What is the West, really? Middle Nation Podcast (E:6)

Assalamu alaihi wa barakatu, everyone. Welcome to the sixth episode of the Middle Nation podcast. The West, as a conceptual collective identity, began essentially as a method of division between Europeans, not of uniting them. It was used to distinguish the Catholics from the Eastern Orthodox Christians. Basically, it was a distinction that grew out of the fracture between the Hellenistic and Latin halves of the Roman Empire.

Of course, this West, based on Catholicism, eventually fragmented as well with the advent of Protestantism, and the West was riven with violent internal conflicts over that division alone. Indeed, the history of Europe right up until the second World War is a catalog of wars and conflicts going on almost uninterrupted for a thousand years. For all the talk about Western civilization, it is a serious mistake to imagine that the collection of countries that today constitute what we refer to as, quote, unquote, the West actually have much in common with one another. They were at each other's throats for most of their history, including their history as Christians, and there's no reason to suppose that their antipathy has been transformed over the past century into any deep sense of brotherhood and unity. Yes.

They have commonalities rooted in ancient Greek philosophy, Roman law, and shared theological origins, but the rise of the West only truly occurred when countries with access to the Atlantic Ocean began trading. Now that matters because it means that those countries became economically and culturally dominant in Europe, thus making them the arbiters of what the West was supposed to be. The most important of these Western European countries, Britain, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain, obviously, subsequently became colonial powers. They rapidly and massively surpassed Eastern European countries in their development, wealth, and global influence. Eastern Europe fell behind in all of these areas, and those nations were and still are viewed as not really the West.

Decades under Soviet rule didn't really help with that. As the disparity of development across Europe grew, so did the concept of nationalism and the nation state, which only solidified the divisions within Europe and again gave the more advanced nations the power to determine the parameters of what would constitute the definition of what the West is. I mean, remember, it was only one hundred years ago during the, first world war that the British were calling the Germans Huns, a term associating Germany with the eastern barbarians who attacked Rome. If you have interacted with Europeans at all, then you'll know that they have derogatory terms in every country for the citizens of every other European country. And the Greeks and Italians are particularly unfortunate in how they are perceived by Northern Europeans, which is ironic since the whole thing started with them.

Now when we talk about Western values, roughly speaking, it means a vaguely Christian sense of morality, but also the secular renunciation of that Christian sense of morality because the enlightenment more or less created a split personality for European Christendom. The ideals of liberalism overthrew the authority of the church as a governing body, and the state was essentially cast as the guardian of man against God protecting his individual liberty from overbearing and judgmental religious coercion. But, of course, coercion persisted. Monarchs, feudal lords, and the aristocracy, and later industrialists, the rich, and eventually corporations continued to retain the power to dictate the allowable exercise of man's liberty, and the state has always been disproportionately dominated by these influential players. So the actual real world application of the values and ideals of liberalism have always been subject to top down controls and limitations.

The enlightenment played out very differently across Europe and particularly between Western And Eastern Europe. From the church to the king to the state, Europe has never really gotten governance right, and has pretty much always manifested the principles of the enlightenment in a very lopsided and selective manner. The real driver and the real philosophy of the West always was and still is materialism. And liberalism is just a decorative, subordinate, useful set of principles that can be invoked to both enable and to camouflage the vicious and exploitative social hierarchy that has never stopped being the West's most defining cultural feature. This is even evident from who really gets to define what is meant by the West.

They are those countries with economic and military dominance, not those countries with the most moral or genuinely liberalist societies. What we call the West or western civilization is really just an inflated term for the culture of western European countries. And with the dramatic ascendance of The United States, The UK has become the most important of these countries due primarily to the importance of the English language and the shared history of Britain and America. So, actually, when we talk about the West, we basically mean two countries. No other country in Europe has anywhere near the cultural or ideological influence of The United States or The UK.

What the West means to these two countries is what the West is. But here we have to differentiate between the proclaimed values and the functioning reality because the fact of the matter is that The United States and The UK and indeed Greater Europe have all changed very little since pre enlightenment medieval times in terms of the actual nature of their societies, their character, and their culture. You can truly say about the West that the more they change, the more they stay the same. As stated, the structures and dynamics of power have not meaningfully changed, only the institutions that hold that power. I mean, just consider the fact that the EU, the European Union, did not form out of a recognition of shared cultural values and principles.

It formed out of a cartel of elite businessmen seeking to control the price of coal and steel. Materialistic interests define the West, which necessarily means that those with the most material resources determine the culture and character and operating principles of the society. When that was the church, Christianity was the garment at war. When it was the state, nationalism was the garment at war. And now it is the corporate elite, and free market capitalism is the garment it wears.

But it is the same old feudal system it has always been. The West has not progressed or matured civilizationally, only technologically. So we have to be astute enough to distinguish between what the West says it is, tells itself that it is, and tries to convince others that it is, and what it actually is. Because culturally, it never really left the dark ages. It just learned how to pretend that it did.

It is important to understand the continuity of disempowerment and disenfranchisement that are features of power dynamics in the West because that explains a lot about their approach to liberalism. Individual liberty is lauded as sacrosanct for the simple reason that the individual does not matter. Power does not care what you think, what you say, what you wear, who you sleep with, or whether your families are broken because you do not matter. Your family does not matter. You have no power, so your morality or immorality is irrelevant.

What you want is irrelevant. None of this endangers the continuity of the socioeconomic hierarchy. And in fact, the more you feel that your irrelevance is actually liberty, the less of a threat to the power structure you are because it's nice to feel that you are free. But consider this for a moment. The labor of industrial factory workers in the Northern States in America was less expensive than slaves in the South.

The acceleration of women into the workforce in America, ostensibly part of the women's liberation movement, had a net effect of decreasing overall wages and increasing income inequality. The wealth gap has done nothing but grow in The US throughout its history. Until today, the economic hierarchy does not so much resemble a pyramid as an obelisk with a very large flat foundation. Now when I'm talking about income or wealth, you can just replace those words with the word power. The power gap in the West is enormous and is perhaps today even greater than it was in the pre enlightenment dark ages, which just goes to show you how superficial the impact of the enlightenment really was.

Every individual or movement that genuinely challenged the power structure in The US was brutally crushed, sabotaged, or appropriated and undermined. Liberalism only applies in irrelevant matters. Anything of importance is dealt with by medieval methods. This is and always has been understood by those with power in The US and throughout what we call the West. Truth be told, the West has generally embraced what was called enlightened absolutism or liberal autocracy even if they'll never admit it.

You see this in the statement of John Jay, one of the founding fathers of The United States when he said those who own the country ought to govern it. And you see it in the much more recent statement of Wolfgang Schauble when he said in a euro group meeting that elections must not be allowed to change economic policy. And you see it in the statement of Walter Lippmann, was an adviser to president Woodrow Wilson when he said that the public are ignorant, meddlesome outsiders who need to be put in their place. That is the West. That is its functional character, morality, and belief system.

If you're even slightly acquainted with their history, you will recognize this. Liberalism means the insignificance of the individual and the marginalization of the population despite all claims to the contrary. It is nothing more than a deflectionary and pretty sounding method of control and disempowerment. And this is why liberalism very often does not extend to us, to the Muslims who live in the West. Because liberalism only applies to those who do not matter, to beliefs and actions that do not matter, to people and ideas that do not challenge the power structure.

Well, Muslims matter, and Islam does challenge the power structure. This is not a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between a fake civilization and a real one. The West from the beginning of the use of that label until now does not adhere to the values and beliefs it preaches. We do.

And this is at least partially because the values and beliefs they preach are not consistently practicable or useful for the longevity of a society, but mostly it's because those beliefs and values that they preach are only a diversionary tactic to mislead the public from perceiving the way the society is really managed. Our values and beliefs are practicable, consistent, and proven. We represent an actually viable model for a moral society that balances the rights and responsibilities of its citizens with a mature and fair social contract that does not inevitably lead to illegitimate tyrannical power whether public sector or private sector dominating and oppressing the population. Our beliefs do not exaggerate the importance of wealth accumulation and genuinely respect individual rights and intrinsic human value. We are the middle nation and the only truly enlightened, viable, and sustainable iteration of organized society that the world has ever seen.

We are therefore, by our very existence, a challenge to the western model and they do not only wanna be the supreme model, they want to be the only model because they do not want their people to know that an alternative exists. The people of the West have been betrayed. They have been and continue to be fooled. Exposure to Islam undermines the Khan that they have been tricked by for centuries. So here again, I need to reiterate that what the West is is defined by the most powerful in the West.

That is The United States and The UK, but further than that, it is those with power in those countries. This reduces who and what the West is essentially to a handful of individuals and institutions which control the narrative and policies of the countries of the Western world, and the populations are sidelined, abused, exploited, and relegated to functional redundancy. This only works as long as the people do not recognize it. I believe that it has become so difficult to sell this to the public that the handful of powerful individuals and institutions who manage the society are now trying to seduce the public into entering into the metaverse, virtual reality, a world literally owned and controlled by companies. It is an utterly dismal failure as a civilization, which again, I do not believe is even an accurate term to describe the so called West.

We have to rehabilitate and detox ourselves from the continuous propaganda about the West. It is a basket of lies, and believing those lies has been incalculably detrimental to the people who live in The US, UK, and Europe. We cannot afford to believe them too. And in so doing, lose sight of who and what we truly are.