As you may have read in the news, the author Salman Rushdie got knifed down at a public event the other day. The context is that over two decades ago Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in response to Rushdie’s blasphemous book The Satanic Verses. There is the flippant saying, “fuck around and find out”, which is certainly appropriate here. Of course, I do not condone violence in any way, or against any person or group. Yet, if you are part of a culture with a very strict moral codex, and you think you will just see what will happen if you step out of line, then you are probably partly to blame if reality hits you like a brick, or cuts you like a knife.

You have to hand it to the moslems: They follow pretty clear rules and if you think you are above them, you may get killed. This happened to various jokers who thought that it is funny to draw caricatures of Mohammed. Those people were fully aware of the provocation this constitutes, and went ahead regardless, somehow believing that their Western, liberal values will act like a protective shield. You can say, “Je suis Charlie” all you want, but the fact of the matter is that different cultures have different moral standards, and if you have the great idea of inviting members of all kinds of cultures into your country, then you can expect conflicts to break out as there is no universal morality.

I once encountered the claim that people in the West became much more law-abiding during the Middle Ages as a consequence of rather harsh selection processes. In other words, if you fucked around too much, you disappeared in a torture chamber or were publicly executed. This may be cruel, but it is clear that the deterring effect of seeing someone being executed for blasphemy, defrauding his neighbor, or well-poisoning is rather substantial, to put it mildly. There is also the fact that a propensity towards criminality is hereditary, so by weeding those people out of the gene pool, your population becomes every more law-abiding and better behaved.

With the above in mind, can you even imagine what our once Christian society would look like today if we had killed blasphemers, like muslims do? The societal effects would be quite obvious. You can view modern manufactured culture as a means for the continual debasement of society. In the 19th century, there were scandalous novels in which married women “went for walks”, which was code for them sleeping with other men behind their husband’s back. A scandalous novella in the early 20th century was about people attending a ball who were “dancing with one attendee after another”, and this was code for those women sleeping around randomly. Fast forward a few decades, and you get novels in which people describe their paraphilic phantasies, nudity has been normalized, and miscegenation is the standard in advertising. Routinely, nuns give blowjobs in mainstream movies or moonlight as prostitutes, cutting off your genitals is empowering, and if you notice that the recent diversity hires at your company are not pulling their weight, you will be out of a job because you are a racist.

Nobody living in 1920s America would have believed how shitty life in 2020s American would be. They went to war against Hitler to save democracy, or something like that, and their descendants today find themselves in a country that pushes porn and drugs on them. This had also been prepared well in advance as you do not go from 0 to 60 in an instant. Yet, imagine if instead of twiddling their collective thumbs, your forebears would have stood up against the peddlers of garbage. Somehow, I cannot shake the feeling that society would look a lot different had they done so.

Imagine you live in 1920s American and some smutty novel appears. Instead of joining the celebrations of the mainstream press about this work of literature pushing moral boundaries, there is an outrage, muslim-style. Two days later, the author, everybody involved with the publication of the novel, as well as mainstream literary critics praising the supposedly high literary qualities of this genre-defining work find themselves impaled on a public square. Surely, the amount of boundary pushing would be a lot less in the future, just as it happened in Medieval Europe.

You may find the thought experiment above repulsive, yet it is quite powerful. If you do not defend your culture, it will be destroyed. Thus, I tip my had to the late Ayatollah. Salman Rushdie knew what he was doing, and justice got served, in the Islamic context. Yes, sure, for our Western sensibilities this is all shocking and brutish and barbarian. However, our Western culture is not universal. It is our set of rules. Well, our current set of rules of some kind of a bastardization, but you surely get what I am aiming at.

With little children there is the interesting phenomenon that they have the tendency to explore what they can get away with. Any school teacher, regardless of the grade he is teaching, will probably be able to tell stories of his students testing his boundaries, and the same is true in the workplace, too. Most if not all toddlers want to see what they can get away with, fewer school kids retain this impulse, and even fewer people in the workforce. However, some people seem to make it their life’s purpose to push moral boundaries. If they do not get put in their place, they will never stop, just like your toddler will only behave worse and worse. This is how we ended up with tranny story hour, unlimited mass immigration, and pornography in the mainstream. Probably all of this could have been avoided by publicly executing a bunch of people every few years.