Meme Warfare

Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain

- a great resource for opposing cultural relativism

The world is a battleground for sets of ideas, memeplexes if you will, or just sets of ideas if you reject that meme. Some fight clean and some fight dirty. I can't help but think it is ideas that are fundamentally weak which need to fight dirty.

I have no shame in proclaiming that I believe in modern (not post-modern) enlightenment, liberal, secular and western values. I reject superstition, faith, fawning respect of old culture or dead ancestors, respect for authority because it is in authority (rather than because it has earned genuine authority), knee-jerk conservatism, grab-my-balls radicalism and nihilism too.

I respect the scientific method, open debate, free markets, free competition, free trade, sceptical enquiry and education in how to think rather than what to think. I don't have an irrational faith in open and free competition among ideas, I don't believe that it is inevitable that truth will always win in every skirmish but in the long term openness, freedom, free rational enquiry, free exchange of ideas, free trade and open intellectual intercourse will build a better world. And even if they don't there is a value in freedom which should weigh heavily in any utilitarian calculus. I have never met anybody who said they regretted having an education in how to think, even people for whom it has brought no tangible benefits.

There are systems of ideas, systems of beliefs and values, religions especially, which reject freedom and openness and fight dirty. We should not feel ashamed to point this out and to infer that fighting dirty comes from desperation rather than certainty.

Indoctrination of children.

Children have a capacity to learn and a propensity to take on board messages put across to them by figures in authority. We use this capacity well when we pass on valuable survival hints such as telling our children to be careful around cars and not to do things to pets which might make them bite. We also use children's openness to learn by teaching them to read, write and do simple mathematics well before we ever teach them why it is important that they master these skills. This is of course slightly manipulative but then again how many children come to resent their parents for making them learn how to read and write? This (regrets and recrimination in later life) is an important test of what is education, making use of the receptiveness of a child's brain and what is shameful and abusive indoctrination. How many people regret having accurate sex education compared to those who regret being told that sex was dirty and disgusting and makes the baby Jesus cry when he sees it?

I can think of many people who have said they wish their children didn't know certain things about sex but I have never met anybody who regrets knowing the facts of life. It seems ignorance is a precious gift that some people want to give to others but nobody who has it themselves regards it as having any value.

Thank you, parents and teachers, for every fact you told me. A fact is a great gift. So is nurturing an ability and appropriate confidence. There is no thank-you due for lies, ugly prejudices and irrational superstitions. Education is a blessing, indoctrination is a curse and a handicap. The only thing worse than teaching a child a lie as a fact they have to believe is to tell them that they can't do something or become somebody which is within their capability. To tell a child that they can't do X because “our sort of people”, or worse, “your sort of people”, don't do that is despicable. Of course it does no good to be telling a boy who can't tie his own shoelaces at the age of twelve that he can be an astronaut or a brain surgeon but to deny talent that is manifest is a great betrayal.

Telling a child that these people believe this or that is education, telling a child that they should or in fact do believe this or that is indoctrination.

Children can be indoctrinated by parents and those around them such that they limit their horizons to those of the parents. Children are instructed to be Amish, Muslims, gypsies, working class low aspiration macho males or females of low or no aspiration. Making your children live the life that you choose for them and to aspire to what you want them to aspire to and no more is selfish and manipulative. It is bad enough when you try to make a child live up to your aspirations, it is far worse when you make them live down to your aspirations.

I have not given my children one minute's worth of religious indoctrination in their entire lives. I have not even gone out of my way to tell them what I believe still less what they should believe. Religion and personal philosophy is something for people to study for themselves when they are old enough and ready for it. We should teach our children how to think, how to study, how to question and we should limit religious education to facts without telling them what they believe. It is perfectly reasonable to teach that Muslims believe in one god and that Muhammad is his final prophet. It is not reasonable to tell little Abdul that because his daddy says that he is a Muslim that means this is what Abdul does and must believe. When he gets a bit older you can teach Abdul that his father's religion insists that he follow and that the Islamic penalty for not doing so is death. But it is never reasonable under any circumstances for a teacher to tell a child what the child has to proclaim belief in.

One of the nastiest and most pernicious tactic of meme warfare is the use of sex to sell religion. Some religions have the nerve to insist that to marry one of their number you must submit to have all your children indoctrinated in their faith regardless of your own beliefs. This should be shown up for what it is: blackmail, extortion and harlotry. It is thoroughly despicable that a father says the only way you can marry his daughter is by selling him your children's souls for sex. Nobody has the right to decide upon the religion of their children, still less of their grandchildren.

Childhood indoctrination is a cynical and evil way to spread ideas that are too weak to stand up on their own. The way religious indoctrination works is by immersion and assumption. Rarely is the indoctrination explicit, flagrant and blunt. Children are immersed in a religious culture and their acquiescence is assumed. My parents never told me that I would become an Anglican because they were Anglicans. It was more low key and based upon assumed consent. You are now old enough to go to church, you are now old enough to join the choir, you are now old enough to get confirmed. Children want to please their parents and they don't want to be the odd one out. This is a subtle form of pressure to conform to expectations. We as a species are very conformist, even when we decide not to conform we have a tendency to conform to the expected image of a non-conformist. Dressing like a Goth or a punk is every bit as much conformist as dressing like your father, in fact it is probably far more conformist for a middle class teenager. These days teenagers “assert their individuality” by choosing to conform to a set of rules of a pseudo-tribe.

Tribal Warfare

Another way that irrational ideas are spread across time (maintaining a hold on people and their children rather than grabbing a hold of new people) is through tribal forces and tribal loyalty. The most extreme form of this comes with religions which are tribal in nature, the classic example being Judaism.

Sikhism is a religion which has managed to persuade some western authorities that it deserves the status of a race and protection of its religious dogmas as if a failure to protect them was serving the interests of racists. This is crazy. Just because your parents follow a particular religion it does not follow that this is and has to be your religion. It is always a choice even if you are not aware of having made it.

Your irrational memeplex can recruit the power of tribal loyalty to protect it by fostering outward signs of difference. Here are some tools that have been used to spread irrational beliefs by harnessing the power of tribalism and the idea that life is all about us versus them:-

Circumcision, tattoos and tribal scars

Making a permanent change to the body marks a person out. Sometimes it can show a level of commitment, especially when the recruit to the cult has to choose to face the pain as an adult. Even when the marking is done to a child it can be powerful, it is a permanent marker, a point of distinction which separates the cult inductee from the rest of humanity.

Special dress

Sikhism requires its men to wear a turban, a full beard, a metal band around the arm and to carry a knife. Through tales of supposedly brave and noble martyrs who chose death rather than removing their turban (which of course is taught as if it was brave and noble rather than petty-minded and idiotic self-indulgence) Sikhs are taught to slavishly follow on and mark themselves out as different. Of course it does not require anybody to reinforce the idea that different from the rest of humanity means, for the insiders, that they are superior, and for the outsiders that they are a sinister group to be feared. Being (at least vaguely) hated and feared by your neighbours is a powerful way to maintain tribal identity.

Religious clothing can mark people out as special without a good rational or doctrinaire reason. Puritans dressed soberly and somberly, that is reasonable, but why did they all define that mood in the same style? Why a particular shape to a hat, why a particular shape to a neckline? Today Muslim women are told to dress in a way which does not provoke the lusts of men and to cover their hair, but this idea does not explain radical Islamic fashions that make women anonymous and shapeless. Neither does it explain why Muslim men wear distinctive clothing and funny little hats.

Wearing a hijab does not make your daughter a good Muslim, neither does it stop her giving her boyfriend personal services in a parked car (as I have witnessed). But it does give the world the impression that she is a devout Muslim and you have done your Islamic duty by indoctrinating her efficiently. Is that the point of it?

Why do people feel the need to proclaim their religion in a way that others can see? Silly Christian fishes on the backs of cars, crucifixes, turbans, taqiyah caps, beards, dreadlocks, black hats and ringlets and so on. What are people meant to do with the information? Am I supposed to avoid crashing into the back of that Christian car? Am I supposed to feel that the woman behind the veil is morally superior to me? Why would any god need such a petty symbol to know who was devout? Actions speak louder than petty symbols of distinction.

Of course the individual wearing the turban or the skullcap in many cases does not wish to do other than make the statement that they are proud, or at least not ashamed of who they are, it is probably only in the minds of a minority to be using dress as an aggressively assertive statement nevertheless that can often be the message that is received.

Names

If you are told your new colleague is going to be Bernadette Mary Concepta Murphy you have got an inkling about the way she has been brought up, haven't you? The same goes for Ibrahim Mohammed Ali, Miriam Goldberg, Ajit Gill Singh and Forest Sky. Parents can inflict names upon their children which tell the world that this child's brain is occupied territory, back off. What can you do if you have been given a name which might as well proclaim your parent's religion in neon lights? It is an evil bind to put a child in, especially when you belong to a minority or immigrant community.

How much courage would it take to give your child a name that did not scream out “this kid is a Muslim” if that had been the family tradition for as long as anybody could remember? You see how thoroughly pernicious this is? Once one of your ancestors has submitted to the sky tyrant you are screwed, you will be lumbered with family names which proclaim the status of slave to belief. Once everybody in your village has succumbed then there is very little you can do to break out, family names and given names will be selected from a very small and stagnant pool.

Safety in Numbers

One of the most blatant ways in which religions spread their tentacles is by breeding more captives. In traditional societies with traditionally high infant mortality there was nothing unusual in having six or more children. Today things are very different. A community which has an average family size of six children is going to grow very quickly, in a way which cannot fail to be alarming to its neighbours.

Apologists for immigration and advocates of a "multicultural society" (who wanted, asked for, planned for or even anticipated that?) say that immigrants soon settle down to the same family size as the indigenous community. Really? At the sharp end of immigration and cultural swamping that is very far from obvious. In my lifetime immigration has gone from a small smattering of brown and black faces to whole cities having whites as a minority.

Immigrants will continue to act like immigrants for generation after generation if they have marriage partners from back home in an uncivilized rural village that is being shipped across to the civilized world one arranged bride or groom at a time. Has anybody of the platitudinous pro-immigration persuasion factored that into their calculations?

Multiculturalism might be all well and good if you live in an affluent neighbourhood where it is in effect something you can go and sample, somewhere else, at a safe distance. It is another thing entirely when your town is being taken over and your house is plunging in value as your neighbours move out to try to find somewhere to live that resembles the home town and community they were born in, somewhere they can escape the symbols of a foreign and frightening creed. It is the people who have least to gain from immigration and multiculturalism who are being asked to be the most tolerant, at least they have most to cope with which they may well find hard to stomach. It is not in the leafy suburbs where the affluent live that are filling up with strange women in strange clothes which seem designed to show pride in rejecting the values they hold dear, dragging along a large number of children all chattering away in an alien tongue.

Immigration may well have benefits for a whole country and economy but it has victims. By the nature of things immigrants don't feel at home anywhere in the new country so they tend to be drawn to places where the property prices or rents seem the best value and where there is the prospect of work, this then becomes an area which is attractive to new immigrants because there are some people like them there. The indigenous community in poor areas is often devoid of special skills and they find themselves competing with people who are used to a lower standard of living and are prepared to do work they are over-qualified and over-skilled for. They don't stand a chance. Not many left wing newspaper columnists and social workers see their jobs taken away by new immigrants, which probably explains why the resentment of immigrants is focused among those people who actually see their neighbours being replaced and usurped.

Certain religions use numbers, the power of the horde, as a weapon, a cultural bulldozer. The obvious candidates for this analysis are Catholics, Muslims and Mormons.

It took a long time for the church to cotton on to the concept of breeding for Jesus. In the earliest days the church thought it was in the last days and the focus was on death, spreading the word by the example of martyrdom, fervour and zealotry. You first have to think that there will be a future before you can focus on a strategy for it. Nowhere did the strategy of breeding to victory come into sharper focus than in Northern Ireland. Fifty years ago Catholics in Northern Ireland were an oppressed minority. The Protestants used the power of democracy to impose their majority will over the minority and to protect religious discrimination in policing and employment. Now the numbers of Catholics have increased significantly through what amounts to demographic warfare, with the active support of the Catholic Church. The majority Protestant community is now resigned to being overtaken within the next generation and suddenly it seems wise to preach cooperation, tolerance, mutual respect and even a guaranteed voice in government for minorities. In another twenty years Catholics will be the comfortable majority across all of Ireland, with Protestants only living in small areas of a local majority, Protestant ghettos, and the Catholics will be preaching the virtues of a vigorous and pure democracy while the Protestants will be using the language of respect for civil rights.

The most obvious and naked bit of demographic warfare was the rise of Mormonism through the vehicle of polygamy. Having twelve surviving children in the nineteenth century was difficult for a man with a single wife. With three of four wives having only twelve children was relatively disappointing, a sign of personal failure. The elders of the church were managing upwards of twenty children, who of course would also go on to have large families themselves.

Breeding more believers strengthens the community in both quantity and quality. I suspect that if you graphed average family size against average change in active congregation numbers you would see a correlation. Populations that are growing in number have more vigorous religions. Family sizes are higher in America than in Europe and religion is comparatively healthy there. It is not obvious which way the causation runs, I strongly suspect that it is a two-way process. The time in Britain when population, and average family size in particular, was expanding rapidly, the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was also a time in which there were repeated waves of evangelism and new chapels and Christian denominations springing up. In the twentieth century average family size fell back to more modest levels and religion was in decline as never before. Year after year, decade after decade, the Church of England has seen a decline in church attendance and while there have always been new and evangelical Christian movements none of them have been impressive or had much of an impact outside the lives of their own members. Britain has not seen anything remotely like the American Christian mega-churches, but then again America has not seen the same decline in average family size that has been experienced over most of Europe.

Two Tribes

If two tribes lived alongside each other without a religious divide inter-marriage and business deals would blur the distinctions between the two tribes within a couple of centuries. A religious divide that reinforces the tribal divide can ensure that the two tribes stay separate in perpetuity especially if that religious divide is helped along by special dress, tribal mutilations, periods of fasting, dietary taboos and the characterization of the other tribe's actions as abominations. The tenth commandment, thou shall not seethe a kid in his mother's milk (Exodus 34:26), comes from a deliberate bit of tribal meme warfare. How can you eat with your neighbour (still less let your daughter marry his son) if his feast food is (rather handily and without a single trace of rational justification) an abomination to your god?

The taboo on eating pork has been a way for the Hebrews to resist integration with their neighbours for millennia. By making tribal distinctions in dress, diet, hairstyles and so on religious as well as tribal markers ensures that they continue across time. Robes and turbans, particular shapes of hat and patterns on scarves can persist through time and be extremely resistant to change surviving even the death of distinct tribal languages. Tribal badges of identity which are not mixed up with religion don't have quite the same staying power. While Scottish highland dress has been preserved through a combination of bloody-mindedness and race hate (sold as pride) it is not everyday street wear. You can bet your sporran that if there was a way to make it a badge of religion, and differing religion, every Scotsman (including lowlanders) would be wearing it every day, wherever they live, in the way that girls from Pakistani families wear modern Saudi Arabian Islamofascist-chic clothing on the streets of Bradford.

Their mothers and grandmothers back in Pakistan used to dress like this.

They come to live among women who dress like this.

So why do second and third generation British-born women of Pakistani immigrant families choose to dress like this?

Banging the Drum

One of the most blatant weapons of meme warfare is the Lambeg drum. This is a terror weapon disguised as a musical instrument. The Lambeg drum is a traditional “musical” instrument featured in the triumphalist Orange Order marches in Northern Ireland, it evolved from the drums used by the Dutch army to instill fear in the enemy, generate a spirit of unity among the troops and perhaps pass on coded battle orders. Such huge drums were used in the Williamite War in Ireland, a period of history romanticized almost out of all recognition by Ulster Protestants who portray it as a war for religious freedom rather than a war between two rival opportunist kings. The Lambeg drum is occasionally also seen in the more bigot-ridden parts of Britain. I heard one in action in 1982 in the Scottish town of Coatbridge which had a history of Irish immigration in the nineteenth century and seems to have developed a local tradition of active anti-Catholic bigotry as a result. Heard is perhaps the wrong word. These drums are largely felt in the diaphragm and bladder. They are among the loudest acoustic instruments in the world, capable of producing over 120 dB and being heard several miles away. While I have never been a fan of Catholicism I was utterly sickened by the experience of seeing a so-called parade which was little more than an army without weapons proclaiming hatred and the occupation of disputed territory. You can't escape a march with a Lambeg drum, you might go inside and not watch but you can still feel it and hear it indoors, even in a busy pub.

The only acoustic so called musical instrument which approaches the Lambeg drum in volume is also a terror weapon in meme warfare, the bagpipes. The bagpipes originated in Irish warpipes, an instrument that lacked a lot in subtlety and euphony but made up for it in sheer terrifying volume.

To this day the bagpipe is used more as a memetic weapon than it it is ever used to play pleasant music. Bagpipes can be made to sound pleasant and they can be used to play cheerful music but these are small pipes, typically bellows-driven pipes rather than the direct descendants of the Irish warpipes such as the Great Highland Bagpipe which is clearly designed for sonic warfare rather than melody or euphony.

It is not meant to sound nice, it is supposed to be disturbing and harsh on the ears. It's an ordeal by sound. It is a sound that you have to make a conscious effort to tell yourself that you like. If you play a harp to a monkey he will listen, if you play the bagpipes to him he will run around screaming and bite you until you stop. Monkeys have far more musical taste than the Scots or the Irish.

Think about big bagpipes and what images come to mind? The lone bagpiper playing a lament a bloody long way off on a battlement or marching bands proclaiming military virtues and racial superiority. There is deep and highly unpleasant undertone in any St Patrick's day parade which is clearly brought into sharp focus by the mass use of acoustic assault weapons.

But these clear cut examples are not the only cases. We should also look at some other examples which are passed off as innocent parts of culture which are not meant to be seen as aggressive or triumphalist. For example church bells.

Bells are a weapon of meme warfare. While small bells may be used for such honest and noble causes as announcing the time, calling you to dinner or telling you to hurry up and order as the bar is about to close big bells, really big bells, are used to put The Fear of God into people.

Bells are used to announce that the territory over which they can be heard is occupied. They are a sign of confidence and dominion. It is telling the world that here is a lump of metal big enough to buy several women and we're confident enough to leave it lying around and we're using it to announce and proclaim that confidence over the territory that we control.

Anybody building a clock knows that you can communicate a message with bells in a matter of seconds. Few people object to the idea of a chiming clock announcing the time (except perhaps when it is not kept running accurately). But bells rung to announce a church service go on far longer than any hourly chime. The longer they ring the more they are saying “We're Christians, we're ringing these bells because we can. What are you gonna do about it, huh? Nothing. Exactly.” If a Christian ever asks you to turn your stereo down ask him whether his church has got bells.

The earliest cannons in Christendom were made by bell makers, they were already in the weapons building trade.

Am I protesting too much? What about minarets? Surely the Islamic call to prayer is all about declaring Islamic dominion. The call to prayer declares that the area hearing the call is Islamic territory. It is designed to intimidate as much as it is a literal call to prayer. It is not saying “excuse me chaps, it's that time again” it is deliberately designed to put the fear of Muslims into all who hear it. By shouting and wailing from a tall tower the Muslims are showing how confident they are. There is little that could be more in-your-face than building a slim tower to yell out your memes at the top of your voice for everybody to hear. There is an implicit assumption that if you can hear the call to prayer you are in Muslim territory, and if you're an unbeliever and you feel uncomfortable you can imagine them smiling behind their beards at the thought of your discomfiture.

Where Islam is in a minority, where Muslims have to at least pretend to care about the opinions of other people mosques often have just token minarets, just an architectural nod in that direction. To actually broadcast the call to prayer requires the Muslims to be well bedded-in to the area.

Spot the Difference

One is a phallic-shaped threat to western civilization, liberalism and human freedom and the other is a Soviet era nuclear-tipped intercontinental missile.

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