ceuta 2.0: armies march on their stomachs

once upon a time, when people were sensible and understood how the world worked, there was a common practice:

when you got news of an invading army approaching, you grabbed every bit of food and livestock and valuables that you could and you brought them into the local fort with you to get protection. you harvested what could be harvested and you burned the rest to be sure that no invader or siege layer could have it. you left them scorched stubble and starvation. it’s effective. an army with nothing to eat is not an army for long.

invaders planned their attacks around this. you came in the summer and fall when there was food, not the winter when there was not. long term sieges and campaigns were affairs of sustenance logistics on both sides. generally whoever ran out of food first lost.

and you’d never, ever see craziness like “hey, the invaders who came to take our town look cold and hungry, let’s send them a care package.” if any civilizations were fool enough to try that one, they are no longer with us.

when invaders looked deprived, you jeered and said “good! go home!”

you attacked.

well, you know how i love the expression “civilizations die by forgetting the obvious things.”

well, guess what we forgot? (source, NY post)

incentives matter and "an army marches on its stomach."

this is the whole issue in a nutshell.

they came with no food, no water, no plan, betting that the sympathy and generosity of the west would provide all these things for them if they simply looked needy enough.

probably they imagined go fund me's and humanitarian air drops once the images of their newfound squalor emerged. probably they imagined food and tents as tribute for not rioting and robbing the town.

so long as this incentive exists, they will come.

and guess fricking what?

yup, the red cross is now in town distributing food to thousands of illegal invaders, giving out blankets, you name it. it’s like watching nishapur hand out mare’s milk to the mongols.

it gets worse.

spanish officials have started transfers of migrants (including early groups of mostly sudanese nationals) from ceuta to the spanish mainland (apparently algeciras in andalusia among others) to “relieve pressure on local facilities.”

this is quite the incentive structure they are erecting, especially for the broke, unskilled, and those fleeing criminal prosecution in morocco (who look to be a meaningful continent here, some are saying the king emptied the prisons into ceuta)

this is a new kind of warfare.

it’s a matter of first order thinking. you would not deliberately impose yourself on another like this because you would not want others doing it to you.

but these people all chose to do it.

they have proven, right from moment one, that they are not golden rule social contract respectors. it’s written in their actions.

this was not an earthquake or a hurricane or some unforeseeable exigency. it did not happen to them as some matter of circumstance.

the invaders created it to weaponize the empathy of a civilization against it.

and you know what happens to easy marks?

yup.

look, i get it, it’s difficult for western sensibilities to look at people suffering and not do somehting.

it’s also difficult to see a kid throw a tantrum in a store and not give them what they want so they stop.

but you have to.

that’s what being an adult is.

if crybabies get cookies, you’re raising crybabies. maybe you solve a short term problem, but you’re creating a bigger one in the long term.

allowing migrant invaders to get free stuff and maybe win a trip to a welfare state for life is an incentive structure that will get you an unending stream. we’ve seen this everywhere.

it’s not sympathy, it’s civilizational destruction by suicidal empathy.

human civilization is human capital. nothing else. the buildings, the institutions, the factories, and universities: none of it is worth a whit without human capital to make it so. floods of low value/unassimilable people demolish this. even high function humans cannot build when surrounded by plunderous vandals.

it’s really this simple:

you cannot build a golden rule social contract civilization out of people whose sole entrance screen is the direct repudiation of such things.

i increasingly fear that that is precisely the point.

if you want to destroy such a civilization, you cannot do so in a hot war.

so you do it like this, you demolish it from within, bury it in costs and low trust never bring the cart back, defect in every prisoner’s dilemma. people who cannot possibly be integrated into western systems.

it’s sugar in the civilizational gas tank poured in by wreckers acting with the support of suckers who insist on giving the mouse a cookie for fear of being called racist and phobic.

and this will not stop until that is stopped.

choose well.