Islamism is as nonsensical and malevolent as Marxism

Islamism, writes Dalrymple,

is so stupid, preposterous, intellectually nugatory and appallingly catastrophic in its effects that it makes one almost nostalgic for the days of Marxism.

Almost.

The classless society: of this earth only

At least Marxism

had a patina of rationality, and most of its adherents (in the West at any rate), while not averse to violence in the abstract, were willing to postpone the final, extremely violent apocalypse to some future date and did not believe that by blowing themselves up or cutting people’s throats they would ascend directly to the classless society or meet Marx in his pantheon.

You could be a martyr in the Marxist cause,

Richard Sorge was hanged in Japan in 1944. He became a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964

but only on the understanding that death was final. The best you could hope for was that, after the final victory of the proletarian revolution, you would have a postage stamp issued in your memory.

This does not have quite the same attraction as

an everlasting orgy in a cool desert oasis while everyone else is roasting eternally in Gehenna. (No bliss is quite complete without someone else’s agony.)

People ground to dust

Dalrymple writes that in the broad, almost deserted boulevards of today’s Pyongyang as much as in the St Petersburg of 1839, a crowd, in the words of Astolphe de Custine,

would be a revolution.

Tyrannies

demand immense efforts to bring forth trifles, one of the differences between the tsarist autocracy and the totalitarian dictatorship being the absence of aesthetic judgment and taste of the latter.

Dalrymple points out that the purpose of North Korean ceremonies

is to humiliate, to force people to acknowledge their enslavement with simulated joy. Spontaneity is not the only thing abolished; sincerity follows into the dustbin of history.

There was a time when Dalrymple regarded North Korea as

the ne plus ultra of contemporary political deformity. In those days, Islamism was hardly a speck on the horizon.

He should have known better, for as he says,

when it comes to the forms of self-evident stupidity and self-destruction, man’s inventiveness is infinite.

 

Message to the world’s remaining Marxists

Dalrymple has this to say to those who continue to profess communism:

It takes considerable stupidity, lack of moral imagination, or an egotism more profound than that of the most voracious Wall Street banker to proclaim yourself a communist after all the human disaster that the doctrine wrought in the past century.

Evil stupidity of Islamism

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

A puerile and barbaric canon served by malevolent cunning

One of the most sinister effects of the efforts of Islamist terrorists is that

they have undermined trust. Those under investigation turn out not to be cranks or marginals but people who are well-integrated into society, superficially at least, or who have good prospects. They are not the ignorant and uneducated.

The perpetrators are not of one ethnic or national group only. And they do not kill

because of personal grievance but because they have allowed themselves to be gripped by a stupid ideology.

This means

no one can ever be quite sure whether a Muslim who appears polite and accommodating is not contemplating mass murder. Deceit is one of the terrorists’ deadliest weapons.

Why it is folly to ignore sociological reality

British society

could get by perfectly well without the contribution even of moderate Muslims. The only thing we really want from Muslims is their oil money for bank deposits, to prop up London property prices and to sustain the luxury market; their cheap labour that we imported in the 1960s in a vain effort to bolster the dying textile industry, which could not find local labour, is now redundant.

In other words,

one of the achievements of the bombers and would-be bombers is to make discrimination against most Muslims who wish to enter Britain a perfectly rational policy.

The problem

causes philosophical discomfort to everyone who believes in a tolerant society. On the one hand we believe every individual should be judged on his merits; on the other, we know it would be absurd and dangerous to pretend that the threat of terrorism comes from sections of the population equally.

History is full of examples

of what happens when governments and peoples ascribe undesirable traits to minorities, and no decent person would wish to participate in the crimes to which this ascription can give rise; yet it would be folly to ignore sociological reality.