Certain observations made by Winston Churchill in the late 1890s have a definite ring of the familiar, and remind us that the violent, barbarous forces of Islam we're currently facing around the world are nothing new. His youthful military career gave him the opportunity to observe Islam in action on the Northwest Frontier (the Swat Valley region of present-day Pakistan), and in the Sudan. In both settings, it seems to have made an impression.
Unlike the PC dhimmis who run Britain these days, Churchill was brutally honest in his appraisals of Islam. He was a little less candid regarding his skepticism for the Christian religion; but it's there for anyone who knows what to look for. He was quite the philosopher, actually, from an early age; and some of the things he wrote in his books and letters were surprisingly deep. Stuff you'd never expect to see flowing from the pen of a modern-day politician.
However, in the same book, Churchill offered a harsh appraisal of the ideology that motivated the Sudanese jhadists. The following quote has become somewhat popular among post-9/11 anti-Islamist with a penchant for history: Over all is a bright blue sky and powerful sun. Such is the scenery of the theater of war.
The inhabitants of these wild but wealthy valleys are of many tribes, but of similar character and condition. The abundant crops which a warm sun and copious rains raise from a fertile soil, support a numerous population in a state of warlike leisure. Except at the times of sowing and of harvest, a continual state of feud and strife prevails throughout the land. Tribe wars with tribe. The people of one valley fight with those of the next. To the quarrels of communities are added the combats of individuals. Khan assails khan, each supported by his retainers. Every tribesman has a blood feud with his neighbor. Every man's hand is against the other, and all against the stranger.
Nor are these struggles conducted with the weapons which usually belong to the races of such development. To the ferocity of the Zulu are added the craft of the Redskin and the marksmanship of the Boer. The world is presented with that grim spectacle, "the strength of civilization without its mercy." At a thousand yards the traveler falls wounded by the well-aimed bullet of a breech-loading rifle. His assailant, approaching, hacks him to death with the ferocity of a South-Sea Islander. The weapons of the nineteenth century are in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age.
Every influence, every motive, that provokes the spirit of murder among men, impels these mountaineers to deeds of treachery and violence. The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherit in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigor. That religion, which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword -- the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men -- stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism. The love of plunder, always a characteristic of hill tribes, is fostered by the spectacle of opulence and luxury which, to their eyes, the cities and plains of the south display. A code of honor not less punctilious than that of old Spain, is supported by vendettas as implacable as those of Corsica.
In such a state of society, all property is held directly by main force. Every man is a soldier. Either he is the retainer of some khan -- the man-at-arms of some feudal baron as it were -- or he is a unit in the armed force of his village -- the burgher of mediaeval history.
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Truth is unknown among them. A single typical incident displays the standpoint from which they regard an oath. In any dispute about a field boundary, it is customary for both claimants to walk round the boundary he claims, with a Koran in his hand, swearing that all the time he is walking on his own land. To meet the difficulty of a false oath, while he is walking over his neighbor's land, he puts a little dust from his own field into his shoes. As both sides are acquainted with the trick, the dismal farce of swearing is usually soon abandoned, in favor of an appeal to force.
All are held in the grip of miserable superstition. The power of the ziarat, or sacred tomb, is wonderful. Sick children are carried on the backs of buffaloes, sometimes sixty or seventy miles, to be deposited in front of such a shrine, after which they are carried back -- if they survive the journey -- in the same way. It is painful even to think of what the wretched child suffers in being thus jolted over the cattle tracks. But the tribesmen consider the treatment much more efficacious than any infidel prescription. To go to a ziarat and put a stick in the ground is sufficient to ensure the fulfillment of a wish. To sit swinging a stone or coloured glass ball, suspended by a string from a tree, and tied there by some fakir, is a sure method of securing a fine male heir. To make a cow give good milk, a little should be plastered on some favorite stone near the tomb of a holy man. These are but a few instances; but they may suffice to reveal a state of mental development at which civilisation hardly knows whether to laugh or weep.
Their superstition exposes them to the rapacity and tyranny of a numerous priesthood -- "Mullahs," "Sahibzadas," "Akhundzadas," "Fakirs," -- and a host of wandering Talib-ul-ilms, who correspond with the theological students in Turkey, and live free at the expense of the people. More than this, they enjoy a sort of "droit du seigneur," and no man's wife or daughter is safe from them. Of some of their manners and morals it is impossible to write. As Macaulay has said of Wycherley's plays, "they are protected against the critics as a skunk is protected against the hunters." They are "safe, because they are too filthy to handle, and too noisome even to approach."
Yet the life even of these barbarous people is not without moments when the lover of the picturesque might sympathise with their hopes and fears. In the cool of the evening, when the sun has sunk behind the mountains of Afghanistan, and the valleys are filled with a delicious twilight, the elders of the village lead the way to the chenar trees by the water's side, and there, while the men are cleaning their rifles, or smoking their hookas, and the women are making rude ornaments from beads, and cloves, and nuts, the Mullah drones the evening prayer. Few white men have seen, and returned to tell the tale. But we may imagine the conversation passing from the prices of arms and cattle, the prospects of the harvest, or the village gossip, to the great Power, that lies to the southward, and comes nearer year by year. ...... Then the Mullah will raise his voice and remind them of other days when the sons of the prophet drove the infidel from the plains of India, and ruled at Delhi, as wide an Empire as the Kafir holds to-day: when the true religion strode proudly through the earth and scorned to lie hidden and neglected among the hills: when mighty princes ruled in Bagdad, and all men knew that there was one God, and Mahomet was His prophet. And the young men hearing these things will grip their Martinis *, and pray to Allah, that one day He will bring some Sahib -- best prize of all -- across their line of sight at seven hundred yards so that, at least, they may strike a blow for insulted and threatened Islam. …
"The weapons of the nineteenth century are in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age." Sound familiar? But in present-day Pakistan, the breechloading rifles of yesterday's gun-savvy tribesmen have been replaced by AK-47s, suicide bomb belts, and nuclear weapons.
Churchill continues:
* (This refers to the Martini-Henry rifle, not the high-octane drink of the infidel.)
Apparently political correctness was not really an issue in 1899. Although some well-informed infidels may still privately compare Muslims to rabid dogs -- while watching footage of violent, frenzied riots, perhaps -- the comparison doesn't get bandied about much in polite society these days.
And how many aspiring politicians today would write a line as straightforward as Churchill's "No stronger retrograde force exists in the world."? Aside from Geert Wilders, that is.
In this passage, Churchill astutely identifies the primary difference between Western and Islamic cultures, which has made the West dominant for three centuries -- the fact that it has been "sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it (Christianity) had vainly struggled". In the Christian world, science managed to take root and flourish, in spite of the best efforts of the Church to squash it; whereas, in the Muslim world, the fatalism, other-worldliness, and violence of superstition-enthralled Islamists have created an intellectual wasteland that's proven extremely inhospitable to science and reason.
While it's true that Churchill was a political conservative for most of his life, he was a Liberal is his early years, when the above passages were written. And, as I mentioned earlier, he seems to have been fairly non-religious. His son, Randolph, never even read the Bible until he was a grown man serving in World War II -- when his bemused reaction to the Holy Book annoyed his Catholic comrade-in-arms, the writer Evelyn Waugh, when he finally read it, on a bet. Waugh wrote to his wife about Randolph slapping his side and chortling, "God, isn't God a shit!"
Many counter-jihadis in the 21st Century have pointed out the obvious comparison between our current situation and the one that Churchill faced in the 1930s, when he was trying to warn his fellow Britons about the danger that Nazi Germany posed. He was a political outcast for years, during the lead-up to World War II -- dismissed as an alarmist and a fear-monger, because most Britons didn't appreciate the grave danger that Hitler represented.
Churchill would certainly be a very useful man to have around today. His bold, Nazi-defying rhetoric -- "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender" -- is inspiring stuff in our present conflict with the Religion of Peace. And the candid appraisals of Islam that he gave in his youthful accounts of adventures in far-off, exotic lands serve as reminders that, yes, we're right to be horrified by the institutionalized barbarism of this religion. And it's okay to say so
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