Amazon bowdlerized this review, so I present the whole thing here. The issue of Muslim immigration has been overshadowed lately by other issues, but it has not gone away. I revisited this review today in writing on related themes from my yesterday’s post about academia.
Fistfights with Muslims
Totally engaging, thoroughly modern, absolutely on target. The millennial generation is finding itself.
I am writing an extraordinarily long review of an economically short book. I have been waiting half a lifetime for this book to appear. To be more exact, the half of a lifetime since my now grown family of millennials was born. They grew up in the wealthy suburbs of Washington DC, awash in cultural Marxism abetted by their mother. I raised my voice in protest, ineffectively, and felt honor bound to remain with the family until they were all grown. It was to no avail; the three are social justice warriors, unmarried, unsuccessful, unhappy, and long out of communication with their father.
It is thrilling to read the account of a millennial who understands their situation so well at a young age. It did not gel for me until a few years after retirement, as the last one was leaving for college. I finally divorced, moved to a healthy country, remarried and started a second family. Though the 30 years it took me to figure things out can never be recovered, the evidence of my young family is that I seem to have learned fairly well from my experience.
This review is thus the endorsement of ideas that Julian Langness has gathered through his own reading and observation, but which I know from life experience. It is divided into five parts:
· Langness' assessment of the situation of modern America and Americans.
· Langness' assessment of modern Europe, and the Muslim invasion.
· Masculinity and fighting – comments from my own experience.
· The structure of the book itself, a wonderful example of how a book should be put together, a model for the book I am writing.
· An extensive bibliography. Langness has read an extraordinary amount for a man in his early 30s. I have been retired longer than he has been reading books for adult consumption. As a top 500 Amazon reviewer I can recommend many to supplement and corroborate his bibliography.
===Modern America and Americans
Modern America is consumed by consumerism. It is epitomized by the frenzy that surrounds the release of each new product from Apple. These little electronic toys do not satisfy any basic human need. They consciously avoid satisfying them. Practical tasks that computers do well, such as word processing, spreadsheet manipulation and personal accounting, are left to Microsoft. Apple concerns itself with the extremely lucrative ephemerals: video, picture sharing, games and online time wasters like Facebook.
It is satisfying to see Langness' contempt for the drones who get sucked up by video games, jettisoning gritty reality for a simulacrum. He confirms what a guy of my generation knows only by instinct.
Langness is blunt and matter-of-fact about the fact that America is extraordinarily overextended financially. Individual Americans have contracted unsustainable levels of debt in the form of student loans, automobile loans, revolving credit and mortgages for overpriced houses. American institutions have developed unsustainable levels of obligations for pension and medical payments. The fact that it is a house of cards, a Ponzi scheme, is evident to seemingly every commentator who takes time to do the arithmetic.
The most glaring gap is between actuarial assumptions such as 7% annual growth that must be satisfied to meet future pension obligations, and the fact that bonds and banks pay almost 0%, and if one deflates the reported earnings of stock issuing companies down to GAAP earnings, they too are earning almost nothing.
It will only get worse over time. The baby boomers, the largest generation in American history, is just entering retirement. The generation just entering the workforce is smaller, no better educated, and to a larger extent of immigrant background. Their taxes can simply not be counted on to make up the difference. And yet, innumerate millennials blithely dream on that somehow the American dream will come true for them, that they may someday have a house and a pension.
Modern Americans are aggressively apathetic. They not only did not defend themselves against minority thugs, but they go out of their way to defend the right of Blacks and Hispanics to be angry and violent. They do not honor their women's chastity; they expect the women not to be chaste in the first place, and will not step up to defend them against sexual harassment or even rape by minorities.
Young Americans descended of founding stock seem uninterested in getting married, uninterested in having children if they do happen to get married, and uninterested in raising those children to be whatsoever like their ancestors if they happen to have them. The only thing that can be said that might be remotely positive is that in this regard they are at least a little bit better than their European cousins. It is awfully faint praise.
Langness' indictment of modern America is sweeping, and on target
=== Europe and the Muslim invasion
Against all evidence, centuries, not mere decades of evidence, the elites in America and Europe resolutely, blindly attribute to Muslims the same motivations as would motivate them. They assume that the Muslims want a comfortable house in the suburbs and a good job. That is not it. They want to dominate their host nations. They want to fulfill the religious mission of conquering the world. They may or may not want converts; in most cases it seems they would just as soon replace the hapless inhabitants of the developed countries.
Muslim crime in Europe goes unreported. Germany, Sweden, Norway, France, Belgium and many others refuse to keep ethnic statistics on crime. The elites resolutely did not want to know. They did not want the nature of crime to be reported. They especially did not want sexual crimes against white women, which are many and horrific, to be reported. These elites include the bureaucrats in Brussels, the governments of Western European countries, the leading newspapers such as the Manchester Guardian, the Times of London, The Economist, Le Monde, the Frankfurter Allegemeine, Expressen and similar publications and every other country. See my bibliography below for authors who detail how it happens in the individual countries.
Langness has a grudging admiration for the Muslims. He cites his own Viking ancestors as motivated by honor, seeking conquest. The Viking tribes prized bravery, and look forward to a heroic death in battle if that came to that. Their sense of honor was such that no Viking would let his comrades down. It made them a force to be reckoned with far beyond their home in Scandinavia. They terrorized Paris and through raids up the Seine; they colonized Eastern Europe, founding the city of Kyiv where I live and the dynasties that ruled here from the 10th through the 12th centuries. He observes that the Muslims have the same sense of honor. While he despises many of their cultural practices – honor killings, female genital mutilation, cousin marriage and so on – he respects the fact that they at least know who they are.
The Muslims are confident enough of themselves to have children. Langness says that an average Muslim family has 3.5 children; that of the average family of European extraction fewer than 1.5. It is a matter of a generation or less until the Muslims overwhelm the native peoples in most European countries.
Righting things will require a twofold effort. First, the Europeans must find the strength to reject the interlopers. Second, and perhaps most important, they must find again a meaning in life that will lead them to have their own children and to raise them to be proud of their heritage.
I add that my adoptive country, Ukraine, is doing fairly well. We are too poor to sponge off and, having been Europe's perpetual victims, have nothing about which to feel guilty.
===Masculinity and Fighting
The book is organized around encounters that Langness had with young Muslim men in the "no go" zones of cities in Norway, Amsterdam, Paris and Vienna. He didn't start fights, but he walked through immigrant neighborhoods and refused to be intimidated. If the Muslims wanted to start a fight, he didn't back down.
Langness has investigated the topics of fighting and masculinity in his other writings. Fighting has been an essential part of male behavior in every culture and history. As Stephen Pinker writes, it has been systematically reduced in modern societies. This has certainly changed the character of men. They don't fight, they don't believe in fighting, and convince themselves that there are no things worth fighting for. Specifically, they do not believe it is worth fighting to defend their country or their traditions or their women. If there is nothing worth fighting for, there is really nothing worth living for. That seems to be the situation.
I have observed this change in my lifetime. Even growing up in Berkeley, hardly a bastion of martial sentiment even in the 1950s, I got into three or four fights as a kid. When I went into the National Guard I had to ask myself whether or not I could pull the trigger if I had to. Arriving at the race riots in Los Angeles in 1965, I was convinced in my mind that I was ready to shoot if need be. I was armed during the four years I spent as a civilian in Vietnam. My military clients were certainly ready. They commanded respect; had I been forced to tangle with any of those Marines, I can be sure they would not have backed down.
During the school careers of my millennial children, from 1985 to 2000, I do not recall any accounts of my children or any others in the school getting into fights. They almost certainly would have been expelled. This habitual softness characterizes their lives today. They abjure any violence, even to the point of accepting and making excuses for the violence committed by America's immigrant and minority populations.
Langness divides modern men into five groups:
· The first group shuck off the "constraints of masculinity and embrace the feminist narrative of gender. They are decidedly nonviolent. While this characterizes many American men in the big coastal cities, and even more thoroughly characterizes modern European man.
· The second group pursues vicarious manhood through video games, pornography and televised sports. They talk about manhood, but they don't practice it.
· The third group is obsessed with money and sex. Langness concludes that in seducing women they are deriving their sense of self-worth from women. It is not earned. The pursuit of money is not constrained by moral considerations.
· The fourth group is typified by "the good man": married, kids, healthy life, and healthy friendships. He preserves himself in the hope that masculinity will someday come back into fashion.
· The fifth group has made the conscious decision to reject and destroy modernity which has rendered masculine virtues obsolete. Langness places himself somewhere between group 4 and group 5. I have moved to a country where I can attempt group 4.
===Structure of the book
I am the author of five books, working on another one. The structure of Langness' book works extremely well. It is worth writing about why.
Traditional publishers put constraints on an author. The most obvious ones are on content; the big publishing houses are run out of New York City and other liberal metropoles. Some books are hard to get published.
A print book imposes certain economic constraints. It has to cost a certain amount, and in order that the reader feels like he is getting his money's worth, it has to be of a certain length. The publisher will give the author a page budget. Regardless of whether he has more or less to say than fits the budget, he has to target what the publisher wants. A book needs a certain tone. The editors make sure that it sounds appropriate to whom they assume to be the audience.
This book is short – 98 pages of text. That text is well written, smooth flowing, and articulate without being too demanding. Langness has hit the right register. It is a personal book, based on his own experiences. He has read quite a bit and has references to back up his opinions, but he is not hiding behind anybody else. This is very much his book. Not having to satisfy a publisher in the same way as before, the author of an electronic book can focus solely on his message. Langness delivers a simple, powerful message.
===Related books
Langness draws extensively on two books in particular, The Way of Men and While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. I have ordered those books and will review them when they arrive. Several of the 400 plus books that I have reviewed corroborate Langness 'thesis.
Muslims in Europe:
The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
The Swedish Story: From extreme experiment to normal nation
Millennials
[[ASIN:B00CS8PUG6 Generation Identity]]
[[ASIN:B01MCUS3KV The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis--and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance]]
[[ASIN:B005FVPEW8 Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood]]
The sexes
[[ASIN:B003WT26I0 Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men]]
[[ASIN:1935965891 Sexual Utopia in Power]]
[[ASIN:B00ADRXOTO The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men]]
Society
[[ASIN:030745343X Coming Apart -The State of White America, 1960-2010]]
[[ASIN:B005HHSYMW The Better Angels of our Nature]]
[[ASIN:1907166467 Convergence of Catastrophes]]
[[ASIN:1455566381 Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging]]
[[ASIN:B016J12NR6 The Real Right Returns]]
==What do I get from this book
Julian Langness is 43 years younger than me. The years that he chronicles as a tragic history are years that I lived. He has the benefit of retrospect, whereas I had only an uneasy feeling that things were tragically wrong. On the other hand, I had the benefit of being raised in a healthy society whereas he has the challenge of grappling with the totally corrupt world into which he was born.
He values masculinity and traditional male honor. He respects the traditional family.
With the perspective of years, and bitter experience, I conclude that even in the healthiest backwaters of America it is going to be difficult to raise children with the proper sense of respect for their history and historical culture. They are not surrounded by a culture which asks to be valued or can be valued very highly. If Julian is going to succeed in an evolutionary sense, have children and grandchildren like himself, he is going to have to fight in every arena and at every echelon: some within his own family, certainly many within his community, and absolutely the powers that be at the levels of state and federal government.
Langness has a dark foreboding that the world will collapse in the not-too-distant future. The hyperextended financial system will come crashing down. That may be our civilization's salvation. It will simply no longer be able to support nonproductive members, the people who do not value or contribute to the productivity and the values we inherited from our European ancestors. Our collapse may be our salvation.
9/11 was a CIA op (George Webb, Sage Hana, Corbett Report, Liam Scheff, etc.) The casus belli for US and Western psy-ops hatred and genocide against Muslims (my ex-wife is Iranian) is a false flag operation and thus one of the most unspeakably evil operations committed by the US government in our name. We have absolutely NO business attacking Muslims anwhere after the eggregious bullshit and genocide of millions (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc.) that is being done in the name of the US. Given the genocidal objectives of the lockdowns, vaxxxes, chemtrails, 5G, Lahaina, Paradise, Santa Rosa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bs3o3z0G8tw) it is quite clear that the WEF agenda to depopulate the globe is a much more serious threat to humanity than Islam ideology. In fact, most American Muslims want to live the traditional American family life that all of our liberal friends and relatives have explictly rejected in favor of anti-life anti-human positions of every possible type---climate BS, covid BS, pandemic BS, abortion BS, gender BS, woke BS, Justice BS, etc. etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNg3SFAqWC8
https://youtu.be/4oVpt_I9iQQ
Good review with a lot of personal extension included. Got me curious about what inspired you to read this book published in 2016. It has a lot of 5 star reviews that confirm yours. Not a particularly popular book probably because most media would prefer not to be challenged, besides modern doctrine disagrees with traditional American culture; I can't speak to EU culture aside from my being an ex-pat in the UK for several years way before this book. Brexit reflects the discomfort the average UK bloke has with the immigration issue and dilution of British culture.
I'm not sure about the future of American culture and its ability to survive. The mass migration we are experiencing recently along with the huge fiscal uncertainties seem to be of no concern to most citizens. There is a growing backlash because the extremes have pushed change a bit too far. We have yet to deal with the Covid debacle as more truth arrives. But immigrants from the South may assist the US in some rational return in that those immigrants believe in family with men being men and women being women.