ancient classics with its brutal realism (“the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must”), and the extolling of false political science (no racial differences as a matter of assumption), and the dominance of a largely non-Christian media influenced disproportionately by non-Christians. Everyone believed in unique racial characteristics before the 19th century, but science came in during the 20th century and told everyone this has been debunked actually.

Islam has a much stronger emphasis on anti racism than Christianity, see here

O people, your Lord is one and your father Adam is one. There is no virtue of an Arab over a foreigner nor a foreigner over an Arab, and neither white skin over black skin nor black skin over white skin, except by righteousness

it’s simply that only highly educated men decided things in Islamic nations. Even today, if only men decided politics, it would be difficult for democrats to win an election. If only men trained in theology and the philosophy / history of the classics decided things, who knows what things would look like? I suppose you could say that, like Adam, the West’s original sin was a combination of pride + being persuaded by womankind, which changed who decided things and then led to all sorts of issues downstream.

Islam has a much stronger emphasis on anti racism than Christianity, see here

Islam is a substantially anti-racist religion, and even the vast majority of Khaleeji (and therefore to some extent ‘founding stock’) Islamic scholars have essentially the exact same blank slatist view of race as a woke American college professor. Racial prejudice exists throughout the Islamic world, but it’s the petty prejudice of local peoples, it broadly isn’t religiously endorsed. Even in the West, while largely lay Muslim communities are grouped by country of origin, hardcore Islamist groups and mosques are often remarkably multiethnic and some groups arrested for planning attacks feature variably Arab, black, Desi, Chechen and white converts. And Muslim countries like Turkey with Syrians and Jordan with the PLO have been very tolerant (arguably much moreso even than modern Europe when you look at the percentage of the total population taken in) of refugees until, in the latter case, they literally tried to militarily overthrow the government. Sure, many Gulf Arabs are still racist against Africans, but that’s nothing you won’t hear from many Southern Italians about their recent arrivals. ISIS obviously had Muslims from every corner of the earth fighting alongside each other; the Arabs who led it were happy to hand over captured non-Muslim Arab girls as bribes and spoils of war to non-Arab Muslim fighters, which again shows the primacy of religion over race among devout Islamists. In Malaysia there were big campaigns about the global ummah and billboards about racial tolerance lol. I work with a lot of Muslims around the world, including conservative ones, and their views on race are - in the case of the devout - indistinguishable from white leftists, even if they disagree on everything else.

I agree that Christianity is less explicitly anti-racist. Still, I think anti-Christian reactionaries would say that its more generally less martial affect, pacifist origins, emphasis on turning the other cheek, the meek shall inherit the earth and so on are ultimately more conducive to DEI ideas than not. Also, we tend to see historical Western figures (say early Americans, or slave traders, or imperialists) as uniformly devout Christians. Almost all would have believed in God and considered themselves Christian, but actual levels of religious devotion varied considerably, in many historically Christian communities the majority of people have never attended Church every Sunday for example, not in 1750 and not today.

Malaysian calls for racial tolerance in any form is fundamentally wrong from first principles: Malaysia explicitly is the only country that constitutionally enshrines special privileges for the muslim majority race and makes continual efforts to further grind other races into the political dirt.

Malaysian calls for racial muslim equality are founded in an intense Arab-worshipping complex in the country, where being increasingly Arabic is conflated with being a good muslim. Small things include the replacement of the word for headscarf from Malay (tudung) to Arabic (hijab). Other examples of linguistic shift include replacing other muslim-practice related terms with Arabic, like iftar instead of buka puasa.

For the most obvious example of Muslim racism, globally but especially visible in Malaysia, look at how they treat the imported Bangladeshi workers. Extreme racial discrimination and forced mosque segregation, with the charity organisations dedicated to foreign worker welfare being run by Chinese and white expatriate women. The ummah is united only as long as the other inferior muslims don't pollute my sacred soil with their backward ways.

Yeah I completely agree with everything you say here. But Malay discrimination against the Chinese (or indeed Bangladeshis) has no basis in Muslim scripture and isn’t justified religiously locally; the Chinese are infidels, sure, but so are the Christian bumiputera who benefit from affirmative action policies. In fact the Malaysia constitution guarantees that Christian bumiputera get the special privileges etc. What happens in Malaysia is just the standard thing that happens with market dominant minorities anywhere in the world, and compared to the historic treatment of Jews, the way the Ugandans treated the Indians, arguably even the way that the South Africans treat the whites now, the Chinese actually have it very good.

As for the Malay Arab worship/LARP, I’ve commented on it before (it’s far from unique, the Maldivians engage in it too, even more northern Desi Muslims do to some extent). The point is that racial discrimination against foreign or minority Muslims (not non-Muslims) in the Islamic world isn’t justified using scripture but by paeans to nativism or for economic purposes. The same is true in the Middle East. Everyone knows that Islam itself doesn’t encourage ethnic separatism and is a universalist religion.

True, the racial discrimination in the mosques is ultimately a self segregating exercise instead of an actively ordained one. The mosque leaders being active community members volunteering to be part of the administration instead of job appointees does make the difference between racial vs religious based discrimination in the mosques difficult to parse.

One minor observation though is the schismatic fissures in Malaysian, and probably larger muslim world. While internally Islam is a race neutral religion in the whole, the cleaving of Islam into its various sects has mapped somewhat closely to differing ethnic groups as well. Shafi is the school of thought for the overwhelming majority of Southeast Asia, with explicit bans on Shia and Ahmadi in Malaysia.Yet there exist strong informal deobandi influence from Indian preachers, while I've seen discrimination against the bangladeshis justified as them being hanafi. Islam may be a racially neutral religion, but it still has been used as justification for racism.