Integrating Islam

Islam has a simple logic to it. Allah is sovereign over the entire universe, and thus the entire globe. Islam, through his Prophet, is a lawgiver. It is the duty of Muslims to follow Allah’s laws and to ensure they apply over the entire globe.

By uttering the formula of submission to Allah:

I confess there is no god but Allah,
and I confess that Muhammad is Allah’s messenger

one is embracing not only submission to Allah (which is what ‘Islam’ means: a Muslim is one-who-submits)—and the obligation to spread submission to Allah—but one is also becoming one of Allah’s people and thus morally superior to anyone who has not so submitted.

This moral superiority has all sorts of implications. It can be morally permissible to lie to non-believers, to take their property, to kill them, to enslave them, to force them to second-class status.

All of this makes Islam an uncomfortable neighbour: both in the sense of being next to Muslim-ruled societies and in the context of having Muslim migrants. Not helped by difficulties in accurately translating key Islamic texts, in not grasping how very different the underlying logic of Islam is from those of Christianity, Buddhism or Judaism—particularly in implications for non-believers—and in the fact that the logic of belief is not necessarily the logic of believers. Someone can be a “cultural Muslim” without embracing all the above implications, particularly regarding non-Muslims and particularly not its most extreme forms.

The human complexity that this logic manifests (or not) within is brought out by an deeply enlightening article (via) by a BBC researcher who ended up having many conversations with the brother of a July 7 bomber.

The brother worked as a taxi driver in Leeds. Like his jihadi brother, he was born in Leeds, children of one of the first Pakistani couples to move to Yorkshire.

The article is a bit like a detective story, but a whydunit? rather than a whodunit?. The author, Shiv Malik’s, local knowledge helps:

… of the four 7/7 bombers—three of whom came from Beeston … I had lived in Leeds for many years, and so I was familiar with Beeston’s shabbiness. Many journalists who landed there after 7/7 saw its poverty and assumed that there must be a direct link to the bombings. But the more we learned about Beeston and its bombers, the more this hypothesis turned out to be a red herring. Although poverty and exclusion are themes that wound their way through the lives of the Beeston bombers, it is the internal frictions within a traditional Pakistani community in Britain that best explain the radicalisation that led to the deaths of 56 people.

It is worth remembering that suicide bombing is a tactic, one not limited to Islam:

Suicide bombing is not just a religious phenomenon. It is employed by many secular organisations, including the Kurdish PKK and the Marxist Tamil Tigers. In fact, until 2000, the Tamil Tigers had carried out more suicide attacks than all other groups put together.

Study of the profiles of suicide bombers have found the motivations are more about sociological characteristics than psychological ones:

Ariel Merari, a Tel Aviv University psychologist, has profiled 50 suicide bombers and found that there were hardly any common factors. None were deranged or schizophrenic. Few had problems like depression. Merari concluded that the only factor linking all forms of suicide terrorism was the way bombers were recruited and trained. It is the psychology of the group, not the individual, that is key.

The problem was not being too disconnected to all human society, but being too connected with a social milieu. One that is, however, hostilely disconnected from the society around it, due to adherence to a “pure” form of the underlying logic of Islam. (Just as Kurdish and Tamil/Marxist identity was hostilely disconnected to Turkish and Sri Lankan societies respectively.)

But why was that identity so hostilely disconnected? British treatment of Muslim immigrants is not remotely like Turkish repression of Kurdish identity or Sri Lankan linguistic exclusion of Tamils.

According to Malik’s research, the answers turned out to be drugs and marriage and the conflicts these caused between first and second generation Muslims.

Drugs was something the first generation migrants from tribal Pakistan had no grasp of how to deal with but some of the second generation Muslims did, with Islam as a unifying motivator:

Ali told me that the older generation didn’t know how to deal with the drug problem. They were largely illiterate and didn’t know the system, so they would sooner move out than try to fight the dealers. The only people who seemed to do anything about the drug-taking were a group of second-generation Pakistanis called the “Mullah boys.” This was a fluid group of 15 to 20 members that formed in the mid-1990s, initially as a response to the drugs issue. Mohammad Sidique Khan was a leading member. Ali told me that on several occasions, the group kidnapped young Pakistani drug addicts and, with the consent of their families, held them in a flat near the Wahhabi-inclined mosque on Stratford Street—and forcibly cleansed them of their drug habits.

Religion motivating social good works: seems a fine thing. Indeed, the parents approved of this religious commitment within the second generation, up to a point:

Initially, this new-found godliness was welcomed by the older generation in Beeston—until the group began marrying people of their choice.

This was defying both parental authority and deeply ingrained patterns which had survival value back in Pakistan but not in England:

In Beeston Hill, the dilapidated heart of Beeston, Pakistanis make up 20 per cent of the population. They are a minority, but large enough to have been able to form their own partially ghettoised and cohesive community. Almost every family is ultimately from a rural part of Pakistani Kashmir called Mirpur, where the rules of tradition are strict and unforgiving. In Mirpur, as in many poor parts of the world, the basic structures of life—justice, security and social support—are organised by the local tribe and not by a central state. One consequence is that people can’t just marry whom they want. If they did, then over time tribal lands would be broken up by the rules of inheritance, and the economic base of the tribe, or baraderi (brotherhood), would be destroyed. This is one reason children in rural Pakistan are often treated as the property of their elders and encouraged, or forced, to marry within the baraderi.
Families that allow children to marry for love are considered to have lost their izzat, or honour. In most circumstances, the only way for the family to regain it is to kill the offending boy or girl. Pakistan has the highest number of honour killings in the world.
When the first generation of Mirpuri immigrants moved to Britain in the 1960s, the baraderi system should in theory have faded away, as social services were supplied by the state. But traditions have their uses for preserving solidarity in a migrant community, and the mechanism still flourishes.

There is nothing specifically Islamic about these patterns. On the contrary, literalist Islam—with its notion that all Muslims are of the one community—gave grounds to rebel against it:

But the Mullah boys were armed with faith. As long as the marriages were between Muslims, they didn’t care about tribal tradition. And since the outsiders all converted to Islam before the marriages, the older generation’s insistence that their young marry their cousins was simply ignored.

So, the older generation’s failure to deal with the drug problem, and their attempt to control the marriages of their sons, both discredited and disconnected their children from them and their attitudes. Conversely, Islam provided a motivation to deal with the former and to marry the women of their choice.

But, of course, the way the form of Islam the second generation was adopting authorized such marriages was to proclaim that Muslim identity trumped all others. Including that of whatever nation-state one happened to be living in.

Migration can be disorienting, so elements of identity can be clung to in all sorts of ways:

Having lived all of his life in Yorkshire, Gultasab, like his brother, spoke with a gentle Yorkshire lilt. But when I asked him where he was from, his immediate reply was Rawalpindi, one of Pakistan’s major cities. This meant the Khans were Punjabi, not Mirpuri. In a Pakistani city, this wouldn’t have meant much, but in Britain, where migration had accentuated small differences, it meant the Khans would have been at one remove from Beeston’s community of first-generation migrants.

He and his brother were born in Leeds but from Rawalpindi. It is like the C19th and early C20th Australian habit of referring to the British Isles as “Home” even if they had never been there.
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Markers of identity can work in all sorts of ways:

But Sidique was on a collision course with his family and background. One important reason for this was religion. At some point in the mid-1990s, when he first got involved with the Mullah boys, he became interested in Wahhabi fundamentalism; this pitted him against his family’s traditional approach to Islam.
Gultasab told me that the first time he noticed his brother had become a Wahhabi was when he started praying differently—Wahhabis add extra hand gestures between prostrations. Sidique had attended Friday prayers from a young age, and the three brothers, Hanif, Gultasab and Sidique, would fast together during Ramadan. But it was during one particular Ramadan, when Sidique was in his late teens, that he began to take a greater interest in religion. “As young men of a certain age do,” said Gultasab.

But the traditional mosque set up by the first generation Muslims had a problem:

Gultasab told me that his brother had found that the traditional, community-run mosque on Hardy Street had nothing to offer him. The people who ran the mosque had no idea how to connect with the second generation, said Gultasab. They spoke and wrote in Urdu, and the only time they interacted with the younger Muslims was when they taught them to recite the Koran by rote—in Arabic.

Not so for in the Saudi-funded Wahhabi mosque:

The Wahhabis did things differently. They delivered sermons and printed publications in English. Sidique’s Urdu was poor, so the only things on Islam he could read were Wahhabi-approved publications. Gultasab said that Sidique’s progression to Wahhabism was reinforced by the fact that some of his friends, and future Mullah boys, were converting too.

Saudi financing of Islam around the world is a major problem, since the Saudi state is a jihadi state and adheres (and promotes) the underlying logic of Islam in a very pure form, regardless of the personal peccadilloes of Saudi princes.

This is not a post-2001 problem. On the contrary, it is part of the causes of September 11:

In 1999, it seems that Sidique began to consider the step from Wahhabi fundamentalism to a form of jihadism actively committed to violence. By this time his life had become intensely narrow: the mosques where he prayed, the buildings where he helped to run Pakistani youth groups, the Iqra bookshop where he gave talks, his brother’s house—every place in his life was within a quarter of a mile of the centre of Beeston Hill’s Pakistani community.

This very narrow social milieu was based on opposition to both the first generation of migrants (and why they had come to Britain in the first place) and to the wider society (with its drug problems and serial contradiction of pure/literal Islam). But second generation issues are hardly new in British migrant experience:

Among those who study British race relations, there’s an informal theory that states that 30 years after the establishment of any sizeable ethnic minority community, there will be riots. After Jewish migration into Britain in the 1900s, there were riots in the Jewish communities of east London during the 1930s. After the 1950s migration from the Caribbean, there were riots in 1981 in the Afro-Caribbean areas of Toxteth, Chapeltown and Brixton. And after the 1970s Pakistani immigration into northern England, in the summer of 2001, like clockwork, serious unrest kicked off in Oldham, then spread to Leeds, Burnley and Bradford.
One explanation is that it takes about 30 years for a sizeable second generation to establish itself and then become frustrated with its status, both within its own community and the wider society. This frustration arises in part from a question of identity. Whose culture and values do you affiliate with? Those of your parents or of your friends? Those of your community or of your country?

Which creates an avenue for recruitment:

Hassan Butt, a former recruiter for the British jihadi network (the term violent Islamic extremists in Britain use to describe themselves), who twice met Sidique Khan, says that the reason radical Islamic movements in Britain have been able to recruit thousands of young Muslims is that they have managed to exploit this identity problem.

Identity tensions are explicitly used in recruitment:

Butt told me that as a recruiter, his most important job was to discover what his potential recruit identified with, and then to pick holes in it. For example, if the potential recruit felt Pakistani, then Butt would focus upon the difficulty of being both British and Pakistani. Butt and many other recruiters find this easy because they know what it is like. Having lived in Britain all his life within a strongly Pakistani household, Butt felt neither British nor Pakistani.

So an identity was offered, one that was particularly powerful in a globalised world:

Religion—in this case a purified and politicised version of Islam, far from the traditional “folk” religion of the first generation—was a natural way of transcending this cultural dislocation. “Here come the Islamists and they give you an identity… you don’t need Pakistan or Britain. You can be anywhere in the world and this identity will stick with you and give you a sense of belonging.”

Such recruitment was not only against Western society, but also against the first generation in their communities:

Butt also explained that traditional communities often inadvertently push their young into the arms of the radicals. Attitudes to jobs, dress, schooling and socialising all play their part in driving youngsters away from their parents’ generation. But one of the biggest factors that has helped the growth of British Islamic radicalism is marriage.
Islamism’s most important tenet is that Muslims should not be divided by race or nationalism—that all Muslims are one. It therefore can offer an Islamic route out of having to marry your cousin.

Identity, belonging and romantic love: a powerful combination to disaffected young men. An identity that can become all embracing because it is so psychologically comprehensive:

“When you’re cut off from your family,” Butt explained, “the jihadi network then becomes your family. It becomes your backbone and support.” He added that when you join it becomes impossible to leave because there is nowhere else to go. The network starts operating like a cult.

But a cult with a lot of money and connections behind it:

According to Butt, the other big factor that has helped Islamist recruiters is the fact that in many communities, Islamists are winning what some have termed a “civil war” within Islam. For simplicity’s sake, contemporary Islam can be divided into four schools: traditionalists, fundamentalists, modernists and Islamists. Unlike the split between Christian fundamentalists and other Christians, both Islamic traditionalists and fundamentalists lean towards scriptural literalism. The main difference between the groups is how they regard the 1,400 years of theological innovation since Muhammad’s death.

The Islamist rejection of anything except the original texts creates a powerful, simple and accessible identity. It is also why Saudi Arabia is not a traditional monarchy, unlike the Gulf States, Oman, Jordan or Morocco:

… fundamentalist movements—of which the Saudi-backed Wahhabis are the most important—reject all theological innovation since the life of Muhammad and his closest companions. Muslims, they say, should pay attention only to the holy book and the collected sayings and doings of Muhammad. This is why, over the last 50 years, Wahhabi authorities in Saudi Arabia have demolished more than 300 historical structures in the holy cities of Medina and Mecca. They want to create a timeless Islam.

Remembering also that the most conspicuous achievement of Muhammad’s companions was the greatest burst of religious conquest in history.

A form of Islam rooted in the texts and origins, so an identity available to all, is powerfully attractive in our globalised age. Just as Pentacostalism is the fastest growing form of Christianity:

Islamism, is a relatively recent offshoot of fundamentalism. It emerged in response to the final demise of Islamic authority with the fall of the Ottoman empire after the first world war, but harks back to the early days of the caliphate, when the Koran was the basis for law-making. It sees Islam not just as a religion, but as a socioeconomic system. The Koran is God’s version of Das Kapital. Islamists pick and choose teachings from across the ages, and while they read script literally and share a religious zeal with the fundamentalists, they are more akin to an ideological movement than a religious one. Their style of work is often compared with the student far left of the 1960s and 1970s.

While many of its features Islamism shares with fascism, in others it is more like Leninism or Trotskyism. There is certainly an argument for treating Saudi funding of schools and mosques as being in the same category of Soviet funding during the Cold War. (That Kim Philby’s father St John Philby was the India Office’s liaison with the al-Saud during World War One and converted to Islam even provides a family link.)

And Islamism has been winning among second-generation Muslims:

Butt says that the war between these schools [traditionalists, fundamentalists, modernists and Islamists], which has been playing out across the Muslim world for decades, has ripped into Britain’s generation gap—and that the Islamists are winning.
In ten years of recruiting, Butt says that he always wanted a theological clash, but it never came. “The traditionalists and the modernisers just wanted to run their own study circles without interference.” On the other hand, if the jihadi network see someone with strong Islamic tendencies, “the moment he leaves his house in the morning, they’re there until he returns to his house in the evening.” Butt also says that unlike the traditionalists, the network won’t judge a potential recruit on his actions. “If the network see a drug dealer or someone from a gang, they will not condemn him like the traditionalists and say ‘oh brother haram, haram [forbidden].’ What they’ll try to do is to utilise his energy.”

They are, after all, offering an identity open to all if you just accept their doctrines. Hence radical Islam has been penetrating Western prisons quite successfully. A violent ideology has something to say to the violent.

Saudi money is a vital part of the pattern:

There is also an economic dimension to the outflanking of the traditionalists. Since most of traditional Sunni Islam is devoid of an organised establishment, the money for running a mosque normally comes directly from the local Muslim community. In Britain, this means that in order to maintain community harmony, the teachings remain bland and the imam will avoid theological controversy. It also means that once there is enough money to run the mosque, there is no incentive to find new believers.
On the other side, British fundamentalists and Islamists are centrally funded. It is estimated that over the last two decades, Saudi Arabia has set aside $2-3bn a year to promote Wahhabism in other countries. It is not known how much of that money has come to Wahhabi groups in Britain, but one major recipient has been the Leeds Grand Mosque.
Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb ut-Tahrir are also centrally funded. They gather money from members, pass it to a central administration which then hands it back out again. These groups’ lack of local community focus means that they have to compete harder for “market share,” which has made them hungrier and more efficient.

With better techniques, resources and incentives operating for the Islamists, the traditionalist Islam of the first generation is losing out:

So while traditionalist mosques carry on recruiting imams from back home, keep their sermons in Urdu and other Asian languages and neglect to publish material to engage new members, the Wahhabis and the Islamists give their sermons in English and take their recruitment on to the streets of Pakistani or Bangladeshi ghettos such as Beeston Hill. They have also encouraged the schooling of British-born imams, have learned to use the internet and have generally come to understand what makes the second generation tick. The Wahhabis and Islamists win new members by contrasting their galvanising message of world Islamic justice with the inactivity and irrationality of the first-generation traditionalists. (Among those who turn to violence, such as Khan, their beliefs are often a mix of fundamentalism and Islamism.) And by arguing that the traditionalists—with their saint worship, mysticism and forced marriages—have been corrupted by weakness and Hinduism, they provide useful arguments to those Pakistani and Bangladeshi youths who want to cling on to Islam but throw off their parents’ constraints.

A techno- and generational savvy-ness which is bearing violent fruit:

For all these reasons, many British Muslim youths who had drifted towards fundamentalist or Islamist organisations were susceptible to the violent global jihadism that emerged in the mid-1990s. This is plain from the anti-traditionalist rhetoric of Sidique Khan’s al Qaeda-produced video suicide note. … It has two parts, but it is only the first—about British foreign policy—that ever gets played in the mainstream media. Part two, which makes up three quarters of Khan’s speech, is addressed to Muslims in Britain. Here is an excerpt: “Our so-called scholars today are content with their Toyotas and semi-detached houses. They seem to think that their responsibilities lie in pleasing the kufr instead of Allah. So they tell us ludicrous things, like you must obey the law of the land. Praise be God! How did we ever conquer lands in the past if we were to obey this law?… By Allah these scholars will be brought to account, and if they fear the British government more than they fear Allah then they must desist in giving talks, lectures and passing fatwas, and they need to sit at home and leave the job to the real men, the true inheritors of the prophets.”

An identity both grounded in history but released from it, one that gives identity, status and extols an aggressive masculinity. A potent brew.

And one that sets up conflicts between and within Muslims. Perhaps the most potent lesson from Eamon Duffy’s brilliant study of a Reformation parish, The Voices of Morebath, was that the religious strife of the C16th was one that ran within as much as between people. There are many similarities between the dilemmas of that time and now—hence the return of the issue of torture—and the tension between secular ethics and Islam is very much a reprise of similar tensions back then:

For some reason, I translated my usual question of whether he thought what his brother had done was “good” or “bad”—he had said that it was a terrible thing several times—and instead asked him whether he thought 7/7 was halal (permitted) or haram (forbidden) in Islam. Only when a look of stunned surprise come over Gultasab’s face did I realise that I must have been asking him an entirely different question. After a brief pause, he replied. “No comment.”
Here, it seemed, was the perfect example of the division between two worldviews—secular ethics and an embattled Islamic faith. How long had Gultasab managed to function with these two conflicting positions fighting within him? Everyday morality told him that his brother had committed a cold-blooded act of terror, while his own Islamic theology told him that there was no clear answer and maybe, in some parallel universe, his brother was a kind of hero. How many thousands of young British Muslims are similarly conflicted?

A conflict made all the more potent by the clash over the right to marry:

And after Sidique got married, on 22nd October 2001, the links between father and son were cut. No longer rooted to his family, Sidique’s immersion into Britain’s network of jihadists was complete.

This is not merely a conflict between certain conceptions of Islam and the West (or, indeed, the Rest), it is also a conflict within Islam:

Khan may have felt indignant about western foreign policy, as many anti-war campaigners do, but that wasn’t the reason he led a cell of young men to kill themselves and 52 London commuters. At the heart of this tragedy is a conflict between the first and subsequent generations of British Pakistanis—with many young people using Islamism as a kind of liberation theology to assert their right to choose how to live. It is a conflict between tradition and individuality, culture and religion, tribalism and universalism, passivity and action.

If the conflict is within Islam—far more Muslims than non-Muslims have been killed by the jihadis—what can non-Muslims do? Not much except endure until it burns itself out is Malik’s answer:

When it is stated like this, the problem of Islamic extremism looks depressingly intractable. … But maybe all that we can do now is remain vigilant and wait for the tide in the battle for Islam’s soul to turn in the west’s favour.

But why would it do that?

There are two strategic arenas: separate but related. One of them is the conflicts within Islamic societies. The other is the question of integration of Muslims into Western societies.

Here the worst thing that can be done is some sort of balkanizing multiculturalism. There are certain base values that cannot be compromised because to do so makes the jihadi goal look achievable. Equality before the law, the secular basis for law, that sovereignty is human not divine, the primacy of democratic processes. The acceptance of cultural diversity cannot be done at the expense of a certain basic legal and political coherence. In particular, the notion that one’s primary public, legal and political identity is one’s religion is not acceptable.

For one can make moral claims against human sovereignty: such claims cannot be made against divine sovereignty and so its absoluteness destroys compromise and accommodation. That was something Europe and its descendant cultures learnt the hard and brutal way through its Wars of Religion. These are not lessons to unlearn, just as the unacceptability of torture is not a lesson to unlearn.

Torture is back as an issue because an external conflict has internal resonance—just as Elizabethan England had to worry about whether local Catholics accepted English sovereignty or were bitter enemies, so now Western countries have to worry about whether local Muslims accept Western sovereignty or are bitter enemies.

But just as the solution of barring torture should not be unlearned, the lesson of subordinating religious to political identity should not be unlearned either. On the contrary, it should be promulgated loud and clear. We should not be passive spectators in Islam’s debates because those debates are not merely an internal matter but bear very precisely on what it means to be a Muslim, and, more to the point—because of the logic of Islam—to not be a Muslim.

Grasping the past (6): Islamofascism

I have not read any of Paul Berman’s books but I have read some of his articles, which I have found enlightening. A recent interview with him traverses a range of issues that few liberal intellectuals are willing to consider as bluntly as him.

In particular, Berman is more than happy to explore the connections between fascism (specifically Nazism) and Islamism, which are deep. The jihadi push has long struck me as the Islamic equivalent of European fascism: a modernising revolt against modernity.

A central figure in the links between Nazism and Islamic militancy is Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, an active Nazi collaborator, including in the Holocaust. His significance to the Nazis was directly connected to his connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. As Berman says:

But Nazi awe of the Mufti also had plenty to do with the support graced by al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood, as it went through its growth spurt. While other war criminals were facing trials after the war, the Mufti, who had called for eradication of the Jews, received a hero’s welcome in Eqypt. This was thanks to al-Banna.

Al-Husayni (or al-Husseini) used violence as a weapon both against Jews and fellow Palestinians:

A Palestinian Arab revolt got up against the Zionist movement, with various wings. The most militant of the wings was led by the Palestinian leader, the Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, whose doctrine was Islamist, and Arabist. The Mufti supervised the assassination of quite a few of his rivals among the Palestinian Arabs. So he had just a dreadful effect on Palestinian political culture. And he himself was very attracted from the start to the Nazis. He approached them in 1933 or so. The Nazis began supplying aid to him. By the time an armed revolt had gotten started in 1936 it became one of the proxy wars that was going to lead to World War II.

Nazi propaganda was targeted at the Arab Middle East:

The Germans had a vast short-wave radio propaganda system going on throughout the Arab world and no one has ever found the tapes of those broadcasts. And no one has ever found a German transcript. But Herf had the brilliant idea of checking around to see what might be available in the State Department archives. And there he found it.

This Nazi propaganda fed a series of ideas into the Arab world which still resonate:

The most important of the ideas is that the Jews are a demonic and supernatural force. The goal of the Zionist project in this picture was to destroy the Arab world and replace it with a giant Zionist state.

Al-Husayni wanted Jews not merely resisted, but slaughtered:

Yes, the Mufti calls on the Arabs and Muslims to rise up and massacre the Jews. …

Indeed, at times, he was keener on the exterminationist aims of the Holocaust than the Nazis themselves:

There were a number of times when the Nazis were willing to allow some groups of Jews to leave Europe and escape to Palestine and a large number of children. The Nazis had wanted to do this as a kind of phony propaganda effort to show that they were nice (and anyway expected the Jews to be exterminated in Palestine by the Arabs, or by themselves when they eventually got there). And the Mufti agitated against this. The Mufti was calling successfully for the Nazis to show no clemency and instead send these Jews to Poland, which is to say to be murdered.

Al-Husayni was very much the Nazis kind of guy but, unlike other prominent Nazi supporters in the West after the Nazi defeat, he found the Muslim world welcoming.

My analysis of al-Husayni is that he was a member of the Palestinian landlord class whose social control, based on debt bondage, was being disrupted both by the rising wages created by Jews increasing the capital levels in Mandatory Palestine faster than they increased the labour force and by other migrants from the rest of the Middle East drawn by the rising economic opportunities. Religion and Jew-hatred (which also allowed incorporating Christians, who were particularly prone to Arab nationalism since that did not exclude them or give them second-class status) provided a way to shore up the position the landlord class, which was not able to compete in providing expanding opportunities via modernisation. So al-Husayni used modern political methods to fight against the implications of modernity: a modernising revolt against modernity with an aesthetic, rhetoric and reality of violence in classic fascist style.
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Al-Husayni was also part of wider currents of opinion:

The Nazis respected him, he was a genuine war criminal who was able to convince them to take a harder line. And one of the real reasons for the Mufti’s power and influence among Nazis was the support and fealty he was getting from the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hassan al-Banna. So there were close connections and an ideological development.

The ideas continue to resonate. Including in figures who Tariq Ramadan treats reverentially:

Because once you’ve read these Nazi propaganda things and the Mufti’s speeches from the nineteen forties and then you turn and look at Sayyid Qutb from the nineteen fifties and sixties and then you turn and look at Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi from our own moment, you recognize that Qaradawi is repeating almost word for word the Mufti’s Islamic Nazi propaganda from the nineteen forties calling for extermination of the Jews, interpreting Hitler as sent to do God’s work, which was a major theme of Nazi propaganda. And then you look at Ramadan’s writings; you realize that if Ramadan has a single great hero, it is Sheik Qaradawi. It’s in one book after another. Now his relationship to Qaradawi is a little complicated. And in recent years he’s gotten into quarrels with Qaradawi, although not over these issues. He’s remained to the present absolutely reverential.

Given this ideology of slaughter and martyrdom by killing, the implications continue to lead to death and destruction:

Qaradawi thinks the Palestinians should go kill themselves in the course of murdering as many Jews as possible. Let me emphasize here that if these people have committed a really terrible crime, it’s above all against the Palestinians. People don’t talk about this. These are the kinds of ideas and the kinds of leadership that have done so much damage to the Palestinian people, who have legitimate grievances, legitimate rights, whose human rights must be respected, who need a state, who stand in need of actually everything.

In many ways, the Palestinians are very much the central victims al-Husayni’s actions and ideas, with a deeply corrupted political culture:

First of all, the Mufti has victimized the Palestinians by murdering all their best people. But the whole political project that comes out of him and out of al-Banna has victimized the Palestinians by instructing the Palestinians that they are in a supernatural struggle against demonic enemies. If you think that you are in a struggle with human beings and recognize that while you have needs other people also have needs, then you’re in a political situation. And the natural thing to do when you’re in a political situation is to strike a compromise. But this has not been the line that has come out of the Mufti and al-Banna. The line has been that it’s a religious struggle of Islam trying to prevent satanic Jews from exterminating Islam and that the only way to deal with it is to exterminate the supernaturally evil Jews. So the struggle is a religious and supernatural struggle. It becomes impossible to compromise, and becomes possible to think one’s own suicide might be an appropriate response because we’re in the realm of the eternal and the supernatural. So it prevents people from being able to make compromises and leads them to think that murder and suicide are principles that must never be yielded. The Hamas charter is the perfect example. It begins with a little quotation from the Koran, a quotation from al-Banna calling for the elimination or obliteration of Israel (it’s translated in different ways) then it goes on to cite the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is a fundamentally Nazi document, then in Article 7 it draws a quotation from one of the scriptural traditions which would seem to call for extermination of the Jews. …
But I don’t think that the Israelis have created the Palestinian political culture. The rise of these Islamist ideas among the Palestinians owes to the power of the ideas themselves, to the leaders who have promoted them, and to the support that other people around the world have given to these ideas.

Given the reality of various oppressions in the Islamic world--of women, of non-Muslims--the anger of the refugees and apostates is something Berman understands and provides a revealing comparison to:

When you go around and look at one dissident intellectual after another who has come from a background dominated by Islamism, quite a few of them have an angry tone. And they don’t sound very moderate. They sound furious and they sound frightened and I think this is to their merit, because they are expressing their actual reality. What I wonder about is why others don’t sympathize with this, with this anger. And it was the same kind of thing that was said about the Soviet dissidents. They would escape from the Soviet Union and they would not say, “Oh, it’s necessary to have some reforms introduced into the Soviet Union.” Rather, they would say, “Communism is really bad and ought to be overthrown.”

There is far more to the dynamics of Muslim politics and Islamic radicalism than the (relatively brief) experience of European colonial rule. It is a sign of the deeply condescending and patronising attitude of many Western progressivists to Arabs (and Muslims generally) that explicit Nazi connections which would lead to the virulent denunciations of fellow Westerners (or of non-Western allies of the West) are passed over in embarrassed silence, ignored or belittled. For the denouncing fellow Westerners and Western allies feeds progressivist status games while denouncing Arabs or Muslims on the same grounds undermines them.

Instead, we are left with a Middle East, and a Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which is imagined, caricatured and framed according to such Western status games, rather than upsetting realities. Veteran journalist Helen Thomas’s recent outburst calling for Israeli Jews to “go back to Germany and Poland” is a case in point. As I pointed out here, Israeli Jews are not even close to being just “European migrants”: and even those who were had grave problems in simply "returning" (via). Many Israeli Jews are of Middle Eastern origin. But Israel accepts Middle Eastern Jews as citizens, while the Arabs prefer to leave Palestinians as stateless sticks to beat Israel with: hence third, fourth, even fifth generation Palestinian “refugees”. So Jewish refugees are invisible to the progressivist conscience while Palestinians are endlessly worthy victims. Just as nine activists killed while attacking Israeli commandos are a global cause célèbre yet Chinese riot police can kill 140 Uighurs and it is completely non-newsworthy.

‘Islamofascism’ is not a silly term, it has a lot of clear history behind it and is, in fact, very revealing about the jihadi impulse: one which is Jew-hating, glorifies violence, maintains an aesthetic of violent heroism, is based on veteran-mystique, abhors liberalism in all its forms and uses the techniques of modernity in a revolt against the patterns and consequences of modernity.

To ignore all that in the name of progressivist status games is not “reality based politics”. It is the very opposite of that. Good on Paul Berman that he is prepared to look at reality directly and convey to the rest of us what he sees there.

Scary Demographics

This (greatly) extends a comment I made here.


There are some demographic realities about Europe that are fairly clear. The first is that the European welfare state is fiscally and demographically not sustainable. The current euro crisis is the intersection of two things:
(1) Establishing a common currency without sufficient institutional underpinnings to made it work.
(2) Fiscal profligacy intersecting with adverse economic conditions, including inability to use currency devaluation to make adjustment easier, due to (1).

It is not the last such crisis Europe will experience as long as it maintains the two basic causes: a common currency without sufficient institutional commonality and welfare states which do not have the fiscal/demographic basis to be sustained at the current levels.

The second demographic reality that is fairly clear is that the “Scandinavian” (or, if you prefer, the “Swedish”) model is not sustainable if Scandinavia continues to import migrants too culturally distinct to preserve the existing public policy regime. Scandinavian social democracy was developed in largely monocultural societies that consequently had high levels of communication between official and citizens, high levels of commonality in expected behaviour. This minimised levels of waste, inefficiency and abuse of the system while permitting much easier design and operation of the system, given people were overwhelmingly operating off a similar set of expectations and responses.

The Muslim migrants have greatly variant expectations, aspirations, outlooks and with much less effective levels of communication with officials. This greatly increases the levels of dysfunction: including much higher levels of crime, unemployment and welfare expense. And it is harder for Muslims to integrate into Western society: particularly if multiculturalist welfarism operates to systematically undermine any incentive to do so. As the work of Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels (long interview here, another here, here, here and here) brings out rather starkly:

A French survey in Le Figaro showed that only 14 percent of the country's estimated five million Muslims see themselves as "more French than Muslim." Research (pdf) made by the German Ministry of Interior shows that only 12 percent of Muslims living in Germany see themselves as more German than Muslim. A Danish survey published by the pro-Muslim pro-democratic organization Democratic Muslims led by the Danish PM and Muslim Naser Khader showed that only 14 percent of Muslims living in Denmark could identify themselves as "Democratic and Danish."

A major sign of the failure of such integration in Europe is that younger generations of Muslims are generally more committed to their Muslim identity—one typically manifested against the surrounding Western societies—than their parents.

Either Scandinavia is going to have to find some way to turn Muslims into “little Scandinavians” culturally fairly speedily or they are going to have to substantially change their public policy model to cope with this cultural diversity or they are going to have to expel the migrants: failure to adopt any of these strategies will just lead to mounting expense, social dysfunction and political angst.

Supplanted majority?
These are big issues. But there is a much grander scenario being sketched, notoriously in Mark Steyn’s America Alone, which is of a demographic collapse leading to a Muslim majority Europe.

In his Afterword to his dystopian C22nd SF thriller Caliphate (which is quite a good read if you like military SF), Tom Kratman sketches out the scenario. The argument is deceptively simple: if 100 European women have a fertility rate of 1.6 children per woman for three generations while 10 Muslim women have a fertility rate of 4.2 children per woman for four generations (due to marrying younger), in a hundred years one ends up with the 91% having 49 descendants and the 9% having 193 descendants.

There are some major problems with scenario. The first is estimating the size of the Muslim population in Europe. France, for example, studiously refuses to even collect such statistics. The demographics of France turn out to be fascinating, as France is having quite the prolonged population boom, after a long period of very low comparative fertility rates.
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The Muslim numbers do not seem large enough without very high fertility rates indeed to be skewing the overall figures down to the 1.6 fertility rate among ethnic French he posits (particularly given France is coming off a decades-long fertility boom), though the French state's coyness about such matters does leave a large hole for scare-mongering. And France does have a major problem in the banlieus. Caused in part by disastrous labour market regulation. But it is traditional in France to treat the underclass like crap.

Yet Kratman’s scenario posits such high fertility rates. The French Muslim population mostly originally came from Algeria (fertility rate of 2.38), Morocco (2.38) and Tunisia (1.93). So, to make his scenario work, we would have to presume that Muslim migrants (first and succeeding generations) have a much higher fertility rate than their feeder countries: which is not very plausible.

Then there is the problem that Kratman posits a century of constant fertility rates: this is even more deeply implausible. First, fertility rates are clearly related to income: rising income leads to falling fertility rates.

Second, fertility rates can change over time: sometimes quite dramatically. One of the great unknown demographic facts: which country has had the fastest fertility collapse recorded? Iran. Why would an Iranian woman—with access to contraception—bring either a daughter to be oppressed, or a son to be an oppressor, into the world of the mullahs? (The high fertility rate of Saudi Arabia [3.31]—where women are much more oppressed than they are in Iran—sadly suggests sufficient levels of systematic misogyny can keep fertility rates up, though even in Saudi Arabia fertility rates are dropping.)

Revealingly—in order to make his scenario work to create a Muslim-majority Europe—Kratman has to posit the extra push of greatly expanded Muslim immigration to Europe (due to a devastating US nuclear attack on the heartlands of Islam in retaliation for terrorists nuking Los Angeles, Boston and Kansas City). This both expands the base of the Muslim population and leads to “white flight” from Europe to North America, the Antipodes and South Africa.

Kratman does have a point in that “white flight” could become an issue. Migration from the Netherlands has increased significantly in recent years as dealing with the Netherlands Muslim minority becomes more fractious (notably via the murder of Theo van Gogh) and murderously controversial. As welfare obligations bear down on a shrinking youth population that could also encourage emigration by young adults.

But, here’s the thing. The looming fiscal collapse of the European social welfare states is likely to have several effects. First, greatly reduce the attractiveness of Europe as a destination for Muslim migration: both due to greatly reduced welfare and because of economic and social turmoil. It is notable that two-thirds of those emigrating from the Netherlands, for example, are not ethnically Dutch.

Second, when the state fails, people retreat into their families. This encourages rather than discourages fertility.

A major collapse of the European welfare state is likely to encourage “white flight” but also, as we have already seen, immigrant flight.

The upshot of all this is that any scenario which posits a century of constant (and constantly different) fertility rates (including Muslim fertility rates higher than in the feeder countries: the very high Palestinian fertility rate, if it is accurate, is in part due to the EU using aid [pdf] to wage demographic warfare against Israel) is the one thing that will not happen.

Europe has major demographic problems with grim implications. A Muslim majority is not likely to be one of them.

ADDENDA This post has been lightly edited to clarify meaning.

FURTHER ADDENDA The classic alarmist video: like to know where they got some of their figures. A rebuttal: more details.

ANOTHER ADDENDA Why not to buy into the Great Muslim Demographic Threat is set out very well by Razib Khan here.

Banning the burqa

This extends a comment I made here.


Burqa's de-humanize. And they selectively de-humanize. That is what causes the discomfort they generate amongst many (including myself)—and I am confident that they would cause less discomfort if they did not de-humanize women specifically.

There is very much a feminist critique to be made of the burqa, as ABC newsreader Virginia Haussegger has expressed:

I wanted to stop and ask why she had such disrespect for herself and our culture that she would hide her face and body under all that black cloth, designed to render her shapeless and inhuman. But her husband shot me a glance, and I was silenced. Dumbfounded.

I abhor the burka, and the niqab. I hate what it does to women. I am appalled that women are separated from the world in this way. And I am furious that some women will continue to choose to wear it. But then, throughout history, feeble women who are afraid of modernity have always been complicit in their own oppression.

The burka, with its tiny window of mesh over the eyes, and the niqab, with its letter-slit opening, are tools of patriarchy used to subjugate women. This shroud of cloth thrown over women defies freedom. It is a symbol of control. Wearing it signifies an acceptance of segregation of the sexes. The cultures which demand such segregation are societies in which men are considered the natural superiors to women.

Columnist Elizabeth Farelly considers the difference between ethics and morality:

Ethics, in this sense, come into play where there is conflict between moralities, or between rules within a morality - as when the truth imperative cuts across kindness

to argue that:

Democracy pivots on the universal franchise; the presumption for each individual of a public identity, as well as a private one. To cover someone's face in public, to reduce them to a walking tent, is to declare them lacking such identity, destroying any possibility of their meaningful public existence. It is, literally, to efface them.

To hide the face is to hide the person. As Shada Islam, Europe correspondent for the Pakistan paper Dawn, wrote last week, most European Muslim women have little patience with the burqa or its wearers, seeing it as ''a sad process of self-isolation and self-imposed exile''.

And while you could see even exile as a personal right, it does directly contradict a public duty, the duty of public presence. The morality of identity-erasure may be (barely) acceptable, but the ethics are not.

The issue of banning the burqa has wide resonance across the West: being highly popular even in Canada and extremely popular in Quebec.

Humans are built to be extremely good at recognising and distinguishing faces, facial features, facial expressions, even body language. What burqas do is cut off all those levels of communication: things we use much more than we perhaps realise to "read" and judge what others are about.

So, what burqas are doing is denying others the chance to read your humanness. (Which matters in court, for example.) The implied statements in all that are likely to cause discomfort and distrust. Made worse by the fact that the burqa is specifically saying that women are to have very limited public role indeed. As a recent piece put it:

Why does political correctness fall away when it comes to the niqab? Because other Islamist inroads, like Sharia banking, happen offstage, so to speak. They are not “seen” by the public. But the niqab is open to the collective public gaze. Individuals responding to their own discomfort observe that discomfort mirrored in other people’s faces, which in turn emboldens them to protest.

Let us also acknowledge that the wider context of the burqa matters. Not merely the public embracing of misogyny, but radical Islam’s association with violence towards others. The deliberate embracing of excluding otherness carries with it more hostile associations that are, entirely understandably, part of the reaction. Hence appeals to public safety by various opponents of the burqa have some resonance.

The discomfort the burqa causes is not some mere "taste" or "offense" or "problem with difference". It is about their attack on basic levels of social discourse and interaction. So, while I tend to be fairly libertarian in most things (and think attempts to ban religious clothing in general grossly illiberal), I can see an argument in terms of insisting on a certain level of commitment to elementary communication for banning garb that de-humanizes.

This may be one of those appropriate areas for "experiments in public policy".

The masculinity of God

This extends a comment I made here.


Catholic philosopher Edward Feser’s claims about treating God as masculine make far too strong a set of metaphysical claims from far too little. Yes, it is not appropriate to refer to God-as-a-Person as 'It'. Since many languages (including English) require persons to be male or female (i.e. there is no general human pronoun), then a gender has to be assigned for ordinary language use. Since public/formal authority is generally male, and God is the Ultimate Authority, it is natural to assign God as being masculine.

But the issue only arises due to a lack of non-gendered language. There is no metaphysical necessity in this.

Furthermore, humans have in fact been quite varied in their family and authority structures. Since men have stronger upper body strength, are more expendable for reproduction and do not have the vulnerability that pregnancy and nursing provides women, formal authority has typically (but hardly universally) been male.

As these features have become less important in modern social life, formal authority has become noticeably less male. This is not some “decay” from the “proper state” of human affairs but a perfectly understandable adaptation to changing circumstances. Part of the ebb and flow of the status of women in Western society. For example, women in Dark Age Anglo-Saxon England had noticeably higher legal status than women in “Enlightenment” C18th England—of the 30 surviving Anglo-Saxon wills, 10 are from women (and are exactly like the male wills) while Alfred the Great’s daughter “The Lady of Mercia” led armies. Coverture marriage was not part of Dark Age marriages, which relied on much more contractual Germanic (or even surviving Celtic) notions of marriage.

Of course, religious conceptions of authority can themselves affect social patterns. Islam’s much stronger sense of gender hierarchy led to female rulers becoming almost non-existent in the Islamic Middle East, in contrast to the situation prior to the Islamic conquest, while coverture marriage came from applying Christian doctrines sacralising marriage as husband and wife becoming "one flesh" (in law, the wife being subsumed into the husband's legal "flesh").

A perennial problem with the natural law approach is that it is very easy to read what one is used to as having or manifesting some general metaphysical quality or necessity, when it does not. (A lack of metaphysical necessity that recent social changes and historical variety both indicate). Feser’s claims reading far too much into using masculine language to talk about God are another case of this.

Dark Age fun

My talk on the Dark Ages went well, with some good questions. The most striking question was:

Do you think the Romans were rather statist and the Goths and Huns libertarian?

My response: I do not believe the Goths and Huns were noted for their respect for property rights.

The questioner thought that was fair comment.

The talk was fun to do. I used data on shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, average skeleton heights, lead in Greenland ice cores and temperature as measured by Greenland ice cores to make the point that there was a serious economic and population collapse in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire which well pre-dated the beginning of the Muslim conquest of half the Mediterranean in 639.

The Dark Age after the Bronze Age collapse made a useful comparison point.

A reminder that a list of useful texts is here.

Corruption as the market for official discretions

This is extends a comment I made here.


If corruption is the market for official discretion, then one would expect that—other things being equal—more corruption where there is more official discretion and/or official discretion has bigger financial rewards.

In Australia, for example, corruption most often occurs in (1) zoning/land release matters, where there is a lot of official discretions which are extremely valuable and (2) drug and "vice" control, where the basic official discretions of enforcing the law or not are extremely valuable.

An obvious way to reduce corruption, therefore, is to reduce the market for official discretions by minimizing official discretions through simpler, more-rule-based regulation: regulation that improves the operation of a given market for participants (both current and future, voluntary and involuntary). A great deal of current regulation—particularly in the more corruption-ridden countries and areas of life—would not past that test.

The economics of grey and black markets: cigarettes in prison

In 1945, former P.o.W. R. A. Radford published a classic article on the use of cigarettes as money in prisoner of war camps. The piece demonstrated quite clearly that money could arise out of use of a commodity without any central authority imposing it. That money was a natural product of the human urge to “truck and barter” (in the common paraphrase of Adam Smith’s famous words).

With the introduction of cigarette bans in US prisons, apparently tinned fish became currency. But the bans did not eliminate the “gray” market in cigarettes as currency: they just created a black market in cigarettes, providing an excellent case study of the effects of prohibition in an allegedly highly controlled environment (prisons).

There is no substitute for reading the study, but I am going to pick out some juicy quotes from it anyway. First, we get the reality of fact-free public policy:

Despite this trend toward banning tobacco in correctional facilities, virtually no studies have examined the effect of this policy change on inmate culture and prison economies. In particular, no research has focused specifically on cigarette black markets that invariably emerge in jails and prisons where tobacco is prohibited.

Public policy so often exists in the land of intentions + resources => outcomes. Policies are judged by their intentions and money or regulatory effort spent. Who wants to be bothered by pesky effects? Particularly effects on non-voting felons?

Then we find out that Adam Smith’s urge to “truck and barter” is alive and well:

For many inmates, however, the formal prison economy does not provide enough opportunities to earn income and offers too few desirable goods and services from the commissary. Consequently, an informal economy develops that is premised on consuming prohibited or contraband items and “hustles” (Gleason, 1978) to earn extra resources to pay for contraband and legitimate commissary goods.

Moving on:

All of the facilities that allowed inmates to smoke prohibited them from trading cigarettes for other goods and from giving cigarettes to each other as gifts. However, cigarette exchanges among inmates were difficult to police, and sanctions for trading were rarely imposed, according to both inmates and officers at these six facilities. Furthermore, because U.S. currency was prohibited, cigarettes functioned as a local form of currency in these prisons and jails.

In other words, demand creating supply.

Other factors leading to a more developed black market were greater organization, communication, and black market skills among inmates. The structure of the cigarette black market as outlined here, with its kingpins, smugglers, middlemen, and dealers, is not too different from illegal street-level drug markets. In fact, inmates involved in the cigarette black markets were frequently individuals who had been incarcerated for drug crimes. These inmates were already skilled at financing and obtaining illegal substances; managing lieutenants, adversaries, and turf; and eluding social control agents. Consequently, banning an addictive substance in a setting filled with sophisticated inmates created an environment ripe for the development of a black market. As one inmate, who was serving a 90-year sentence in a maximum security prison for drug trafficking, lamented, “I would’ve never messed with coke on the street if I knew how much money I could’ve made selling cigarettes here in the joint.”

So, it is the demand and illegality which makes the skills sets valuable.

Interestingly, prison wardens and jail administrators often reported a decline in illegal drugs entering their facilities since banning cigarettes and attributed the decline to a greater demand for cigarettes among inmates. Inmates suggested that demand is, in fact, greater for tobacco than other drugs. For instance, several inmates claimed that kicking nicotine had been more difficult than quitting heroin, and others said that they would much prefer a cigarette to a line of cocaine. However, in addition to demand for tobacco, an equally significant factor dampening the drug economy was that tobacco was a more profitable substance to sell than other drugs. Whereas illicit drugs, such as marijuana, heroin, or cocaine, may yield greater profits per sale, the volume of tobacco sold and its high profit margin made it a more lucrative commodity to sell.

Turnover beats profit margin!

First, since smoking cessation aids, such as smoking cessation classes or nicotine replacement therapies, were virtually nonexistent in the facilities where bans were enforced, the inmates interviewed were compelled to quit cold turkey or contend with the vagaries of the black market. Most inmates interviewed chose to participate in the black market because their tobacco use rarely abated on entering a facility that banned cigarettes.

Policy judged by intentions, not consequences. This is where we came in …

Second, the majority of inmates were compelled to pay considerably higher prices to continue their cigarette habits. For instance, prior to a ban at a maximum security prison, one inmate said he spent about $5 per week on a can or about $15 per week on a carton. Following the ban, he smoked about three cigarettes per day at a cost of $60 to $70 per week. Consequently, the high cost of cigarettes prompted many inmates to undertake various hustles or to become low-level dealers because paying for only a few cigarettes could cost a third of an inmate’s monthly institutional pay. For instance, one 60-year-old inmate used his pension money to pay for black market cigarettes. He said he had been robbed six times and manhandled twice over cigarettes. Prior to the ban, he said he was never robbed or assaulted.

Illegality creates violence: since ownership is not recognized by the normal legal process, more primal processes determine ownership.

Third, just as the criminalization of cocaine and heroin gives rise to impure drugs and a scarcity of sterile drug paraphernalia, cigarettes sold on the black market are often more harmful than those sold legally and are combined with less healthy smoking practices.

Illegality decreases quality: since ownership is not recognized by the normal legal process, more primal processes operate.

So, an extremely revealing case study of the problems of prohibition. If you cannot make it work in the prison system …

The housing price madness of restrictive land zoning

This extends a comment I made here.


If you want to see the effects of restrictive zoning of landing, compare the UK with Germany. Under the German federal constitution, there is a "right to build". It is almost impossible for officials to interfere with property owners building on their property. So housing supply responds to housing demand and German house prices move at about the rate of inflation.

In the UK, just about everywhere land use is subject to official discretionary control over market entry. The result is ridiculous housing (land) prices and a boom-and-bust cycle.

The suggestion that Germany (593 people per square mile) has some profound geographical and population density advantage over the UK (660 people per square mile) is not exactly plausible.

Another comparison is Texas (80 people per square mile) and Australia (7 people per square mile). Texas has a higher population, higher population growth, higher average income and crams more of its population in its five largest cities than Australia does. Yet Texan houses are a half or a third of the price of Australian metropolitan housing. That median houses in Sydney and Melbourne are 9 or 8 times median household income, more expensive than houses in London or New York (both median houses 7 times median household income) while in Dallas and Houston they are less than 3 times median household income is pure regulatory madness.

The national average ration of median (metropolitan) houses to median household income is 2.9 in the US and 6.8 in Australia. We have 22 million people in the area of the continental US. We do not lack space: what we lack is Texan/German land management. Instead, with have adopted California/British-style land management, with California/British-style problems such that houses in Sydney are now more expensive than those in London or New York.

Giving officials discretionary control over market entry encourages inflated asset prices due to impeding the ability of supply to respond to demand, so as to reward incumbent asset holders with inflated asset values. If you doubt that, just look at the price of taxi plates in any jurisdiction where numbers are controlled. (In Melbourne, taxi plates are currently about the same as the median house price.)

The geographical concentration of housing bubbles in the US is not a result of geography (except in the sense that geography creates positional goods—hilltop views, ocean views, beach fronts, etc—which encourage the adoption of restrictive zoning), it is the result of restrictive zoning.

There is a simple rule about giving officials discretionary control over market entry: don’t!

Grasping the past (6): Marriage

This extends a comment I made here.


If one is familiar with the history of marriage, contemporary debates over marriage can be a bit odd. The Church got into marriage law because there was pressure (particularly from landholders) to regularise marriage rights and law to help smooth transfer of property. There is a transaction costs argument in favour of a standard contract that I suspect would recur rapidly if marriage was "disestablished" (i.e., the state withdrew from regulating marriage: which it only got into in Latin Christendom during the Reformation).

The notion that marriage "has to be" sacralised is also deeply odd. In Latin Christendom, marriage did not become a sacrament until the C11th. The Catholic Church did not require the presence of a priest until the Council of Trent in the C16th. But contractual marriage is, in fact, older in Western traditions (in Judaism, Roman, Celtic and Germanic law).

The notion that the Church has "intellectual property (IP)" in marriage is simply stupid, showing a crass ignorance about the history of marriage. But it is consistent with the pattern of social movements vis-à-vis the family: they start off being against it as distraction from the Great Purpose, make some sort of accord with it when social reality proves too strong and end up claiming that they were always in favour of it really.

The only thing anthropologists have been able to find that is common and distinctive about marriage—it creates in-laws. There has been at least one society (in Southern China) that did not have marriage at all (a woman’s brothers helped raised her children) and many societies (notably Amerindian societies, but African, Asian and Middle Eastern ones as well) have had same-sex marriages of various types.

As for its origins, that is not remotely tied to any particular religion. Indeed, religions typically seek authority from supporting and ritualising marriage, rather than marriage requiring religious authority. Marriage itself has origins in human needs and conveniences. In Stephanie Coontz's —words:

... having a flexible, gender-based division of labor within a mated pair was an important tool of human survival.

Children, property and companionship sustain marriage as an institution: so much so that any two of them seem to be enough to keep it going.

ADDENDA: The Israeli state has no role in marriage except registering the marriage, which has it own problems given marriage is treated as an entirely religious institution. (The Israeli state does enforce some residency restrictions however.)

Grasping the past (5): Slavery

This extends a comment I made here.


The comment was made that:

The transatlantic slave trade was unique because it made a slave into an inescapable caste. Slaves in Africa or the Arab world would within a generation or two often be no different than the rest of society. In the New World, slavery meant Blackness (even if one intermarried), giving one permanent second class status. Its effects, in the inequality between Black and White in societies across the Americas, persist to this day, a legacy not present in African or Arab slavery.

This is a less than adequate depiction of reality.

(1) The first anti-black discourse was a North African Arab-Muslim one, justifying enslaving blacks en masse rather than converting them to Islam.

(2) A major factor in the lack of a black underclass in Islam was that so many male slaves were turned into eunuchs, a process that had a horrific death rate.

(3) The Muslim world slaved wherever it could, which did indeed limit the association of skin colour with slavery. White slaves, however, always had higher status and higher prices: due to a mixture of greater scarcity and higher skills. So, even within slaves, blacks were looked down on.

(4) The death toll from Muslim slavery was, almost certainly, much greater than the Transatlantic slave trade: it was at least comparable.

(5) The Transatlantic slave trade "piggy-backed" off the already existing slave-taking-and-selling infrastructure from the Muslim slave trade.

(6) That only blacks were slaves in the Americas did, indeed, lead to noxious racism. But that was in large part because it was such an affront to "all equal in the sight of God" and "All men were created equal" that the humanity of the blacks had to be attacked to justify their exceptional treatment.

(7) There were free blacks in the American South, even at the height of slavery. It was always possible to manumit slaves: this was done on occasion. So it was not an “inescapable caste”.

(8) The first countries to permanently abolish slavery were all European. The last countries to abolish slavery were all Muslim.

(9) There is evidence that mass slavery does undermine social capital in a society for generations: but this is true regardless of whether the slaves are of a different ethnicity or race or not. Indeed, it can be argued that the American South is actually making a faster recovery from the curse of slavery than other regions did historically.

It is important to acknowledge all the past, not create selective fairy stories about it. Racism is not even remotely the worst of the horror of slavery. It is particularly perverse to, in effect, give the Muslim world a “pass” for the horrors of the market for eunuchs.

Typical failures

This is based on a comment I made here.


Conservatives are typically bad (sometimes very bad) on how existing structures fail for particular groups: particularly groups that it is “traditional” they fail for. That is, conservatives typically have a much stronger sense of achievement for existing structures than their sense of failures of the same.

Progressivists are typically bad on how existing structures work well. That is, they have a sense of failures but a typically flawed sense of achievement.

Libertarians typically fail to consider what might be called “second order” social dynamics: that we are not random individuals but members of wider collectivities that have their own dynamics and demands.

Goldwater and Rand Paul in their attitudes to the 1964 Civil Rights Act seem to be typifying the way libertarians of conservative bent (or conservatives of libertarian bent) fail. Particularly given how much the African-American experience gets in the way of a triumphal view of the American project.

On the notion of Goldwater as hero, personally, I do not understand why people need “heroes” in the unblemished sense. You can admire some aspects of a person and not others. (It is worth reading the comments thread on Yglesias's post on Goldwater to see just how screwed up Americans get over race.)

As for morally judging the past, we cannot “unwind” how people’s sense of right and wrong has evolved since whenever, but we can consider whether there were people at the time who called the issue correctly. If there were, then that puts those who did not in a poorer light.

On the conservative/liberal split in the context of US politics, Scott Sumner puts it like this:

Conservatives tend to be nationalistic, which makes them over-rate America. Liberals know more about American sins than they do about the sins of others during earlier centuries (including our victims) which is why they under-rate America.

A point which has wider application.

ADDENDA: A friend has sent the following comment:

Reading the intro to your post reminded me of Ambrose Bierce's definition in The Devil's Dictionary:
"Conservative - one who is enamoured of existing evils, as opposed to the liberal, who wishes to replace them with others."

Bierce's primary definition of politics - "a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles" - is deservedly well-known, but his secondary definition deserves to be better known than it is: "the conduct of public affairs for private advantage". Plus ça change ...

Texts on Dark Ages

My talk on Dark Ages critiquing the Pirenne thesis, and modern variations thereon, went well, with about 30 or so people attending and lots of good questions.

A request was put that I provide details on the books I mentioned. These follow.

The obvious starting point is Henri Pirenne's posthumous work Mohammed and Charlemagne (1937, English language version 1954) followed by Hodges and Whitehouse's examination of the thesis in the light of the archaeological evidence Mohammed, Charlemagne & the Origins of Europe (1983). I review both books here.

Relevant to the notion of ‘barbarians’ is Christopher I. Beckwith’s Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (2009) whose analysis of modernism I discuss here.

Peter Heather teaches at Worcester College, University of Oxford. He has written a very thoughtful and informative account of the fall of Rome, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians (2006) which I review here.

Ramsay MacMullen’s book on the Christianisation of the Empire Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (1999) includes some very useful analysis of its internal workings, which I review here.

Bryan Ward-Perkins, fellow of Trinity College, Oxford wrote The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilisation (2005) which I review here.

Grasping the past (4): What government wrought

The New York Times has editorialised on the limits of libertarianism (via), in response to comments by Rand Paul on civil rights and racial matters.

Now, there are some perfectly reasonable criticisms to be made of Rand Paul's comments on race. Scott Sumner makes some of them here. Nevertheless, the New York Times editorial makes some deeply stupid comments:

It was only government power that ended slavery and abolished Jim Crow, neither of which would have been eliminated by a purely free market.

American slavery was created by government. The common law did not recognise slavery: only statutory acts by colonial government's created slavery in British possessions, as Lord Mansfield ruled in the famous Somersett's Case of 1772.

Similarly, Jim Crow was an act of US state governments. Jim Crow were the Jim Crow laws. Government as an institution is hardly to be credited with abolishing what it had created in the first place. As I have pointed out before, commerce generally has a better record in its treatment of minority and disadvantaged groups than government or religion. For example, in the US, commerce still treats gay folks better than governments do.

The stupidity continues:

It was government that rescued the economy from the Depression

There is an excellent case that government policy turned an otherwise normal cyclical downturn into the Great Depression and that FDR's policies as much hampered recovery as helped it.

As for:

... and promoted safety and equality in the workplace.

Leaving aside all the ways government promoted inequality in the workplace, insurance premiums had at least as much positive effect on workplace safety as anything the governments did.

Now, the New York Times's comments on the Depression and workplace safety are nowhere near as stupid as its comments on slavery and Jim Crow, but nor is the editorial spouting the "obvious truths" it thinks it is. What is on show is the progressivist mindset, where government failure is turned into market failure and so becomes invisible.

There are reasonable criticisms to be made of Rand Paul's comments. Pity the New York Times does not make them: instead, it puts on blatant display its own historical ignorance and ideological insularity leading to comments of breathtaking stupidity.

ADDENDA There is also the question of how libertarian Rand Paul is actually.

FURTHER: Jeffrey Ellis has gone into more detail about why the NYT editorial is nonsense.

Shedding light on Dark Ages

For those readers in Melbourne, on Monday 24th at the Hollywood Palace, Bridge Rd, Richmond, I will giving a talk (starting at 7.30) on Shedding light on Dark Ages, where I will be looking at the Dark Age in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 – 1050) and comparing it to the Dark Age in the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age (1210 BC – 800 BC).

The “blurb” for the talk is:

Dark Ages! Barbarians raging around looting and pillaging. Chroniclers wailing about death and destruction. Violence, mayhem, murder and the collapse of civilisation as they knew it.

For centuries, the received historical wisdom was the collapse of the Western Roman Empire under the barbarian invasions was a disaster that ushered in a Dark Age that Europe took centuries to recover from.

Then the great Belgian medievalist Henri Pirenne's (1862-1935) Mohammad and Charlemagne (1937) claimed that the new barbarian rulers changed little, that it was actually the Arab conquests of half the Mediterranean that so disrupted the Mediterranean world as to create the true collapse.

This thesis was extended so that, particularly as the European project (and mass migration to--rather than merely within--the West) took off, historians, began to dispute that one could talk of the "Fall" of Rome or a "Dark Age".

Was there a Dark Age in Western Europe? Did the Muslims do it really? Lorenzo will explain the concept of a "Dark Age" and look at the evidence.

Grasping the past (3): Western imperialism

This extends a comment I made here.


Something the world has not lacked over the last x decades, is Western intellectuals denouncing Western imperialism.

I have no objection to acknowledging the past, as long as it is acknowledging all the past.

One of which is imperialism is what rulership does: indeed, has done since rulership first began. The West conquered most of the world because it could (though the highpoint of Western imperialism was relatively brief: 1878-1939). Then it decided that was a bad idea and let the colonies go. Sometimes peacefully, sometimes not, leaving behind very mixed legacies. (It is generally much better to have be a former British colony than a former Spanish or Portugese one, for example.)

One of the reasons imperialism got discredited is so much of Europe was subject to the Nazi version.

Imperialism is not even remotely some uniquely Western sin and, as the decades pass, Western imperialism is less and less relevant to talk about it when considering contemporary issues. Afghanistan, for example, suffers all the problems of the Middle East to the nth degree but was never a European colony: at least not prior to being a victim of Soviet imperialism.

The other side of imperialism is that Western imperialism was so successful because Western societies had become dramatically more effective than other societies. So successful that it is, in many ways, more disastrous to acknowledge the failings, but not the strengths, of Western societies than to do the reverse: since if you define virtue against success, you are going to end up promoting a lot of failure.

Australia’s Education Revolution

Kevin Donnelly’s Australia’s Education Revolution is a collection of previously published newspaper articles loosely organised around the theme of the approach of the Rudd Opposition, and subsequent Rudd Government, to education (mostly schooling) matters.

The Australian Constitution gives no legislative power to the Commonwealth government over education. The Commonwealth role in education outside the Territories is entirely a result of the power of the purse. But since State and Territory governments (not to mention various educational institutions from universities on down) have long since decided that they prefer to spend money they do not suffer the burden of having raised, that is a very considerable power indeed.

There is an advantage in the Commonwealth having no constitutional responsibility: it does not run educational institutions directly, so does suffer the egregious conflict of interest that afflicts State and Territory governments of regulating schools most of which they run themselves.

Funding yes: provision, not so much
The case for government funding of schooling is very strong. First, there is the argument from opportunity: that children should not be bound in their opportunities to acquire basic skills and knowledge by the capacity or willingness of their parents to pay for their schooling. Then there is the argument from common benefit: we all gain from having a literate and numerate fellow citizenry. The former appeals to our sense of fairness, the second to our (mutual) benefit.

While much rhetoric invokes the former justification, we can be confident that the latter has been the historically more powerful reason for government funding of schools: notably the creation of better workers (and soldiers). The hope such funding invokes that the schooling of one’s own children can be, in part, paid for by others is justified by said others receiving significant indirect benefit from being able to anticipate a certain basic level of literacy and numeracy among those we interact with. Indeed, this justification has been extended to all other manner of allegedly beneficial skills and understandings that schools are claimed to be able to usefully inculcate in the students placed in their care.

But just because a powerful case can be made for the government funding of schooling, it does not follow that such schooling should be provided by government, that government should run schools. On the contrary, if our concern is with the quality of the acquisition of skills and knowledge, there are powerful arguments against governments running schools.

The first is the obvious conflict of interest involved in having the regulator also be the (main) provider of the service being regulated. If the head of a football club announced that they had a great idea: the club Board should take over the football code, set the rules, appoint the umpires and administer the entire sporting code; people would wonder what he had been smoking. This is obviously a completely daft way to run a football, or indeed any sporting, code. The conflict of interest is massive and obvious.

Yet, that is precisely how most children are schooled: in schools governed by the politicians and bureaucrats who themselves are responsible for regulating schools. We apparently are expected to take it on trust that they do a good job of regulating themselves, honest. (It is revealing that, in the US, charter schools appear to do best in jurisdictions with strong regulatory oversight [via].)

Given the much higher growth in student numbers in private rather than government schools in Australia, clearly many parents do not trust said regulating-providers to do a good enough job, and for very good reason. The notion that the magic of elections somehow makes the patent, endless, conflict of interest go away is, indeed, nonsense. Neither Ministers for Education, nor their public servants, are magical. That governments are periodically elected may ameliorate the conflict of interest somewhat, but it most emphatically does not abolish it. That many parents clearly expect more congruence for what they want for their children with what private, as distinct from government, schools provide—and are willing to pay a premium for the difference—itself indicates what a weak reed electing a government to preside over such a powerful and pervasive conflict of interest is.

Australia’s shameful history of failure to provide clear, public indicators of student (and thus school) performance in literacy and numeracy comparable in skills achieved from year to year is, in itself, a manifestation of the conflict of interest in the regulator also being the main provider. A regulator seriously concerned with quality of schooling would ensure such things existed as a matter of course.

This inherent conflict of interest in the provider also being the regulator is central to the general problems of public provision. If, for example, one wants to understand the notorious problems of government schooling in, for example, the United Kingdom, identifying why British Leyland was a failure is, in fact, very useful. There has been a general retreat around the globe from government-run production for very good reasons. Reasons that do not magically fail to apply to schooling.
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Problematic pedagogy
But education is often treated as something that somehow more general patterns do not apply to. Australia’s Education Revolution is arranged in four chapters, with an introduction, conclusion plus a preface by Colin Black, former headmaster of Camberwell Grammar School. This preface has some very trenchant things to say about the effect progressivists have had on schooling:

It is a sad irony that the legacy of the social democratic/progressive consensus is that for so many children born into the lower echelons of society, the state school as a vehicle for social mobility and intellectual development has been rendered impotent (p.4).

An effect that the conspicuously compassionate shield their children as they:

… send their own children to independent schools or to schools open to them only because of their privileged knowledge of how the system works or because they can afford to buy a house in a favoured area (p.4).

A process that reached its peak in the elite schools for the children of top cadres in Leninist countries. There is a vast difference from living in a Leninist tyranny compared to a liberal capitalist democracy, but rather less difference in the patterns of thought and behaviour of progressivist apparatchiks. Western societies have their own nomenklatura.

There has also been much activity marked by ideological intensity but of rather less (indeed often negative) social benefit, with teachers bearing the brunt:

… the education class’s obsession with change and innovation, the insistent revising and re-revising of curricula, the plethora of critiques of current pedagogical practice, the addictive quest for new and arcane terminology, the eagerness to leap upon the latest bandwagon which so often turns out to be tumbrel. Little wonder is it that teachers are exhausted and perplexed by all they are asked to do. The loss of deference in our society and authority in our schools means that they are among the few people who actually go to work in the morning with a sense of dread, dread of what some child may say or do to them in the course of the day (p.5).

One’s sympathy for teachers is somewhat ameliorated by the reality that, individually and collectively, through their education unions, they are prime defenders and (in employment protections) beneficiaries of structures which produce these outcomes. In few fields is the virtue of incoherence more marked than education, where the need to be protect one’s individual and collective status as a “good person”, requires acquiescing to all sorts of disastrous notions whose patent effects progressive theory operates to deny, obfusticate or ignore. But the more general patterns of “ostentatious virtue” are largely hegemonic among teachers: as, indeed, is the pedagogy of “ostentatious virtue”.

After a brief Introduction setting the scene, the first chapter is a collection of pieces on how the Rudd-led ALP won the education “wars”. The burden of these pieces is that surface rhetoric did not match underlying policy realities. Chapter 2, Australian Education: Dumbed down and politically correct is rather longer. It starts with a statement of the battlelines as being between:

… a liberal/humanist view of education based on the disinterested pursuit of truth and those committed to overthrowing the status quo and turning students into politically correct, new age warriors (p.40).

With Wayne Sawyer, President of the NSW Teacher’s Association and Chair of the NSW Board of Studies English Curriculum Committee, providing much grist for Donnelly’s mill in his statements treating the election of the Howard Government has a sign of a failure of education (Pp41ff). The notion that the purpose of government-run education is the inculcation of “correct” belief (pdf) on conspicuous display.

But if that is the real reason for government run schools (and why religious bodies are the next largest provider of schooling) then the question who captures the structures of belief dissemination. Donnelly is clear on who has:

Has education in Australia been captured by the left? Evidenced by students being made to deconstruct the classics in terms of gender, ethnicity and class, Australian history being taught from a black armband view and geography being redefined in terms of peace studies, deep environmentalism and multiculturalism, the answer is ‘yes’ (p.67).

He identifies Antonio Gramsci and Pierre Bourdieu as important thinkers in this process.

Chapter 3, English lite, is a series of pieces attacking modern relativism and defending the notion of literature as a vehicle of quality and enlightenment. Donnelly approvingly quotes Christopher Lasch from The Culture of Narcissism on those argue literature is not for all:

In the name of egalitarianism, they preserve the most insidious form of elitism, which in one guise or another holds the masses incapable ofr intellectual exertion (p.85).

The experience of decades of ostentatious egalitarianism in public schooling, notably in the US (via) and the UK, is that it undermines (both via) rather than encourages social mobility. Australia does better in terms of educational mobility, but it has a much larger and more broadly-based private school sector than either the US or the US.

Chapter 4, Dumbed down standards, begins with an attack on outcomes-based education (OBE) noting that international comparisons show Australian students being outperformed by countries with syllabus approach to curriculum (p.116). Donnelly defines the latter as:

A syllabus approach is one where teachers are given a clear, succinct and manageable road map at the start of the year detailing what is to be taught. There is a syllabus for each year level, teachers are expected to teach, not facilitate, there is regular testing to monitor standards and the focus is on essential learning (p.107).

One of the features of the syllabus approach is that it gives more status and authority to teachers than OBE and allows learning to be built up in clear stages (p.108).

If standards are set, they need to be worth achieving:

With the Australian national literacy and numeracy benchmark tests at years 3, 5 and 7, the bar is set so low and the expectations are so minimal that everyone succeeds (p.109).

But then, who is potentially embarrassed by poor results? The Education departments who are setting the standards for schools they mostly run themselves.

Donnelly points to evidence teachers vary widely in effectiveness and that merit pay systems can work (Pp112-3). Incentives clearly matter, in schooling as in other spheres of life. The trick is to working out what the real incentives are: not the ones that wishful thinking (even if dressed up as theoretical preconceptions) hopes operate.

Donnelly cites scholarly research that centralised examinations lead to higher levels of student achievement. American academic John H. Bishop argues that (in Donnelly's summary of his research, such as this paper and this paper):

… to be successful, that examinations must be discipline based, externally assessed, rank students in terms of multiple levels of achievement and be high stakes in terms of consequences (p.119).

In other words, force accountability through effective incentives.

Donnelly strongly argues that international comparisons provide a basis from which to learn what works and what does not: for example, “student-based learning” is clearly outperformed by more directed systems (Pp122-3). Though testing is not a panacea: it can be done badly or too often (Pp124ff). Once again, working out the actually operating incentives and effects are is crucial.

Donnelly points to the (considerable) evidence that outcomes in schooling do not flow directly from expenditure (Pp128-9). It is a fairly childish form of analysis to think that it does or would, but it is, of course, the perennial claim of defenders of government schooling that the problem is “lack of funding”. Bad incentives create waste and ineffectiveness that ends up looking like inadequate funding but is actually something quite different—something that will neither be changed nor fixed merely by more money. On the contrary, studies suggest that increased spending is largely soaked up in waste and ineffectiveness, with increases in spending going with declines in school productivity (pdf).

Chapter 5, The Way Forward, strongly pushes school choice. Donnelly notes that:

… those associated with the Cultural-left side of politics are strong opponents of freeing up schools and increased parental choice (p.142).

Naturally: since inducing “correct belief” is what they are about in education (and shielding their people and notions from accountability). The argument they typically mount is on grounds of social cohesion (Pp142-3). This is mostly bunk. Private schools integrate at least as well (or better) than government schools. Government schools are at least as stratified by socio-economic status, for example. Moreover, a regulatory body not compromised by also being responsible for schools would, in fact, be in a stronger place to insist on educational standards (such as, for example, in science and civics: to take two areas where religious education can be problematic).

Not that Australia is without its successes: immigrant children in Australia perform as well as native-born children (p.157), which dramatically undermines the “migrant disadvantage” argument for more “social justice” pedagogy in schools.

In his Conclusion, Donnelly draws together his threads to warn of the dangers of increasing “centralised, top down, one-size fits all” approaches, against a utilitarian “improve productivity” notion of education, for a tempered approach to testing to improve accountability an awareness of what happens in schools matters that continuity matters as well as change, that Australia is a highly successful society with a rich cultural heritage that we have an obligation to pass onto our children. That learning has value for its own sake and educational outcomes are improved by empowering parental choice, by allowing diverse students to be taught in diverse ways so that the system itself continues to learn.

Kevin Donnelly is a very informed contributor to the debate over education in Australia. His arguments are often a great deal more “reality-based” than those of his critics. Australia’s Education Revolution is a useful and informative contribution to the fight for better schooling for Australia’s children.

Grasping the past (2): Counterfactuals

This extends a comment I made here.


I agree with Geoffrey Blainey, Australia's premier historian: a sense of counterfactual possibilities is an aid to historical analysis. Without a sense of possible alternatives, how can you see the importance of causal factors?

Those who argue that even without Lenin one would get Hitler anyway are missing some big factors.
(1) Without Lenin's model of totalist politics, it is very unlikely that Mussolini or Hitler would have had a model of politics to adapt to their nationalist (Mussolini) and racist (Hitler) projects.
(2) Without the fear of Leninism, Mussolini and Hitler would have had far less to work off.
(3) Without Leninism, the socialist movement in Western Europe would very likely not have split into revolutionary and evolutionary wings.

This is not to suggest that democracy would have had smooth sailing across Europe if Lenin had not consolidated power. But Leninism hugely raised the stakes of politics: Leninist victory threatened life, liberty, property, culture, religion. This patently made a difference to political calculations, creating more tolerance for more extreme responses in crisis situations. Just as Lenin’s success and mode of operation created a model for use of modern technology and organisational capacity for very high levels of political mobilization of society.

The issue of the history of anti-Semitism if Lenin had not consolidated Bolshevik rule is much trickier. Anti-Semitism in Russia was violent, murderous and virulent. If the Whites had won the Civil War, I have little doubt that a mini-Holocaust was a distinct possibility. The question is whether Russia could have avoided a Civil War. This was certainly much more likely without a Bolshevik coup.