Article 78: Confessions of a Western Mongrel
On listening to Rashib Bolsen, the Islamic Spokesman from the Peoples' Republic of Boulder
On listening to: Shahid Bolsen on the inferiority of Western values | Group identity must be shared beliefs whose description reads:
“If you find this controversial, it is because you have never heard the conversation being had by most of the planet about the West, and don't realize how ludicrous Western exceptionalism sounds to the rest of us.”
Shahid describes Islam as a civilization which includes many different nations and ethnicities, going from Morocco, to Malaysia and all the way into China. It is one overall culture sharing the same beliefs with mutually attuned senses of right and wrong, honorable and dishonorable, a way to lead a good, meaningful life.
In contrast, he describes the West as lacking all of these elements essential to any sort of cohesive society. There are many videos on his channel, each about fifteen minutes long. I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says, but what he says is worth contemplating because in a way he is discussing what is playing out in the Middle East and with the Ukrainian Special Military Operation, namely a clash between Russia and her Allies against the Collective West, aka ‘Collective Waste’!.
He offers a critique of Western civilization using the West’s own language. He is a German-Irish American, born in Boulder Colorado in the 70’s who, having lived most of his life in Islamic countries now speaks his fluent English with a slight Arabian accent. He has a chequered past, to put it mildly having been, amongst other things, jailed for years on Death Row for murder which later on appeal was reduced to manslaughter. I find his characterization of the Islamic civilization, the Ummah, a bit over the top; he says, for example, that all Muslims agree with each about values and such and abhor violence and conquest as if Muslim nations haven’t often been at war with each other or perpetrated violence and conquest. Moreover, I find it hard to believe that everyone agrees about everything; I am sure many families are torn with internal disagreements in Islam as in the West. That said, he makes some interesting and penetrating points, especially about Western cultural issues. So whether or not the messenger is entirely savory, nevertheless some of what he says can still be worth considering.
One of his critiques in this or another video goes into how Western liberalism is internally inconsistent. That the latest iteration, Wokeness, which attacks most others for being intolerant racists or bigots (anti-trans, anti-female etc.) is itself extremely intolerant. This is true. And in many other ways Western nations, policies and individuals fail to measure up to the same Enlightenment Ideals they profess to follow and which they don’t hesitate to push onto the rest of the world even though, clearly, they aren’t working all that well. Again, I think it’s worth listening to the man’s arguments in his own words.
I have long been critical of most Western nations but in a Tolkienish sort of way: I lament their passing. Although not convinced that they were necessarily all that great before Modernism took hold – a post-religious, materialist thrust which now pervades not only the West but most of the world entire at this point, the Chinese being perhaps the most advanced materialists of all – I do feel that it was a more or less cohesive civilization sharing similar values and worldview. A worldview is something both deeply personal and collectively shared, the experiential glue binding communities, nations or civilizations together, spanning physical expression and non-material perception and one of whose core expressions is civilizational Culture. I believe the West had a valuable culture with many marvellous aspects. I believe this because growing up in England and later both visiting and living in Italy, France and Germany, one can see with one’s own eyes clear, ubiquitous evidence of beauty, intelligence, sensitivity, playfulness, elegance, depth, dignity, grandeur and timeless peasant wisdom. One sees this in the furniture, the buildings, the landscape, the streets, the markets, the clothing, the languages, the cuisines and manners. I saw it everywhere: evidence of past high culture still influencing those born into its civilizational gestalt to this day.
Of course I also saw inconsistency, corruption, decay, decline, ugliness, ignorance, quarrelsomeness, frivolity, crassness, lewdness, degraded behaviours and so on. Increasingly, it seemed the modern world was moving into a culture not reflected in the buildings and landscapes from past eras and increasingly veering into a modernist hellscape - crass, gross, degraded.
‘And so it goes’, I thought, enjoying every Vonnegut novel I ever read decades ago, for he seemed to capture the madcap, gloriously hopeless tragi-comic essence of our times extremely well. As a young man he walked through the rubble of Dresden, clearing away the bodies, or what was left of them. He knew our world well, in all its surrealist fury, and created new worlds for us to explore in narrative, worlds whose principle Surrealist Deity had an unquenchable sense of humour.
Of late it seems that the political and leadership classes, those in charge of managing and directing our world, especially in the West, are deliberately working to make things worse on pretty much every front: economic, social, personal, family. They seem animated by hatred for all that is good. They are trying to turn us all into orcs tearing each other limb from limb. It is disturbing to witness and hard to know how to resist. Deception is everywhere, including in all the controlled oppositions provided to further ensnare the unwary. Where to turn?
Along comes this white Islamist from Boulder Colorado to provide a little clarity. Much of his critique of Western civilization rings true, or true enough. Things are never quite as cut and dried as someone with an agenda can make them out to be, but still: the West is indeed confused, inconsistent, doesn’t practice what it preaches, imposes its financial systems on other nations and peoples, exploiting them, and is culturally declining not advancing. The whole business is decidedly unpleasant. Some say this is because of a long-term plot by Jews or Bankers to undermine society for their own benefit and there is enough circumstantial evidence to make that a plausible argument, though distasteful and politically incorrect. But even if true, it’s not enough. It doesn’t explain how so many millions are willing to buy into so much civilizational self-destruction and personal degradation. How did we let things come to such a pass?
For example, in one of his videos he responds to a question from a woman: ‘do you believe that women are equal to men’? After a shrug and a smile, he launches into his answer, something he he has clearly thought through and expressed many times already. Basically he says that the whole notion of equality is bogus. First of all, there is no equality between men and men or women and women; some are smart, others stupid, some attractive, others ugly, some born wealthy, others poor, some work hard, others don’t and so on. Furthermore, specifically in terms of men and women, clearly there are great differences between the two sexes. As an example, he asks the woman if it is not often the case than when being ‘hit on’ by a man in a bar when she is there alone, in order to deter his unwelcome advances she might make up a boyfriend or husband in the background at which point the guy will usually withdraw from the pursuit. Because men, he says rightly, are inherently ‘more dangerous’ than women and you need a man to protect you from other men making them inherently unequal. If that man, acting as your bodyguard essentially, insists that you not both go into a dangerous neighbourhood, are you not going to want to agree and obey? The whole equality issue, he says, is illogical and absurd, like most of the social issues which come up in the West. I think that was a fair point. Moreover, what is more interesting than the point itself is the way so many accept the equality proposition without a second thought and can even get irate with anyone who challenges it.
In the midst of musing on this critique of Western civilization offered by the Mullah from the ‘Peoples’ Republic of Boulder’ (where, as it happens, I was living whilst he was a boy growing up there), it occurred to me that I – like so many others - am a ‘Western Mongrel’, someone whose personal situation and journey mirrors that of millions of others. There are many different layers and levels to Western lives, of course with many things shared in common one of which is that increasingly we feel we do not have all that much in common with each other, or at least less and less. Moreover, most of us don’t really know our family or cultural lineages much more than a few generations back, if that. Hence, many of us are mongrels.
First, what is a mongrel?
From the Mirriam-Webster online Dictionary:
1: an individual resulting from the interbreeding of diverse breeds
especially : one of unknown ancestry
She owns several dogs, one of which is a mongrel.
2: a cross between types of persons or things
the cinema is … a mongrel of virtually all the other arts —Gerald Mast
We each have our own personal story, or lineage. In my case I come from an American family with English roots on the father’s side and on the mother’s side, a red-headed Irish grandmother who married the eldest son of a Belorussian rabbi - which we only learned after he died, since he never admitted to being Jewish to his wife or daughter. I didn’t meet my father or paternal grandparents until the age of sixteen because my mother divorced my biological father and married an Englishman who raised me in London, where we moved when I was about five. So I have mixed parentage and nationality, thus am ‘a cross between types of persons or things’ (things here being nationalities). I also have two family names: in England my last name was my step-father’s but my passport always had my original family name because as I found out later was never legally adopted by the English stepfather. The word ‘mongrel’ fits quite well. So that’s one personal example of the notion.
But of course this sort of individual mongrel-hood is not untypical for many Westerners. Most of us who come from unmixed family lines don’t go back more than a couple of centuries, if that, and even those that do may only have a tenuous experiential connection with their ancestors even in the same country given the way Western societies change so rapidly from century to century. How much does an Englishman today have in common with a person from the same class in Chaucer’s, about twenty five generations ago? Some, for sure, but in many ways very little. If we were to meet our great, great, great grandparents, for example, (in my case born in the late 1700s) how well would we understand each other? If we are practicing Roman Catholics, perhaps quite a lot, but if not, perhaps not so much at all given how much our outer situations and the class systems have changed. And of course a large number of us are now being born in countries far away from where our ancestors lived. Native Americans who haven’t moved far have little connection to their ancestors of several centuries ago for well-known reasons. Similarly Mexicans, where I live, have little connection with their own ancestors whose languages they no longer speak and whose customs and ways of living are now largely lost.
I don’t want to belabour this overmuch, but the point is that many of us in many ways are deracinated. When I lived in Germany in the 90’s, for example, many German contemporaries born in the mid fifties like myself felt extreme disconnection with their parents who lived through Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s because of the huge changes their country went through during and since that period. There are Russians who still find the notion of having their country led by a Tzar resonates strongly and yet that reality is something now only imagined, not witnessed in present reality nor known by living persons. The Chinese have similar experiences. Indeed all peoples the world over are very much in the same boat as such we are all civilizational mongrels.
In musing on this after listening to one of Rashib’s youtubes, I had the sort of idea that writer-types like myself find themselves spontaneously birthing, namely the title of this Article: ‘Confessions of a Western Mongrel’. I often get little ideas like this and immediately wonder if perhaps this is the next Great Book Idea. But then this time, also immediately, I realized two things: first, that it’s a good topic for a short article and second, am better at coming up with interesting-sounding titles than actually writing books, making me perhaps more of a ‘Book Title Composer’ than ‘Book Author’.
And later wondering: maybe mongrels don’t have much to pass on, being so fragmented to begin with; maybe fragments is all we can string together; and maybe that’s good enough.
In any case, Rashid’s critique of Western culture, though by no means earth-shattering, raises issues more of us in the West should be contemplating. Our current politico-social situation is confused and confusing; people talk AT each other but rarely WITH each other. That used to be a very common thing among Europeans of my parents generation. Nowadays, when people come over I find myself guarding against saying the wrong thing – so easy to do these days. Too many of us are outside our natural tribe, or pack. Mongrels.....
And so it goes...