Hope against hope...?

Once again, Baron Bodissey, who along with his wife Dymphna helms the anti-Islam blog Gates of Vienna, has written a provocatively salutary essay.  This comes a couple of weeks after another fine essay about which I wrote in two parts (A sunbreak of sense "in the counter-jihad" and A sunbreak of sense "in the counter-jihad" part 2).  If Baron keeps this up, I may have to revise my critiques of his counter-jihad analysis (see, for example, The poisoned fruit of Gnostic alienation, Muslim Taxonomy, Conspiracy-Mongering, and The Wrong Instinct: The case of the Gates of Vienna blog).

The main point of Baron's essay is that the problem of Mohammedans hell-bent to conquer (i.e., destroy) our Western civilization is the #1 problem -- even more pressing than the danger of the Dastardly Cabal of Globalist Elites.  Once again, as with the aforementioned previous essay of his, I was surprised by his deference to the primary problem (Islam), effectively elbowing the "Real Problem" off the front burner.  This, needless to say, did not sit well with many of his readers.

And it didn't help that he framed it in terms of a micro scenario emblematic of a macro phenomenon -- to wit, that any civilization worth its salt must cultivate the virtue of its men defending its women, even if many of its women have become Social Justice Warrior Feminists.

...if you act according to them (or rather, fail to act) by not defending the women of your culture, and if millions of other men make the same decision, then your culture will be conquered by Islam. If you are under 40, it will probably happen within your lifetime.

I don't agree with Baron's timeline here; he makes the same mistake most in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream make, pressing the Chicken Little warning that the sky is falling now.  He, and they, underestimate how formidably sophisticated their own West is, and apparently overestimate how capable the Mohammedans are.  Once we adjust both parameters more reasonably (but still keep in mind the alarmingly systemic and metastasizing problem), it would more likely take Mohammedans a good 100 years to reduce our civilization to rampant disorder -- zones of killing fields, civil unrest, devastating damage to infrastructure, breakdown in civil order, etc. -- tantamount to destruction.

Then in the comments section, Baron goes after the expected demurrers:

Quote:

You say: “But Cultural Marxists and Feminists must learn the consequences of their subversion.”
Why? Why must they be required to realize that or anything else before you decide to defend our damaged and pitiful civilization from complete destruction?
 
There will be no more Cultural Marxists after Islam gets through with us. But there will be no more us, either. It will be a thousand years or more before there is any chance of a new beginning, and by then the remnant societies of the West will resemble Yemen.

End quote.

Now, the next comment Baron wrote fleshes out his position a bit further:

Quote:

Mind you, I can understand what drives so many young men to bitter misogyny these days. I’ve seen how the Mean Girls and narcissists and inflamed SJWs behave in relationships with men of their own generation. I’m very glad not to be a twenty-something man in the year 2017 looking for someone suitable to marry and settle down with and have children by. It’s a nearly impossible task.The foundations of our culture definitely need some serious, fundamental repairs. But not before we take care of the problem of the Ummah. We must deal with that first, or we will be assimilated.
And then there will no longer be anything outside the Ummah.

End quote.

The bolded part pretty definitively distinguishes Baron from (apparently) most of his readers -- because they conceive of the Dastardly Elites as being both too powerful and too evil for us to wait around to do something about (though again, they apparently haven't thought through how "we" could possibly do anything about them, given how supposedly powerful and evil they are).  Perhaps more to the point is that these Dastardly Elites are in fact preventing the West from adequately dealing with the problem of Muslims -- so logically, the former would have to be dealt with before the latter.  Much like if, for example, your house is burning down, but a certain group is preventing you from getting to a phone to call 911.  Before you can call 911 to deal with the primary problem (your house burning down), you have to figure out a way to evade or nullify the group who is preventing you from dealing with the primary problem.  

Thus, a couple of the commenters to Baron's essay wrote:

Wrong enemy. Muslims are INVITED into our lands by Marxists like Barack and Frau Merkel of Karl Marx University. they’re then given goodies and rewards for getting to the nation giving out the most goodies. Marxism has always been the alien within not folks looking for a better life.

And:

The issue is not one of willingness to fight, to take injuries and deal them out in defense of your tribe. The question is one willing to be financially destroyed and go to prison for acting out his “white patriarchy” on some invited guests of the local Marxist establishment in the process of defending his tribe? I’ll pass. If I’m ever to unleash the Kraken, it will be on the treasonous bastards who’ve invited in the enemy.

These two demurrers don't quite hit the Real Problemer nail on the head, though they circle around it (perhaps they are too busy venting their contempt for the Elites).  The point of the Real Problemer argument is that it's the Elites who are preventing Us Ordinary People from defending our civilization from Muslims.  Baron seems to counter (in past remarks -- though he doesn't here) this by saying that the problem of the problem is larger than merely Elites; it embraces perhaps most of Us Ordinary People as well (my above-linked "Sunbreak" essays deal with this).  If it were merely a Dastardly Elite Cabal composed of, say, 1% of the total Western population , arrayed against 99% of We Ordinary People, then We Ordinary People have no excuse for not overthrowing that 1%.  Here, alas, it gets complicated, as the Real Problemers begin going into contortions to save their argument.  Either the Dastardly Cabal is no longer a mere 1% -- but they never get specific about how large it is -- or it is, but then in order to explain how it can wield such extraordinary sway, it is implied that it has such dastardly superpowers, it can hold 99% of the people at bay and in virtual servitude.  The former attempt at a solution founders on a simple-minded Manichean division of The People into the Good Guys and the Evil Leftists, ignoring that Western society is a much more complex stratification of gradations between these two stark poles.  The "Civil War" these types of Real Problemers feverishly envision, then, is mostly a fantasy, at least in its demographics.  That doesn't mean that a Civil War in various parts of the West won't tragically break out (since most sociopolitical tragedies in history seem to have been the result of a devolution of misunderstandings and misperceptions); only that it didn't have to, and countless lives were lost for nothing.

The Baron again:

I have concluded that we don’t have time to drain the Cultural Marxist swamp before we tackle Islam. The Islamization of our countries is simply moving too quickly. 

This seems to contradict BB's more grimly jaded attitude about We The People, who don't seem to be waking up to the problem of Islam in sufficient numbers.  The bolded quote can avoid that problem if he merely means it as a statement of fact -- that Islam simply has to be tackled first if we are to survive; but not expressing any hope that it will be We The People who will eventually wake up and do the job.

Then, however, Baron has an unfortunate spasm of unrealistic optimism:

But if we somehow manage to confront the Mohammedan horde and overcome it, that will reinvigorate our culture and give us a fighting chance against the progressives/globalists.

Not only is it unrealistic optimism in general; it also goes against his many statements expressing grim disappointment with We The People.

Success seems less likely with each passing year, but I still have hope. Unfortunately, I won’t be around to see how it all turns out in the end.

Hope against hope?  That might be all we have...