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Note: I made the above video earlier today as a shout-out to False Flag Weekly News Fundrazr donors, but also feel grateful for my Substack subscribers! (Watch FFWN with E. Michael Jones tomorrow after 1 pm Eastern at https://kevinbarrett.heresycentral.is/2023/03/ffwn-flatten-the-truth-with-e-michael-jones/ .)
I last visited Morocco six years ago.* I wasn’t planning to wait that long, but a series of bizarre mishaps,** not the least of which was COVID, interfered with earlier travel plans.
COVID hit Morocco hard—not so much in terms of deaths (16,000 in a total population of almost 40 million) as economic hardships. Morocco is still roughly 99% real economy, 1% bullshit jobs. In the USA you can almost reverse that ratio. (Okay, I’m exaggerating, but you know what I mean.) Very few Moroccans do work that could be done online. A relative handful work in corporate offices. Capital management and investment—Wall Street style vampire squids—don’t suck all the lifeblood out of Moroccan main streets. The service economy here is far from bloated; lawyers, accountants, PR specialists, and other rule-setters and bean-counters and propagandists and cyber-dabblers play a relatively minor role in Moroccan society. Most folks build and repair things, grow and transport and distribute food and other useful goods, and generally work in the real world. A very high percentage work for themselves; corporate culture is relatively undeveloped, walhamdullilah.
In the USA, privileged, parasitical people did relatively well during COVID, materially at least, while working stiffs got stiffed. To a certain extent the same is true here. The difference is that there are fewer privileged, parasitical people in Morocco than in the USA. So the vast bulk of the population took a big economic hit—especially since Morocco’s two biggest sources of foreign exchange, tourism and remittances from Moroccans living abroad, were flattened along with the rest of the COVID curve.
The richest Americans who own the leading corporations made out like bandits during COVID. It was the biggest reverse-Robin-hood transfer of wealth in human history. With so many small and medium-sized businesses shuttered or hobbled, the big boys ate everything in sight. The Americans who make good money moving bits of information around in cyberspace got to work from their relatively lavish homes, while underpaid real-world workers got COVID, got laid off, got their hours cut, or all of the above.
Though Moroccans took a bigger economic hit from COVID than Americans did, the spiritual damage seems milder. Morocco did close its mosques for awhile, but re-opened them fairly quickly. Unlike in the USA, where churches were shuttered while liquor stores, marijuana dispensaries, brothels, and porn purveyors all thrived, Morocco emerged from COVID with its traditional religious identity, the central pillar of its culture, stronger than ever.
Virtually all Moroccans are somewhere between bemused and horrified by stories like “Clueless Twitter tries to convince Arabic speakers that gender is a preference.”
Of the world’s nearly 400 million Arabic speakers, there may be one or two who got kicked in the head by a donkey and think gender is a mere preference. The other 399-plus million think the West has gone insane.
There is, of course, a propaganda war on Islam that aims to convince Muslims to worship sexual deviation instead of God. London’s schools, for example, are trying to turn Muslim kids bisexual.
But only a minuscule lunatic fringe entertains such notions here, and nobody would be crazy enough to try to push it in the schools.
I prayed Friday prayers today in the Firdaus mosque. It’s on the east side of Oujda, the “city of mosques” in northeastern Morocco next to the border with Algeria. Oujdis are proud of the fact that that their hometown has the most mosques per capita—or is it mosques per square kilometer?—of any city in the world, with the possible exception of someplace in Turkey with an evidently forgettable name. One of the best ways to check out Oujda’s mosques is to spend the entire Night of Destiny (Lailat ul-qadr) mosque-hopping—walking all over the city praying supererogatory prayers in as many mosques as you can. The one who prays in the most mosques wins bragging rights. But since in Islam we are not supposed to brag, that and ten dirhams will buy you a very good, very small cup of coffee.***
While chatting in the mini-souq (open-air market) outside the mosque, the local café, and my in-laws’ houses and cars, I’ve heard talk that the COVID depression is ending and things are starting to pick up. I haven’t met anybody here who’s aware of alt-COVID views on vaccines, but statistics show that only about half of Moroccans ever got vaxxed and hardly any got boosted. Mandatory masking was apparently never as heavy-handed here as it was in the States. (Hardly anything is.) And since so few people do white collar work from home, and since Amazon deliveries are few and far between, the authorities couldn’t really lock down the country even if they’d wanted to. And why should they, when people buy their food, and most other things as well, at open-air markets?
In short, it seems that COVID drove America even crazier than it was already, while Morocco just suffered through it and is still…well, Morocco.****
*For a spine-chilling (or should I say spine-shocking) account of how I nearly died last time I was in Morocco, check out “The Moroccans Who Saved My Life.”
**Including a mysteriously disappearing passport and a severe knee injury.
***When I last spent the Night of Destiny mosque-hopping around Oujda 23 years go, I believe I racked up about fifteen mosques—not enough to make this footnote much of a brag.
****Some people think Morocco is crazy, but they’ve been influenced by the Orientalist emphasis on the dark side of the culture, as I explained a few years ago in a Quora answer that has now been viewed more than four million times.
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The figures for the United States wouldn’t be as different as you might think.
I guess the Sahara desert has its mythology, and some people see bedouins and Arabs in a romantic light — it did attract Rimbaud and T. E. Lawrence and others, after all. Although in some cases it was more about the gay sex. Well, maybe not Rimbaud, he left that stuff after Verlaine, but Lawrence, sure.
But, personally, the desert and Islam has never attracted me. And Islam is so infused with Arab stuff that I don’t get the point of it for Europeans. You usually have to change your name to some Arabic name, like Cat Stevens did, and learn some words in Arabic, etc. Well, you have Bosnians, which I suppose are the most European of the Muslims.
I hope there is a new Reconquista, and Arabs and others such as Indians are expelled from Europe once again. I mean they have huge land tracts, they have more land than Europeans do. Why do they want to go to Europe and especially to places where climate isn’t even very good? The current Arab invasion of Sweden is one of the weirdest things that have happened, considering that the Vikings and their descendants played a part in expelling Saracen invaders in the past, from Sicily to parts of France.
Oh well. But Morocco could be interesting. Maybe in another life. For now, Morocco has come to Europe, so you can more easily visit it there.
Morocco isn’t just desert. It has three major mountain ranges (complete with ski resorts), enough arable land that it’s food self-sufficient, and is generally Mediterranean in climate, like Spain, southern France, Italy, California, etc.
When you enter Islam, a name change is optional, not mandatory. Learning some Arabic is a good idea, just like learning some Latin would have been helpful if you’d entered Christianity back when the religion was taken seriously. But you can get by as a Muslim with very little Arabic.
The root cause of immigration to Europe by a long list of peoples, not just Muslims, is the low European fertility rate primarily caused by by hedonistic-individualistic secular materialism. When Europe was still religious and expanding in population there was a net outflow of Europeans to other parts of the world. Today it’s the opposite.
Westerners subconsciously understand that the loss of religion is the root cause of the collapse of their civilization and accompanying demographic implosion. Then they notice that Islam is the most vibrant religion (with more than a billion doing the rigorous Ramadan fast, hundreds of millions praying regularly, etc.) They typically react by hating on Islam and Muslims. But it would be smarter to learn from them.
Wow Kevin you’re so iconoclastic and rebellious, talking about how much like Muslims and shit, even though you were a cock munching liberal faggot in the 70s and only became a “conservative” because it’s the new “liberal”.
I have been to Morocco once, and I will never go again. It has much less to do with Islam and much more to do with a very pushy culture that is out to swindle Europeans.
We have a several unpleasant experiences, and the worst one was when we were corralled into the top floor of a carpet salesman’s showroom. At first he was very pleasant and charming, plying us with mint tea. Then when he figured out that we were not going to buy a carpet he turned quite nasty and aggressive and scared my 10 year old daughter at the time. We had to wait in 3 separate long lines to get through customs and when we finally got through the border into Tangier what seemed like hours later the Moroccans swarmed around our car, all yelling and wanting something. To get out of the country we finally had to pay a bribe to a policeman and the customs officer.
I also know several people who have had similar experiences and will not go to Morocco again.
I have also been to Antalya, Turkey where I had some similar experiences, however they were not as aggressive as the Moroccans and I would go there again.
But I have no interest in travelling to Northern Africa again.
Good comment, sir. I’ll just add that the whitest Muslims in the world also include the Chechens, Bulgarian and Balkan Muslims, and many of the Turks (especially outside the heavily Kurdish/Arab eastern third of the country).
I don’t hate Islam or Muslims. However, I don’t want all of them in Europe either.
I don’t care that Islam is a “vibrant” religion if it’s not a good religion (well, for me – if it works for them, fine, as long as they are over there in their own countries. We can always visit them.).
But it’s true that Christianity has been seriously weakened in the last decades. Catholicism in particular has been almost destroyed, and worse, mostly from the inside. (Protestantism/Reformation was already a form of destruction).
Only the Orthodox Christians seem to still have some life in them.
I don’t know what is the solution to that, in the context of Europe. But certainly not converting to another religion, as it makes no sense. It’s like setting your house on fire to save it from spiders.
Muslims and Indians are attracted to the white world because the white man has a magic fire that makes summer in winter and magic ice that makes things cool in summer. The white man gives them free money and promotes and protects their culture while spitting on his own, the white man allows the brown man to rape and abuse white girls and boys with impunity because he believes in this magic thing called diversity that nobody can really define, but they know if they keep on saying the magic word the diversity gods will reward them one day (perhaps with a free trip to the land of India, where the diversity gods live). Finally the governments and police keep everything working and put in jail any whites that question the magic word diversity.
Christianity contains such absurdity that it wouldn’t be a sensible choice either, except for the fact that it has already been so dominant in our countries for so long, and it will be very difficult to organize and motivate people around another philosophy.
Better to take the substantial material that is good, kind, rational, sensible, useful from the “old” and “new” testaments alike, from the abrahamic religions generally, then jettison the rest. Three varieties of ignorant vicious or incoherent garbage, on balance. We’re just accustomed to “ours” and don’t see or refuse to admit it’s largely as silly and useless (or counterproductive) as those “bad people who don’t look like us” religions.
I hear you. The pushy salesmen and false guides are a problem in the more heavily-touristed corners of Morocco. That’s one reason I prefer the Oujda/Berkane/Saidia region, where there are very few Western tourists and people are more religious and have too much pride and integrity to stoop to obnoxious exploit-the-tourists shenanigans.
In any case, the best way to see Morocco is to get invited to stay with normal Moroccans. Failing that, arranging for a place to stay ahead of time, knowing what you want to do and see, and maybe pre-arranging to have a guide or local show you around, will solve most of the problems. The rest you have to solve yourself by politely but firmly telling pushy tourist-exploiters to bug off.
Aren’t most of the greatest national and cultural comebacks in history caused by religious conversion?
Every religion claims it’s the last one, and God always shows them that they’re wrong. We need a new religion when we have a change of heart and the new path is shown to us. It will be islam (submission to God) but it won’t be Islam (a convoluted prescription of rakats and incoherent laws about prayer times that only work in half the world. )
Went to Morocco decades ago with girl friend.
Uni student at the time so budget travel.
Ferry from Spain to Tangier, interesting but overcrowded city.
To Fez by common bus, several stops overnight/few days/week.
Met a lot of really decent people, several long intellectual conversations. Was speaking French bc alas no Arabic, so limited.
Never been back, but would go again. A good country in my experience.
Islam is interesting to non – believers of the Jew ( Abraham ) invented mythology which underpins and gives unearned weight to it.
Some thoughtful people who have read the academic papers of Princeton’s Prof. Michael Cook and his late Danish colleague , Prof. Patricia Crone may take a different view of both the history of Islam and the purported geography of the Koran’s tall tales.
Mr. Barrett, as a Muslim, can you clarify this matter for me, I am puzzled with. Is the Crescent moon on mosques the symbol of your God ? It used to be symbol of Nannar Sin, the Moon God. Is that mean, that your God’s name is in fact Nannar Sin. I think, “Sin” deriviates from Sinai peninsula, where He died.
Thank you.
Bob
London is a destination for racially – alien Muslims who , far from knowing how to treat host – Whites properly , deal summarily with their fellow Muslims.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/10/mosque-west-london-islamic-centre-man-set-on-fire-police-search
A ” racist” Muslim Malay friend of mine told me that Europeans could improve Islam’s International practical application if only they would all convert. Mind you , his country’s former Prime Minister had just been charged with corruption.
I advised my friend that these British , legal corruption proscriptions constituted an outdated White Colonial imposition .
He provided me with plausible a one word answer , deeply embedded in Malay culture , viz., “rezeki”.