Apologies For Cultural Sins

... are uniquely Western.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through the outstanding The Strange Death Of Europe. The most recent chapters have dealt with the collective guilt of the European elites. It's the usual crew of the media, academia and politicians, each writhing in masochistic, orgiastic pleasure every time they find a reason to blame themselves for anything.

Well, they're not really blaming themselves, are they? They're blaming their ancestors and their culture. None of them are taking personal responsibility for anything. Instead, they get all of the pleasure of confession and atonement without any real risk to themselves. In fact, you ordinary slobs in flyover country are the ones who need personal confession and atonement if you don't agree you're guilty for our collective pasts.

Also, the formulation: the media, academia and politicians doesn't really describe the mechanisms properly. The academy is the source of the self-loathing. It educates the media, which is made up of journalists too stupid and slavishly fashionable to think for themselves and object to any of it. From there, the media flogs the politicians according to the catechism of the academy. Politicians are weak creatures by nature as they must follow the whims of the voters, so the flogging is particularly effective.

And so here we are, reaping the harvest sown by the warped post-moderns in the academy. Handicapped by our guilt for having succeeded where everyone else, at best, only partially achieved their goals.

The Aztecs did a bang-up job conquering, enslaving and murdering, but as they were too dim to invent some crucial technologies, they weren't able to expand beyond the reach of their foot soldiers. Likewise, the Ashanti (and others) were delighted to round up and sell off millions of their fellow Africans at a handsome profit, but they could never extend their reach, either. Helpful hint: next time, look into inventing the wheel. You'll be able to enslave and sell more.

When it comes to imperialism, the Ottoman Empire did a decent job of it before getting trounced by the Poles at the Battle of Vienna. The Mongol Empire weren't slackers, either. I'm sure the countries around China might have something to say about their past as well.

So where are the apology tours for these guys? To take one in particular, when was the last time a Nigerian leader came over to the US and made a grand tour of black neighborhoods and begged them for forgiveness, dramatically, publicly and accurately describing their very plentiful and hideous sins?

We don't have to go that far back, do we? How about as far back as, oh I don't know, yesterday. Any Islamic leaders apologizing for female genital mutilation, which goes on every day in the West at the behest of their religion? No?

No. It's just us crawling across the floor, pleading to be forgiven. It's pretty sick when you think about it. And when they think about it, they're sickened as well. Sickened into utter disrespect for a culture so corrupt and decadent that it hates itself. That link is a long and worthy essay about Afghanis raping Europeans that explores why this is happening. Here's what the author, no one's idea of a crazed, "far-right" racist, finds the most likely one.

This brings us to a third, more compelling and quite disturbing theory—the one that my Afghan friend, the court translator, puts forward. On the basis of his hundreds of interactions with these young men in his professional capacity over the past several years, he believes to have discovered that they are motivated by a deep and abiding contempt for Western civilization. To them, Europeans are the enemy, and their women are legitimate spoils, as are all the other things one can take from them: housing, money, passports. Their laws don’t matter, their culture is uninteresting and, ultimately, their civilization is going to fall anyway to the horde of which one is the spearhead. No need to assimilate, or work hard, or try to build a decent life here for yourself—these Europeans are too soft to seriously punish you for a transgression, and their days are numbered.

And it’s not just the sex crimes, my friend notes. Those may agitate public sentiment the most, but the deliberate, insidious abuse of the welfare system is just as consequential. Afghan refugees, he says, have a particular proclivity to play the system: to lie about their age, to lie about their circumstances, to pretend to be younger, to be handicapped, to belong to an ethnic minority when even the tired eye of an Austrian judge can distinguish the delicate features of a Hazara from those of a Pashtun.

We've hated ourselves into being raped and pillaged. Dig the underlying statement in that excerpt: There's no point in assimilating because the West won't be around long enough to make it worthwhile. Good luck with that whole millions-of-refugees thing, you idiots.

Way to go, elites. Great job, academics. Of course, there's a way to put a quick end to all this.

What do you say we take 10,000 Afghani refugees, all young men, and house them at Harvard? Harvard's got a huge endowment, over the $34B mark. They can afford to build housing and take care of them. At the same time it will be a boon to the, err, diversity of the place. I recommend integrating them into student housing so everyone gets a good, close look. Who knows, the geniuses who run Harvard might actually learn something.