Essays in Idleness

“Contrary to what moralists would have us believe, men are nowhere the same.”

I have quoted Count Gobineau’s Nouvelles Asiatiques (1876), and I would continue to quote to the end of the book, did not a modern and very Western shame of plagiarism stop me. Then, since my thème-du-jour is Persia, I would begin to transcribe Morier’s Hajji Babba (1824).

But continuing with Gobineau, “Doubtless anyone can see that a Chinaman has two arms, two legs, and one nose, just like a Hottentot or a Parisian; but one hasn’t got to talk an hour with either to perceive that there is nothing in common between them, unless it is the conviction one must eat and sleep. In every other regard, in their mode of acquiring ideas, in the nature of those ideas, in their combination, their budding, their flowering, their hues — all are different.”

Actually, I must stop quoting there because if I continued with some of Gobineau’s examples (i.e. a negro dwelling south of Lake Chad, or an Egyptian Arab), I could be arrested. In becoming Woke, our society has sunk into depths of depravity never previously known, although for that reason, also unique. We are forbidden to tell the truth about anyone, with sufficient candour to make it recognizable; let alone the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as men of the ancient West recommended.

Just compare, the shopkeepers now rioting against the Ayatollah in Tehran with those who rioted against the Shah.

Having spent much of my youth in Asia (including two visits to the Shah’s Iran) I knew exactly what would happen when the Radical Muselmans took over in 1979, and approximately how it would end. But it was pointless to “report” this. Similarly, at the time of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was pointless to explain how the American effort at “democratic nation-building” would result in a lot of unnecessary death and destruction, including the extermination of native Christians, Jews, Yazidis, &c. One would have had to consult the most learned and rightwing American “neo-conservatives” (who could speak Persian, Turkish, and Arabic) to have a clew.

It is because the worldlings are unalike that it is unwise to make war on any of them, unless it is strictly necessary, and one is willing to be exceptionally brutal, and get out very shortly after one got in. For without the self-confidence of the former British or Roman Imperialist, and most important, indifference to death, things will not turn out well.

Trump has the right idea. Americans should go in by surprise, blow everything up, and then promptly disappear, having gained everyone’s respect and admiration.