Friday, September 25, 2015

Darwin Stalks the Jihadis

Michael J. Totten writes for a site called World Affairs Journal, and often has useful things to say about the MENA countries. He notes something we wrote some weeks ago - letting jihadis go to Syria is a win-win proposition, so long as they are not permitted to return alive. He writes:
There’s an upside to the exodus, I suppose. Britain and the United States are better off without these people. If they didn’t run off to Syria, they’d be living down the street.

Syria sure as hell isn’t better off with these people as “immigrants,” but they’ll eventually die there when the Islamic State, like every other monstrous utopian entity, either destroys itself from within or is destroyed from without by fed-up outsiders.

When it finally happens, whether it’s next year or two decades from now, the British and American Muslim communities will be, on average, a little more politically moderate and sane than they are now.
Totten's is the most overt application of Darwinian natural selection to geopolitics I've seen, and I like it. The same could have been written about Western leftists who went off to Spain to fight (and lose) against Franco, in the late 1930s. Or about the European Crusaders who bled and died in the Holy Land centuries earlier.