Diary of Defeat, March 2025

THE DAILY BLOG carries a story on Luxon and police minister Mitchell wishing NZ’s Muslims a happy Ramadan and reading a script from FIANZ’s Dawah Division.  The Blog is Left-wing, so its criticism is of Luxon and Mitchell, not Islam.  Of course.  The X post is frankly creepy, and Luxon reads out the well-worn line about Ramadan being a time of ‘spiritual rejuvenation’.  I found this hard to resist so posted the following on the Blog's site:

Ramadan’s spiritual rejuvenation carries statistical value.  The average daily slaughter in the name Islam for the last ten years is 37.9 dead people.  But Ramadan carries a 13.6% premium – 43.1 dead people.  For those who think this is a bad thing, take comfort.  Rates are declining.  Islam’s daily dead peaked at 90.4 in 2014 while last year’s was only 23.8.  Thanks to TheReligionOfPeace.com for keeping pace with ‘peace’.

Diary of Defeat, February 2025

Argumentum ad Cultro

 THE WORD ‘ISLAM’ IS RARELY SPOKEN THESE DAYS.  In situations where it should be necessary to talk, for example, about its moral justification for violence, rape, Gaza and societal change, euphemisms are used and ellipsis is commonplace.  Where once Islam could be discussed in forums, lectures and seminars as well as pub and dinner-table conversations, the Overton Window has closed.  Yet Islam is effecting a reversal of the West’s moral progress, and those who, like me, wish to bring attention to this cannot make headway because commentary is increasingly discouraged.  How?  I have a theory…

In Stage 1 psychology I learnt about ‘operant conditioning’, whereby behaviour could be controlled by using reward and punishment.  A sub-function of this was ‘intermittent reinforcement’ in which reward and punishment could be applied at irregular occasions and achieve the desired result with less intervention.  The subject is aware of good and bad behaviour and internalises it for maximum reward and minimum punishment.  Ironically, in education the far Left has maximised reward for minimal effort and minimised punishment to the point where control is lost.  But that’s another issue.

Generally, in Western societies punishment is no longer physical.  It tends to be limited to incarceration, fines, public shame and forms of restitution.  This is not the case in Islam since the rules for Muslims’ behaviour are those laid down in the Koran and hadiths, from the tribal desert culture of 7^th century Arabia.  Since these are dictated by God or by Muhammad’s actions, they cannot be changed.  

And thus it is with violence.  When God says, “And slay them wherever you come upon them…” [2:191] Muslims are obliged to comply, and comply they do.  Cutting off heads, knifing people, mowing people down with vehicles, machine-gunning and bombing, the list goes on and on.  This is punishment for the non-believer, but not every one of them, just a few.  It is intermittent reinforcement in action, and results in implicit fear.

There is a phrase in studies of logic called ‘argumentum ad baculum’, a fallacy which means argue with the cudgel rather than with the subject under discussion.  It’s a threat, plain and simple.  However, God says, “I will throw fear into the hearts of those who disbelieve.” And Muslims are obliged to “then smite their necks…”  [8:12, 47:4].  Not with a cudgel, but with a knife, so to coin a phrase to suit Islam’s intermittent punishment, it should be ‘argumentum ad cultro’.  We in the West are, after all, in Islam’s domain of war and this is how it is fought.

IMPLICIT FEAR IS A WONDROUS TOOL.  This is the real Islamophobia - the fear of offending Muslims, and offended Muslims can be extremely violent.  The occasional beheading or knifing reminds people that Islam’s punishment for blasphemy is death, and since blasphemy is hard to define, no-one makes comment.  In the Islamic world, punishment works top-down.  Courts routinely jail or hang perpetrators, or the police permit mobs to attack suspects.  The Christian world hasn’t killed blasphemers for centuries and the application of relevant laws is lax, which suits the public’s secular inclinations.  But for fundamentalists, Islamic law is universal.  The doctrine of hisbah, ‘command right and forbid wrong’ [9:71, 3:110, 3:114, 7:199, 9:112] obliges action by Muslims in the doctrine of fard al-‘ayn, individual responsibility.  This is bottom-up punishment in what I’ve termed ‘retributive subsidiarity’, the obligation of each Muslim to impose the will of Allah and punish infractions, operating at the lowest practical social level. 

Even so, the level at which such control operates is rising.  Lawyer Lucy Rogers counter-protested an Auckland pro-Palestine march with an improvised sign and was told to move on by the police, despite the right of Kiwis to peaceful protest.  She was arrested for ‘breach of the peace and failure to comply with the lawful instructions of a police officer’, alleging she was ‘attempting to “antagonise” the crowd and their role during protests was to uphold the law.’  A police officer can be heard telling Rogers the pro-Palestine protesters were “going to get upset [with the sign] and then it’s going to start a riot”.  Similar things are happening in Europe with ‘two-tier policing’.  One result is that Muslims’ assertiveness increases.  This can lead to aggressive assertion, thence to assertive aggression.  This is what Islamic conquest looks like – authorities are doing the fundamentalists’ jobs for them.

GIVEN IMPLICIT FEAR, Westerners are increasingly describing themselves as ‘Christian-adjacent’ or ‘cultural Christian’ which is a back-door way of saying Islam is toxic and taking over the West without saying “Islam”.  It’s a code phrase, or as Jews have termed it in the past, a shibboleth, signifying outsiders from the prevailing world view.  Our personal, professional and political lives are shaped by the fear of what other people think.  Adding qualifiers to ‘Christian’ is deemed wise, since Christianity is considered below the salt for the professional managerial class. 

Diary of Defeat, January 2025

THE POST carried an article on the15th about Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and a treacherous spy for the Soviet Union.  There is a parallel with the elite opinion of today, where a sophisticated and educated group, then the Cambridge spy ring, now the clerisy who form part of the media and government, can be so easily misled by skilful agents of ideology, then the KGB, now Islam’s ulema, Muslim scholars dedicated to achieving Islam’s goal of global supremacy.  The Soviet Union’s ideology, based on Marxism, collapsed due to its inability to incorporate human nature.  This was a lesson unlearned, as every other nation seized by communist revolution has either failed or succeeds with tyranny.  Regrettably, Islam will not meet the same fate.  It knows how easily its target populace can be manipulated.  Its structure of having the ulema issue fatwas while keeping ordinary Muslims ignorant of its holy books has extraordinary persistence.  Where Right-wing commentors in the United States could keep communism at bay, albeit with some egregious human rights violations, in the United Kingdom, as The Post’s article points out, fear of libel laws kept the press silent.  The parallel today is of media’s fear less of libel, more of false accusations of racism or Islamophobia.  This is how Islam will succeed.  Where the media will maintain a wilful ignorance, it will maintain that Tarrant’s actions are unforgivable while while discounting Islam’s terrorism that exceeds his death-count every two days, year in, year out.  The media, here and in Britain willingly take the role of useful idiots, and like the Cambridge spy ring, care not about the consequences until it’s too late.  

The lesson for the Left is what happened in Iran.  They supported the eviction of the Shah and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini, only to be slaughtered in the aftermath.  There will be an equivalent evisceration as Islam comes to power in the West.

Diary of Defeat, December 2024

DEPOSING ASSAD WAS MORE THAN A REGIME CHANGE.  The cautious euphoria over the departure of Bashar al-Assad from Syria hides something of greater significance.  Assad was the last of the Baathist dictators who in principle were a  toxic mix of secular Arab nationalism and Eastern Bloc-style socialism opposed to fundamentalist Islam. 

Baathism, its ideological pretensions notwithstanding, lacked the inherent perceived legitimacy of Arab monarchies which were thus able to provide their peoples with a sufficient dose of freedom — freedom which, in turn, allowed for a measure of civil society that the Baathist regimes lacked.  However, under their rule, ethnic and religious minorities were protected from the excesses of Islamic fundamentalism.  Not any more.

Baathism has a perilous history.  Founded in Syria in the 1940s it took two irreconcilable forms which took control in Syria and Iraq.  It had organisations throughout the Middle East/North African states but only achieved power in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. 

Nasser was a Baathist ruling Egypt until he was replaced by Sadat who moved away from Baathist principles towards Islamism in exchange for its support.  But his peace treaty with Israel was too much for the Islamists, who assassinated him in 1981.  The increasing power of Islamists peaked with the Arab Spring in 2011 and the popular election of the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate Mohamed Morsi.  His autocratic excesses led to a revolt with the Islamists quashed and a more moderate president, Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, elected with 96% of the vote.  However, Egypt is said to have returned to authoritarianism since then. 

Gaddafi ruled Libya following his success in a coup d’état against King Idris in 1969.  While claiming no party affiliation, he transformed Libya into a new socialist republic and support for Arab unity with Egypt and Syria.  He also advocated for sharia law and Islamic values, though their incompatibility with modern economic and social relations meant they were not enforced.  His increasing eccentricity, corruption and an autocratic personality cult funded by oil revenues, he was killed in 2011 by military rebels who formed during the Arab Spring.  While Islamic fundamentalism does not have a strong hold in Libya, its increasing influence has created a morality police crack-down, enforcing Islamic principles.  Extremist groups, once in fear of Gaddafi, are now strengthening their foothold.  In general, Libya’s governance is under severe stress.

Syria’s tyrant Assad has been now been deposed by Islamists albeit presenting a moderate façade.  It seems inevitable that a steady increase in Islamist influence will see a greater application of Koranic principles in both government and civil society.  Its effects from throughout the Middle East makes a Syrian move to fundamentalism very likely.

From an Islamic conquest perspective, eleven of the 21 Mediterranean states are Muslim majority, with a population percentage of 61%.  All of them are increasing in Islamic population and militancy.  Don't place bets on Syria being a moderate exception.  

Trump Deserved His 2024 Victory

Criticism of the appeal of the Right as a pull factor, ex nihilo, comes with no consideration given to push factors that emanate from the extreme Left.  Until the Left becomes aware that its utopian vision is destroying civilisation step by step, it will continue to erode its traditional constituency of the working class.  Ordinary people don’t want to have ordinary hopes dashed, or their identity devalued by an isolated elite, whether it be national, cultural, racial, religious, occupational, political or sexual.  The extraordinary sums spent on non-citizens entering Western countries illegally could have been used for health, education and welfare of its tax-paying citizens – the primary obligation of the Hobbesian social contract.  Instead, people see housing, child-rearing and a comfortable retirement as being out of reach.  Younger ones may not be aware of the detrimental changes brought about by neo-liberal economics, but with the Left beholden to the Professional-Managerial Class, they’re not seeing changes that should be core to the Left’s traditional obligation to working people.  Nor that the polarisation of society comes from the Fourth Estate’s binary realignment of ‘balance’, now meaning presenting the media’s view, and its opposite.  And that social media captures these two perspectives forcing those bereft of introspection into one echo chamber or the other.   

Few seem aware of the 80-year peace dividend, that weakens civilisation through the feminisation of society with the predominance of personal feelings over societal balance and rationality.  Or that the Left's support for one of the most traditional and conservative agencies in the world, primitive culture (now deceptively called 'indigenous') is contrary to its 'progressive' ideology.  Fewer still, particularly among the educated, understand the Left and Islam’s use of each other as mutual stalking horses to impose their radical prescriptions on a society rendered defenceless by their joint control of the narrative, with captivation and stupefaction.  Or, for that matter, the changes the Left has to make to its doctrines as Islam becomes more powerful.  Gramsci’s long march has endowed the PMC with epistocratic and meritocratic contempt for the non-aligned, and the Left with its seditious enterprise.   

Ordinary people are becoming aware of the effects of this and have voted accordingly.

Diary of Defeat

It seems to me that the West[1] is undergoing a transformational change the like of which it has never seen before.  It might compare with the Mughal conquests, Islam’s conquest of the Levant and North Africa, or the expansion of the USSR, with lower mortality.  It is a change wrought by ideologies[2], yet most Westerners seem insensitive to them, or acquiesce without demur.  In this journal I aim to act as witness to this unopposed revolution.

August 2024

A FRIEND EMAILED ME with a link to a tweet of a German Muslim stating that "when Muslims become the majority, we will take over Germany by force. German laws will be replaced by Sharia law.”  Well, that’s Islam’s goal so nothing new there.  Then my friend checked the Muslim population of Germany and had second thoughts, at 4% he considered “it's a bit premature for a revolution yet!”  Well, not really, as I replied:

It's better to describe Islamic conquest as incremental rather than revolutionary.  It's also better to consider the increase in Muslim population in the West in terms of proportional increase, rather than absolute.  A change in Muslim population from 4% to 5% is a 25% increase, after all.

Doctrinally, Muslims are expected to migrate in what's called hijrah.   Here's a definition.  Koran 4:100 - "Whoso migrateth for the cause of Allah will find much refuge and abundance in the earth, and whoso forsaketh his home, a fugitive unto Allah and His messenger, and death overtaketh him, his reward is then incumbent on Allah."  Muhammad said "The reward of deeds depends upon the intentions and every person will get the reward according to what he has intended. So whoever emigrated for worldly benefits or for a woman to marry, his emigration was for what he emigrated for."  Thus, migration redeems a Muslim's previous sins and increases his or her chances of entering paradise.  Martyrdom - dying while killing unbelievers in the name of Islam - guarantees this. 

Nasty British jihadist Anjem Choudary was a former spokesman for al-Muhajiroun, which is Arabic for The Emigrants (that's the 'haj' part of Muhajiroun).   Known as ALM or the Islamic Thinkers Society, it is proscribed as a terrorist group, and Choudary’s role as director led him to be convicted in July 2024 and sentenced to life imprisonment.  That is, spending the rest of his life converting other prisoners, by force if necessary, to Islam.

Statistically, Muslim populations grow much faster than total populations, meaning that at some time in the distant future Muslims will outnumber non-Muslims in the West, which is precisely what happened in the Middle East, formerly majority Christian.  I only have accurate figures for NZ, which are based on censuses.  For example, the average annual growth rate from 1976 (Muslim population 1,341) to 2018 (Muslim population 57,726) is 9.1%.  NZ's non-Muslim population growth for the same period is 0.91% per annum, meaning the rate of Muslim population growth over 42 years is 10.3 times that of non-Muslims.  Extrapolate that!  It's fair to assume other Western countries will see similar rates.  I'll update these figures once the 2023 census 'religious affiliation' stats are available. 

And it's not just migration that increases the Muslim population.  Conversion to Islam is extremely easy; leaving Islam incurs the death penalty - the deterrent effect of this should not be underestimated.  Conversion occurs for many reasons but the main ones are likely to be for purposes of marriage, or for an easier life in prison.  Other reasons include voluntary or spontaneous conversion, but I think an undeclared reason, acting as an explanation for the greater proportion of women converting, is that Islam is a very patriarchal way of life, in contrast to the increasingly feminised West.  It is also strongly rules-based (fatwas), rather than ethics-based, which suits people who think Western morality is too far out of kilter, or who feel the need for fixed rules to live by.

Demographically, the problem is a lot more serious.  One thing that Muslims have that no other religion, ideology or political system has is the ummah, the nationhood of Muslims.  This is extremely powerful, given that Muslims tend towards greater piety than Gloriavale, though do it in public.  We can see this in the way that UK Muslims, who tend to co-locate in electoral districts, had a powerful effect on this year's election, based on ant-Israel sentiment.  And that will get more significant as the proportion of Muslims increases. 

There is something called 'the percentage rule', which takes two forms.  First is a paper by Harvard polsci prof Erica Chenoweth saying that it only takes 3.5% activists in a population to effect a change.   Second is one which states that as the proportion of Muslims in the population rises, certain effects become noticeable.  Violence increases and Islam's supremacism takes control.

Then there's the tipping point. A research paper shows that when 10 per cent of a population are strongly committed to a viewpoint, the view rapidly becomes the majority.

Premature, you ask?  When does one start to oppose the inevitable?  Or does one accept capitulation, as many in the West seem happy to do?

Am I a Humanist?

Am I a Humanist?
HUMANISM ESTABLISHED ITSELF in the late 19^th century as an umbrella term for any disposition of thought stressing the centrality of the human species in the order of nature.  Today, in the Western world, humanism is more or less synonymous with atheism or secular rationalism.  The subordination of individuals to ideologies of economic structures, religious codes, or regulating forces is antithetical to Humanism since it reduces human agency to a subset of pre-ordained dogma.  Being an anti-ideological materialistic atheist, I am a Humanist.

Are Humanists Humanist?
OPINIONS EXPRESSED RECENTLY, and appear to be a consensus, impact negatively on the question.  Most critically is the recent issue of Humanists NZ opposing the rights of free speech, to hear and to be heard.  This is a form of censorship, cultural regulation and control of discourse.  Humanists’ concern for Mubarak Bala should apply to Kelly-Jean Minshull for offending popular beliefs.   There is an increasing distance between the Humanists and public intellectuals who, if not atheist, adhere to the concept of eschewing determinism or external agency, and if no longer on the Left, certainly once were, including Douglas Murray, Frank Furedi, Jonathan Haidt, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris and particularly Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptics, who describes Humanists as having gone “full woke”.  ‘Woke’ ideology is utopian and concerned with the primacy of individual feelings over dispassionate rationality. 

HUMANISM CAN ENCOMPASS NOMINALLY RELIGIOUS PEOPLE who eschew supernatural interventions in human life.  But there is an irony here.  While Christians and Jews can describe themselves as Humanists on that basis, Muslims, by the essence of their faith, cannot.  This is because an expressed belief in Allah and his agency in human affairs is an essential component of the religion.  Furthermore, Islam’s rules oblige Muslims to bring about the dominance of Islam throughout the world.  Humanists represent a form of apostasy, which is punishable by death.  Thus, Islam is definitively anti-Humanist and vice-versa.  The naivety and neutrality, even sympathy, towards Islam I detect in this Humanist branch is dangerously misplaced. 

WHILE SARAH BAKEWELL IS NOT HERSELF A HUMANIST, in an interview about her latest book, Humanly Possible, she describes Humanism as “anything that puts individual human experience at the centre of things, rather than, say, an ideology like communism...a utopian ideology where present well-being would be sacrificed to the grand ideas of the future.”   I would suggest that ‘individual’ would not have been a factor in times past; it is a preoccupation of the present.  Further, the Marxist-derived ‘woke’ ideology, which appears to have significant sympathy within NZ Humanists, is utopian.

THE CONSENSUS I PERCEIVE OF HUMANISTS is that they consider themselves to be on the Left.  The Left is more likely than the Right to be captured by ideology because it wants change rather than stasis and ideology is perhaps the major agent of change.  Once in place, of course, an ideology will change laws and institutions to suit the ideology, as we saw in Russia in 1917, Germany in 1932, China in 1949, Vietnam in 1972, Cambodia in 1973, and Iran in 1979.  A return to a more liberal era takes generations.  I remain wary of the educated on the Left for their susceptibility to arrogance of the intellect (Richard West), chronological snobbery (C S Lewis), brahmin caste assumptions (Trevor Philips), the tyranny of merit (Michael Sandel), anachronistic moralising, moral superiority and authoritarianism, and cultural repudiation.

NEW ZEALAND HUMANISTS, in its manifesto, advocates personal responsibility, development and enjoyment, pursuit of positive ideals, and respect for the well-being of others.  It has communitarian ideals and respect for the golden rule.  It supports open societies in which differences of opinion and lifestyle are accepted, and unbiased state institutions.  In practice it appears to support diversity unless it’s that of thought.