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Fitzgerald: Jared Diamond’s collapsed Collapse

May 15, 2005 8:38 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

Jihad Watch Advisory Board Veep Hugh Fitzgerald reviews Jared Diamond’s Collapse:

Jared Diamond’s Collapse is a curious book, one that ignores the influence of ideology — just as his previous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, was careful not to attribute the success of Western European civilization to such formative influences as Hellenism and Judeo-Christianity, distinguishing elements that permitted the development of free and skeptical inquiry, and of modern science and modern economies. In Guns, Germs, and Steel he was determined to avoid any possibility that one might inquire into differences among different groups of humans. Instead, he wanted to focus on such matters as the 14 animals capable of domestication and the latitudinal breadth of the Euro-Asian landmass. Indeed, he explicitly announces that his intent was to show that no other kind of explanation was permissible, or even, it seemed, conceivable. And because Diamond goes birdwatching every year in New Guinea, and finds the New Guineans to be wonderful people, he draws much of his evidence, his anecdotal evidence, from New Guinea. The book nonetheless received exaggerated praise.

This second book is also worthy in its intent (if one thinks a writer should necessarily set out with an intent). And here he seems to agree that what people believe, or do not believe, and how they react to situations, can matter. He sees that Western dogmatism of one kind, and one kind, only, may lead to “collapse.”

The kind that Jared Diamond has in mind is the dogmatism of the free market, the belief that somehow governments should not intervene (though of course they intervene all the time, every time a new provision is added, or an old one amended, in the Tax Code) for example, to end in a crash program, utilizing every possible bit of pressure and power that the government possesses, to limit the use of fossil fuels in this country and all over the world. And he is correct.

But he says nothing about the belief-system in much of the Western world that may lead to another kind of collapse, not a physical one, but one that would end Western civilization. And that is the dogma that all peoples, collectively and individually, are of equal worth, and that no judgments can be made. And this peculiar belief, for which there is not the slightest evidence, comes out as something often called, in praise or blame, “multiculturalism” or “relativism.” It is madness.

And that brings us to the third dogma, far more dangerous than the two that have been described above, yet which is related to the two described above And that dogma is Islam, which is an affront to tolerance, and peace, and which limits artistic expression, free inquiry, the rights of women and all non-Muslims.

Yet the free-market ideology that has so far prevented any systematic effort to cease the transfer of enormous wealth to OPEC oil states (some $10 trillion since 1973), 10 of the 11 OPEC members being Arab or Muslim-dominated states), and that also has so far largely prevented the kind of effort that may be needed to protect the physical environment that is being degraded before our eyes, in the name of Growth (for economic activity appears to be the only (hollow) Good by which most people can set store), prolongs and even increases the power of Islam and of Muslim states and peoples.

And the other dogma, that of multiculturalism, usually means that the Western, white, European and American peoples are supposed to be forever embarrassed, forever apologizing for, forever in the dock about, not only whatever evils were caused by European imperialism (while all the considerable good of colonialism is ignored), but are to ignore completely the vast achievements of their own civilizations, and to forget who they are, and what Europe, and America, have managed to create.

And those two dogmas — the Free Market as the Sole Answer to fossil fuel use (and hence to Muslim wealth which funds, in turn, mosques, madrasas, an army of Western hirelings, etc.), and the belief that All Cultures and Peoples and People are Equal, both get in the way of sensibly dealing with the third, and most dangerous, dogma — that of Islam.

Diamond of course stays well away from that.

Europe today is experiencing a slow death. It is lying in bed, waiting for the end, a slow death, and there is a box of chocolates to be consumed, and on the old phonograph player a dying swan who manages to sing (qui chante son trepas).

And meanwhile the forces of black reaction, bearing an ideology that has been a consistent failure, political, economic, intellectual, and social, and that has simply been a blueprint for conquest and subjugation, and that insured a kind of false success based on the accumulated capital (including intellectual capital) of those non-Muslims it conquered and subjugated, gather.

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