Extracts from Huntington's "Clash of Civilisations" (mostly as quoted by The Associate aka He Who Must Not be Named aka mindgame aka nw.t.):

"During the last decades of the twentieth century both Islam and Christianity significantly expanded their members in Africa and a major shift toward Christianity occurred in South Korea. In rapidly modernizing societies, if the traditional religion is unable to adapt to the requirements of modernization the potential exists for the spread of Western Christianity and Islam. In these societies, the most successful protagonists of Western culture are not neo-classical economists or crusading democrats or multinational corporation execs. They are and most likely will continue to be Christian missionaries. Neither Adam Smith nor Thomas Jefferson will meet the psychological, emotional, moral, and social needs of urban migrants and first-generation secondary school graduates. Jesus Christ may not meet them either, but He is likely to have a better chance.

In the long run, however, Mohammed wins out. Christianity spreads primarily by conversion, Islam by conversion and reproduction. The percentage of Christians in the world peaked at about 30 percent in the 1980s, leveled off, is now declining, and will probably approximate about 25 percent of the world’s population by 2025. As a result of their extremely high rates of population growth, the proportion of Muslims in the world will continue to increase dramatically, amounting to 20 percent of the world’s population about the turn of the century, surpassing the number of Christians some years later, and probably accounting for about 30 percent of the world’s population by 2025."

nw.t: Huntington claims that the islamic resurgence is a primarily urban, middle-class process and he finds parallels in marxisim in that an educated intellectual elite is at the radical forefront of fundamentalist movements.

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"Whenever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems livng peaceably with their neighbours. The question naturally arises as to whether this pattern of late twentieth-century conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim groups is equally true of relations between groups of other civilisations. In fact, it is not. Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world's population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any civilisation.

Muslims were participants in 26 of 50 ethnopolitical conflicts in 1993-1994. Twenty of these conflicts were between groups from different civilizations of which fifteen were between Muslims and non-Muslims. There conflicts within Islam also were more numerous than those in any other civilisation, including tribal conflicts in Africa. In contrast to Islam, the West was involved in only two intracivilizational and two intercivilisational conflicts.

Of the six wars in which 200,000 or more were killed, three were between Muslims and Non-Muslims (Sudan, Bosnia, East Timor), two were between Muslims (Somalia, Iraq - Kurds), and only one involved only Non-Muslims.

In the early 19990s, two thirds to three-quarters of intercivilizational war were between Muslims and non-Muslims, and Muslims were involved in more intracivilizational violence than any other group. Islam's borders are bloody, and so are its innards.

Muslim states also have had a high propensity to report to violence in international crises, employing it to resolve 76 out of 142 crises in which they were involved between 1928 and 1979. In 25 cases, violence was the primary means of dealing with the crisis, in 51 Muslim states used violence in addition to other means.

When they did use violence, Muslims used high-intensity violence, resorting to full-scale war in 41 percent of the cases where violence was used and engaging in major clashes in another 38 percent of the cases. While Muslim states resorted to violence in 53.5% of their crises, the United States only responded in 17.9%. Among the major powers only China's violence propensity exceeded that of the Muslim states; it employed violence in 76.9% of its crises. Muslim bellicosity (and Chinese too it seems) annd violence are late twentieth century facts which neither Muslims nor non-Muslims can deny."

nw.t: bwahahaahahaha listen to huntington's cop out

"It may be true that Christians in the past killed fellow Christians and other people in massive numbers but to evaluate the violence propensities of civilisations throughout history would require extensive research which is impossible here... what can be done is to identify possible causes of current Muslim group violence and distinguish between those causes which explain a greater propensity toward group conflict throughout history, and those causes relevant only to the end of the 20th century."

nw.t: off hand a casual reading of historical statistics would have shown that the western christian civilisation at one point had the highest propensity to violence in far greater quantities than any other civilization extatnt - and this propensity would stretch all the way from the renaissnace to the sunset of empire and colonialism

the question is why islam has inherited that mantle now; and i think part of it can be explained due to the monotheistic, proselytizing nature of their religions; and the fact that civilizations in ascendance (like the West was thanks to superior science, military power and economic clout at one point) and civilizations in resurgence as the West declines (Islam) tend to start looking for elbow room, particularly when the resurgent civilization is ALSO identified with a montheistic, proselytizing religion.

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nw.t: between 1928 and 1979, the Soviets used force in 28.5% of their crises; the Chinese ratio was 76.9%

soviet vs china is proof (according to huntington) of an early manifestation of how intercivilisational faultlines were present even during the ideologically bipolar cold war period

i think it was due mainly to a chinese need to be superior even under the guise of ideological similarity if chinese had been a fascist state, they'd have complained that the nazies weren't killing jews fast enough and that they (after wiping out their tiny jew enclaves along the northeastern coast) were the true inheritors of judenrein and lebensraum concepts:)