Noam Chomsky
Mark Kingwell
Naomi Klein
Arundhati Roy
Evelyn Lau
Stephen Lewis
Robert Fisk
Margaret Somerville
Mona Eltahawy
Michael Moore
Julius Grey
Irshad Manji
Richard Rodriguez Navi Pillay
Ernesto Zedillo
Pico Iyer
Edward Said
Jean Baudrillard
Bill Moyers
Barbara Ehrenreich
Leon Wieseltier
Nayan Chanda
Charles Lewis
John Lavery
Tariq Ali
Michael Albert
Rochelle Gurstein
Alex Waterhouse-Hayward
looking for a place to emigrate
TIME TO LEAVE WESTERN CIV BEHIND
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear, O Israel! (Mantua Books). His
editorials appear regularly in PJ
Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials of
an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012. His debut
album, Blood
Guitar, is now available, as is his latest
book, Reflections
on Music, Poetry and Politics.
There is no doubt
that Western nations are now undergoing a bonanza of massive
immigration. Europe’s large and growing Muslim population
has gifted the continent and the U.K. with riots, rape fests,
car burnings, terror attacks, grooming scandals, no-go zones,
hostage takings, and heightened criminal activity. The same
scenario is gradually unfolding in the U.S., Canada, and Australia,
whose landscapes are variously enlivened with much of the same,
including even jihadist training camps. Organizations like CAIR
and its offshoots are making substantial inroads into the public
square, acquiring positions of authority in government and the
professions to the benefit of all.
The
surge of “illegal” migrants across America’s
southern border threatens to destabilize the economy and dilute
the cultural and electoral traditions of the nation. This is
a good thing. Canada, too, is experiencing a similar oblation,
its southern border having been crossed by brave expeditions
of these same “illegals.” I was recently robbed
by a couple of these new kids on the block in the parking lot
of a local shopping complex—a minor episode resembling
a Quaker Oats insert reflecting what is happening to the larger
box called a country. But this is only fitting, a form of absolution
for my—and our—unconscionable and undeserved privilege.
And
of course, we should keep in mind our indigenous populations
whose “ways of knowing” are indisputably superior
to crass Western materialism and jejune utilitarian preconceptions,
who are profoundly in touch with the spirit of the land whose
redemptive custodians they are, whose slaughter of the buffalo
have cleansed the plains of these horned intruders, who prudently
refused to invent the wheel as a bringer of future congestion
and pollution, and whose existential innocence and moral virtue
have been ruthlessly trampled into the dirt by the bearers of
modern civilization.
We
are constantly enlightened by the social justice community in
our universities and media to the undeniable truth that Western
civilization is a feral colonial enterprise, that its free market
system is an abomination predicated on the exploitation of the
world’s disadvantaged, and that its advances in science,
technology, medicine, art, the concept of the individual, political
democracy, law and the amenities of everyday life offer little
to be proud of.
Notwithstanding,
we may wonder why this slough of despond we deplorables inhabit
is the obvious goal and destination of a volkswanderung of immigrants,
refugees, migrants and “illegals” from countries
they apparently cannot wait to leave in their dust, whether
in the Middle East, Africa or Central America. Are these poor
people deluded? Are they a collection of dedicated masochists?
Do they not realize they are entering the Ninth Circle of Hell?
But they persist, unfathomably. Or perhaps not. Perhaps they
are animated by a higher purpose.
Clearly,
Western culture should be sent to the chop shop, dismantled
piece by piece, and sold off to the newcomers. They may conceivably
reassemble the parts into something far superior than the civilizational
vehicle we’ve been driving around in. Indeed, these “parts”
may have been theirs in the first place. We have been guilty
of so much in the past, of condescension as well as outright
plunder. We are obviously morally obligated to cheer them on,
to surrender our “white supremacy” in favor of the
nobility, wisdom and cultural glory of Third World saviors and
aboriginal peoples. Perhaps we should be grateful to our betters
for bringing the manifold fruits of their accomplishments to
our wide-open doors. Perhaps that is their real agenda, bless
their souls.
As a friend now
teaching in China writes in a personal communication:
Remember all the wonderful things invented by Black Africans
or Muslims or both, and then stolen by whiteys. And don't
forget that indigenous people everywhere, before the ongoing
genocide and dispossession, had a deep intimate spiritual
knowledge of life, Universe and everything, far more evolved
than our pitiful 300-yr-old settler-colonial narrative of
"science." They have known about dark matter in
the sky for 50,000 years, while white people are only starting
to discover it now with our telescopes, as the Dean of Research
of my ex university once told us. As for music, as another
SJW academic once told me, the genius of the Aboriginal artists
is that every didgeridoo is unique, has a different sound
from every other, unlike our boring Western instruments that
all sound the same.
Too
true, too true. That aboriginal artists lacked the resources
of mass production to make their instruments available to all
is not an argument to be taken seriously.
There
are many unsuspected facts we will now have to accept. Socrates
was black. Jesus was a Palestinian. The Library of Alexandria
didn’t really burn to the ground before Aristotle’s
purported visit. The Muslim caliphates did not, as we have been
misled to believe, rely on Syriac and Jewish scholiasts for
their epistemological talents. Christopher Columbus was a heartless
marauder—and, besides, he was after the fact since African
sailors had visited these shores thousands of years earlier,
as Leo Weiner reveals in Africa and the Discovery of America.
Who
can forget Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiactic
Roots of Classical Civilization, which showed beyond the
shadow of a doubt that Greek culture—the source of Western
reason—derived largely from Egypt, a black nation as we
are informed, and that Greek philosophy was the child of African
parentage. Western civilization was, in the words of George
James, a Stolen Legacy. Edward Said’s universally influential
Orientalism, we recall, also deflated Western pretensions
of cultural and intellectual supremacy to the advantage of Arab
and Middle Eastern unacknowledged greatness. Mary Lefkowitz,
author of Not Out Of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became An
Excuse To Teach Myth As History, has endured much opprobrium.
As she points out in her subsequent History Lesson: A Race
Odyssey, she was called, among other things, an “obscure
drudge in the academic backwaters of a classics department.”
These are the words of Penn State “new historian”
Wilson Moses. Should he not be believed?
As
for, in no particular order, Pythagoras, Hypatia, Heraclitus,
Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Herodotus, Augustine of Hippo,
Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo,
Titian, Giotto, Bernini, Thomas More, Isaac Newton, Adam Smith,
Rembrandt, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Joseph Salk, Alexander
Fleming, Marie Curie, Johannes Gutenberg, Robert Boyle, Gottfried
Leibniz, Michael Faraday, Alan Turing, Nikolaus Otto, the Wright
brothers, Amelia Earhart, Charles Babbage, Alexander Bain, Giovanni
Caselli, Erwin Schrödinger, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Georg
Cantor, Werner Heisenberg, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Shakespeare,
Homer, Dante, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, John Milton, Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
William Wordsworth, William Wilberforce, Frank Lloyd Wright,
Guglielmo Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell, James Cook, Benjamin
Franklin, Thomas Edison, Max Planck, Selman Waksman, Paul Dirac,
Francis Crick, James Watson, Frederick Banting, Charles Best,
Winston Churchill, John Gielgud, Lawrence Olivier, Alfred North
Whitehead, John von Neumann, Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, Pope
John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, Alain Aspect, Murray Gel-Mann,
Robert Frost, Yehuda Amichai, Richard Feynman and, yes, even
Woody Allen and Donald Trump—the list is endless—all,
every one of them, racists, bigots and white supremacists who
opened a Pandora’s Box of incurable ills.
The
fact that America and Europe have garnered 474 Nobel Prizes
in Science while Egypt and Algeria have three between them and
the rest of Africa none—is only a sign of Western decadence
and the obvious fact that Third World countries have been savagely
kept down by the Western conquistador onslaught responsible
for stealing the discoveries and inventions of the now benighted
continent. The United Nations Human Development Index (HDI)
tells the same story, ranking 185 nations along the spectrum
of Very High, High, Medium and Low. Of the 51 nations in the
Very High category, 80% are white; no African nation is in that
category; indeed, 87% fester in the Low bracket. Once again,
the responsibility incontrovertibly lies with the Western spirit
of pillage and destruction, which has robbed these nations of
the fruits of their cutting-edge thinking and contributions
to human betterment and expropriated these for its own purposes.
But
there is a serious problem. In our ineptness, arrogance and
bad faith, we have produced a curatorial wasteland of stolen
goods. The welcome our apologetic elites have accorded the newcomers
may likely have come too late. The rot may have gone so deep
that even our Third World and Stone Age redeemers may not be
able to repair the damage and misery we have caused in giving
the planet a presumed new lease on political, economic, agricultural,
jurisprudential, scientific, technological, quotidian, intellectual
and spiritual life. The donatives of massive foreign aid and
increased life expectancy are deceptive gratuities and provide
no consolation or acquittal. Making life less nasty, brutal
and short is obviously a conspiracy intended to further our
interests.
For
who can deny that we have profited from both our ethical turpitude
and systemic mismanagement? Who can deny that we have squandered
our powers and endowments and befouled everything we have touched,
creating a hell where once there was a heaven? Who can deny
that we have abused the sage and the blameless and defrauded
the inventive genius of our pristine superiors? Who can deny
that we deserve to be distrained and replaced?
I for
one am heartily sick of the sordid project of Western civilization
and am desperately seeking a place where I can emigrate.