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Islamismophobia - by Tomas Pueyo - Uncharted Territories

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:51:16 +0000

This timely article is probably the hardest, most important one I’ve written this year—maybe in years. I might not get it all right, so I look forward to your comments and corrections. If you believe it can help heal society, please share it.

“Muslims are violent and try to impose their beliefs on others! We should send them all back to their countries!”

“That’s just islamophobia! You’re a bigot!”

Both of these are not just wrong: They’re blurring concepts of freedom, equality, immigration, race, and politics at such a fundamental level that they’re threatening the foundations of our society. Today, we’re going to try to make sense of it all. By the time you’re done, you should be able to see a conflict related to Islam in the West on the TV, on social media, or on the street, and have a better sense of what we should do about it and why.

At the heart of this is the mixing of two concepts: Islam and Islamism.

Islam vs Islamism

Islam is a religion followed by 2 billion people in the world, ~25% of the population. It is a personal belief, protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Like in most religions, most adherents of Islam are kind, welcoming, peaceful, and productive. You can witness it yourself traveling to places like Turkey, the UAE, Malaysia, and Indonesia, where this was certainly my experience.

Abu Dhabi, in the UAE, is not only impressive visually. It also hosts the Abrahamic Family House, with a mosque, church, and synagogue side by side. Freedom of religion is enshrined in the constitution.

Islam has over 1,300 years of history, and has produced some of the most distinguishable aesthetics.

Top and middle: interior tilework and dome of the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran. Bottom: interior of the Mosque-Cathedra, of Córdoba, Spain.

Its position in between the biggest world civilizations allowed it to preserve knowledge from older empires, increase the exchange of knowledge across civilizations, and produce fundamental new contributions.

The world in 1000 AD. Muslims, in green, are between Europe on one side and China and India on the other, which meant they controlled all commerce and transit between them. Source.

But within Islam, there’s a problem of Islamism: a political movement that says Islam should influence politics because it’s superior to liberal democracy, capitalism, and any other alternative. Islamists want Sharia (the law derived from Islam1) above civil law, they want it to apply to non-Muslims, they seek pan-Islamic political unity, and the creation of Islamic states. So by nature, it’s not individual and persuasive, but social and coercive in its attempts to spread. That’s why the European Court of Human Rights declared Sharia incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy. It’s why Turkey banned the leading political party in the late 1990s: Its Islamism went against democracy and the country’s secular constitution.

There is a blurry line between Islam and Islamism. It’s crucial to understand it though, so let’s take specific examples.

I hope the difference is clear: Islam whispers to the soul; Islamism shouts on the street. Islam wants believers to get on their knees, Islamism wants you to get on yours. Islam breeds pilgrims, Islamism conquerors. Islam saves souls, Islamism drafts laws. Islam wants the freedom to believe, Islamism wants obedience.

Islam is a personal religion, a set of personal beliefs. Moderate Muslims respect that others don’t share the same beliefs. This is protected by the Universal Human Rights. Islamism is a political movement that tries to impose its views on others. This is against Universal Human Rights.2

Islam is protected by Universal Human Rights, Islamism is against them.

If you want a test to differentiate between Islam and Islamism, here are seven questions you can ask:

Is it voluntary or coerced? If it’s voluntary, it’s consistent3 with Islam. If it’s coerced, it’s consistent with Islamism.
Is it just for the believer (consistent with Islam), or also for others (consistent with Islamism)?
Is civil law supreme (Islam), or is Sharia (Islamism)?
Are all citizens equal (Islam), or do Muslims prevail (Islamism)?
Is it persuasion (Islam) or intimidation (Islamism)?
Does it make room for dissenters inside the community (Islam) or not (Islamism)?
Is the same standard applied to all religions (Islam), or does Islam have privileges (Islamism)?

Now, these are extremes. As we saw in this article, in the West:

About 20 – 50% of Muslims are moderate Muslims
About 15-20% are Islamists
In between, about 10-50% are Conservative Muslims. They might, for example, think that the precepts of Islam should apply to all, but they might use persuasion instead of coercion to achieve this goal.

If we were to draw this:

The best way to understand the difference between each extreme is to dive into each separately.

The Moderate Muslims

They believe in Islam, and they also tend to think that:4

The Quran is not the literal word of God
There are many ways to interpret Islam
Democracy is above Islam, and they’re compatible
Men and women are equal
Homosexuality should be accepted in society
Jews don’t have too much power, they can be trusted
Israel has a right to exist
School should be secular and mixed genders
It should be legal to show a picture of Muhammad and burn the Quran
Halal food is not necessary everywhere

If you’re a Westerner and you know Muslims, odds are higher that they belong to this group. That’s been my experience: I’ve had friends and colleagues from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, and probably more that I can’t remember, and every single one of them was kind, fun, tolerant, and hard-working.

These Muslims know and understand the threat posed by Islamism. They think:

Islamism is a problem
Political violence is never acceptable
Jihad in general, and organizations like ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Muslim Brotherhood are bad

Moderate Muslims would want nothing more than the elimination of Islamism.

This goes to the highest levels of several Muslim countries. For example, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the UAE, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Libya have all outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, in most cases designated it a terrorist organization.5 Many prolific Arab commentators agree.

Here is Mohamed Bin Salman, ruler of Saudi Arabia, about Islamism:

We want to go back to what we were, the moderate Islam that is open to the world, open to all the religions. We want to live a normal life. We represent the moderate teachings of Islam and the right is on our side. We will eradicate the rest of extremism very soon.

Here is the UAE’s Foreign Minister in 2017, talking about Islamism in Europe (a bunch of additional quotes follow. If you get the gist, you can move on):

There will come one day when we’ll see far more radical extremists, and terrorists, coming from Europe, because of lack of decision-making, trying to be politically correct, or assuming that they know the Middle East, or they know Islam far better than we do. That’s pure ignorance.

Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of a Hamas founder, was so repelled by the organization that he defected to Israel, and later to the US, and has been criticizing it ever since. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan have banned the organization.

Here is the a Lebanese Shia Muslim preacher:6

We need to review Islam from beginning to end. The human being no longer has value in this religion. You [Islamists] have distorted the true image of Islam. You have made us feel that Islam is only gunpowder, rockets, killing, and crime. There is the silence of one and a half billion Muslims across the globe. Silent about all this destruction. Silent about the massacres. Silent about killing in the name of God. Every crime committed is being accompanied by the slogan “Allahu akbar.” We can no longer leave Islam as a playground for these so-called Islamists, these criminals, these terrorists.
The whole world has come to hate Islam and Muslims. Campaigns of hatred against Muslims and Islam are rising because of the behavior of Muslims, and because of the behavior of Islamic leaders who remain silent about crimes and justify them. How is the far-right Christian movement rising in Europe? Because it has become afraid of you as a Muslim. What are you offering to break this stereotype? What are you offering so you can say to him: “No, that isn’t true”?
All our calls are calls to violence. All our calls are calls to killing. All our calls are calls to exclusion and eradication. I do not feel peace. I want to feel peace. There has to be a corrective movement in the Islamic world. I want the Islam that came and opened this message with: “In the name of God, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.”

Commentator Ahmed Khalifa:

We Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf the original heart of Islam don’t tolerate extremists in our countries. Our societies are genuinely tolerant. We welcome people from all backgrounds whether they’re different in race or religion.
The real hardliners and extremists run away from our region and head straight to Europe, America, Japan, & places like that. They take advantage of your freedom of speech in the worst way possible and try to tear down your customs, your culture, & your way of life. Sadly, you keep giving them that space & then later you blame Islam for the mess.

Here is the Emirati commentator AQ Almenhali:

A friend of mine travelled to the West recently and went to pray at a mosque there. He told me the [sermon] started normal, then slowly became political and started talking about jihad. He literally said: “I can see how people here get radicalized hearing this stuff.” He got up and left halfway through.
This is exactly why the UAE and other GCC countries regulate mosques through Ministries of Awqaf. It’s not about “controlling religion”, it’s about stopping religious spaces from turning into political recruitment centers.
The Muslim Brotherhood mastered this years ago: mix religion with politics, build grievance narratives, then slowly create ideological loyalty.
The West keeps viewing this as “freedom of speech”. Gulf countries view it as national security.

And Amjad Taha, Emirati expert in Middle East politics:

Why does Britain today have more extremists than the Middle East, and more rapists rivaling the Islamists of Port Sudan in Africa and Pakistan? And why does the UK system protect Islamist jihadist thugs and rapists instead of protecting its own people? We fear visiting London, it is no longer safe. Your people deserve better. Your streets are crowded with 300,000 homeless in London alone, yet while poverty grows, the Muslim Brotherhood, banned in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, is free to run your streets.

Here is the Gazan Arab Muslim Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib:

The "pro-Palestine” movement refused to acknowledge the criminality of hostage-taking & killing innocent Israeli civilians, condemn Hamas’s actions including against Gazans, call for the terror group to step down, or engage in pragmatic activism and targeted demands for specific outcomes that actually help Palestinians [... It] will forever be looked at as the pinnacle of embarrassment, failure, and wasted opportunities—all while the people of Gaza suffer horrendously.

Maliq, another Muslim commentator:

Truth be told: The #1 cause of Islamophobia isn't outsiders. It's us Muslims. Our resistance to reform, silence on extremism, and victim mentality. If we fix ourselves, the fear will fade.

And:

One thing I absolutely hate about us Muslims is our dishonesty. ISIS, Taliban, Boko Haram, they name their groups "Jihad" and "Sunnah", wave the Quran, scream "Allahu Akbar" during attacks, force hijabs on captives, and forcibly convert people at gunpoint. Yet we still rush to say "They're not real Muslims!" Bro, we can say they don't represent Islam. That's fair debate. But pretending they have zero connection to the faith while they quote our books and use our slogans? That's pure denial. We can't keep lying to ourselves and the world forever. The truth isn't Islamophobia. It's honesty.

UAE commentator Majed, on the rapes of several thousands girls for decades in the UK, in what’s called the Grooming Gangs scandal, of which allegedly7 a majority of perpetrators were Pakistani men and a majority of victims White British:8

To imprison a 13-year-old girl, drug her, and abuse her for profit is pure evil. Predators like this do not deserve the name of men. They are monsters who prey on the innocent. What’s even more shocking is the so-called “justice” in the UK. Six years? Nine years? A child’s life has been shattered forever, yet these criminals will walk free while their victim is still young. If this happened in our region, the punishment would have been swift and merciless.

Another take:

Another take.

I hope this gives you a good grasp here: There are many moderate Muslims—20% to 50% of Muslims in the West, as I mentioned.9

And many moderate Muslims very publicly decry the radical Islam speech and behaviors that have been festering, especially in Western countries. How is this happening? Who are these Islamists? What do they say?

The Islamists

In the previous article, we saw that about 15% of Muslim immigrants in Europe are Islamists.10 What does that mean?

Islamist Speech

The best way to understand Islamism is through the eyes of the imams who preach it.

The Imams

Here’s a cut of some imams in the US

Source

These are examples of Islamic viewpoints that are consistent with human rights:

The goal is to make sure Islam is well established in society. To integrate Islam in the USA.
You dedicate yourself to establish justice in the world. That’s what Allah created you for.
Allah mentions he has sent the prophets to establish justice on Earth.
Allah teaches us that there is one purpose: Establishing justice on Earth.11

I haven’t sampled mosques, but I assume this type of message to be the majority. The following are Islamist though, inconsistent with human rights:

We’re supposed to bring Islam to regulate society according to divine law and purpose.

Allah made it obligatory upon the Muslims to change society.
You need to completely replace the system with an Islamic system.
When we say America will be an Islamic country some day, that’s our goal.
Islam has a second round, where Islam will rule the world again.

Here are some other examples of imams sharing Islamist positions in the West:

California: “Islam will enter every household in the US.”
California (San Diego): “America will be a Muslim country, Russia will be a Muslim country. We have to be part of that change. Never apologize, never compromise.”
Again San Diego: “We must understand Islam as a comprehensive way of life, which includes political influence. In Medina, at the beginning, Muslims were a minority. For some it took weeks, months, years to accept Islam, but Muhammad taught us how to build that power.”
Texas: “Mamdani as the mayor of New York is a victory for the Ummah, and if you don’t understand this, you don’t understand the role of civilizational strength. Everyone has a role to play. (Muslim) politicians have a role to play. [...] Across the Western world, Muslims are rising to the point it’s terrifying them. Sweden, Oslo, 10% Muslim. Vienna is 10% Muslim, the Ottomans Turks tried for 200 years and couldn’t do it.”
Colorado: “We’re still fighting Jihad, just not with swords.”
Detroit: “For Muslims, it’s an obligation to prepare against your enemies. The first obstacle is the Wordly life: When you are too attached to it, you’re not prepared to sacrifice. They say ‘You’re too few, just 1%, you can’t do anything, overpower the military.’ But how many times have small groups of dedicated believers overcome groups far more powerful than them?”
UK: “The first blow to the US was Afghanistan. Now we can give our final blow to America. It’s the opportunity to project Islam as an alternative world order. Now is the time to put the final nail in the coffin of Western liberalism.”
UK: "No integration, no multiculturalism, no diversity, no tolerance. You have democracy, we have Sharia."
England, UK: “We (Muslims) have to be Allah’s solution to England.”
Northampton mosque (UK):12 “Victory to Islam. Destroy the enemies. Bless the Mujahideen (holy warriors). Heal from the usurping Jews and every enemy of Allah. Count them and kill them, leave none of them alive. Make them war booty for the Muslims.”
Dublin (Ireland): “Many of the major problems in the Western world today are because women do not know the status of men in Islam. Since we live in the Western world, women prefer to think that men are equal to them. In Islam, the man is the master of the woman, and the woman obeys the man. The man is the master of the woman. A woman should not raise her voice against her husband. A woman should not leave her house without her husband’s permission.
Germany:13 “Is it permissible to stone someone for adultery? Yes. Obviously, here in Germany you cannot stone someone for adultery. But if there were an Islamic state, then it would be the duty of its ruler to enforce these rulings of the Quran."

Why is this Islamist rhetoric so widespread? Among other things, because it’s politically pushed in the West by Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood (MB).

The Muslim Brotherhood

The UAE, France, the UK, Spain, and Austria have recently published reports on how it’s organized and how it pushes Islamism by penetrating all levels of society from the bottom.15

Muslim Brotherhood logo with the Arabic word for ‘prepare’ in calligraphy below the two crossed swords

It avoids using its own name in the West, keeps membership secret, establishes front organizations and umbrella groups.16 It builds parallel societal structures like schools, nurseries, or funeral homes. In France, it operates over 60 schools. It trains imams across Europe and organizes activities for children. It promotes political candidates in national and local elections and actively lobbies police.

It actively isolates Muslims in the West to preserve its ultra-orthodox views. It created an organization17 to issue religious rulings specifically tailored to Muslims living in Europe, which often promote segregation, discourage assimilation, and push a literature of victimhood of Western societies.

It funds itself with tens of millions of dollars.18 Its biggest donor is Qatar.19 It also has a network of NGOs that host large-scale fundraising events, concerts, and dinners that attract Muslims far beyond their base, thereby expanding their influence, and gather the Zakat (charity). In the UK, charities have found to be important infrastructure for the MB and the terrorist group Hamas. The MB also engages with politicians to secure public funding.20

The proliferation of Islamist speech in Western countries, enabled by these Islamist organizations, is one21 of the reasons why, in some of these countries, next-generation Muslims are actually more radical and more Islamist than their parents.

This, then, finds its way into Western politics.

Islamism in Western Politicians

Elected officials in Belgium intended to implement aspects of Sharia Law in the country. This is very direct Islamism in action.

Chaudhry Sarwar, former Pakistani politician,22 previously UK MP for the Labour party, and father of the current Scottish leader of the Labour Party, stated: “Time will come that there will be a law all over the world that there can be no disrespect to our beloved holy prophet. Any disrespect of the Quran will be inacceptable, intolerable.”

Here is Zul Mohammed, a Muslim who ran for Mayor of Carrollton, Texas:

No vet has made any sacrifice. I want to make that clear. I do not support the US military. No, I do not support the United States. I look down on both entities.

These are politicians!

Unsurprisingly, the head of the German domestic intelligence agency has warned that Islamists were deliberately trying to influence German parties to change the state and society.

Islamism in Everyday Life in the West

Obviously, this trickles into education. In Canada, 11 teachers of North African descent were suspended for teaching “Islamist religious concepts” to elementary school children.

It bleeds into political rallies, like this one in NY:

There is nothing more glorious than a martyr. The Western world is a lie. The members of Congress will be prosecuted, all over the world. Let’s remind the mainstream media that Goebbels was going to stand trial before he shot himself, and we intend to prosecute every media outlet.

And it bleeds into interviews of the public, like this one:

We’re not here to take part, we’re here to take over.

Or this one:

We’re here to take over your country. You can’t stop us. We’re here to uphold Sharia Law.

Or this one:

“As a Muslim, I don’t really identify with British values. I’m Muslim first, second, and last. I’d like to see Britain governed by the Sharia. I believe it’s far superior to democracy.”

Or this one:

INTERVIEWER: Would you undermine the German constitution if you could?MUSLIM INTERVIEWEE: Absolutely. We are commanded to take over Germany.
INTERVIEWER: How do you intend to establish Sharia here and create an Islamic state?
MUSLIM INTERVIEWEE: When Muslims are the majority, and if needed, by force.

Or this example, which I shared in my previous article:

INTERVIEWER: How satisfied are you in Germany?
MUSLIM INTERVIEWEE: Zero. Mainz [German city] belongs to us foreigners.
INTERVIEWER: Would you fight for Germany?
MUSLIM INTERVIEWEE: I wouldn’t do anything for Germany. Just marry a German woman, get a German passport, and I’m all set. [...] I’m from Kurdistan. I have no country, They can’t deport me. [...] Germans out, foreigners in.

You can see more examples here and here. You get the picture.

All of this is speech, and if it remained as such, it would be OK. But it doesn’t.

Islamist Behavior

The worst, of course, is terrorism, which we discussed here.

Terrorism

Over 80% of terrorist attacks in the world are carried out by Islamists—groups like Islamic State, Al-Shabaab, Hamas, JNIM23, etc.

This is also true in the West.

We’re unfortunately used to men killing people while yelling Allahu Akbar, with several dozens of such attacks in the last 10 years. The last Allahu Akbar attack was one just a few weeks ago in Switzerland.

Crime

Terrorism is unique in its impact, but also in the ease of proving its causality. It’s very clear when a terrorist attack has been caused by Islamism. It’s less clear in everyday crime. As a reminder, there is an overrepresentation of Muslims in crime statistics in the West, but is that due to Islamism? Or the age of people? The specific culture in some origin country? Islamism is certainly not at fault in all cases. But in some.

Last week, an MP in the UK Parliament read testimonies of some of the British girls who were raped by the Grooming Gangs I mentioned earlier—some of them by several hundred men. The testimonies are graphic, so I won’t repeat them all, but you can watch them here.

Here are the relevant ones for this article:

“Comments were constantly made suggesting that White girls, that Christian girls, were viewed as having fewer morals, or lower values, whereas Muslim girls were described as having dignity and higher moral standards. These comparisons were used to justify the way I was treated, and to further humiliate and control me.”
“Race did play a part and motivated the selection and demographic of the victims. Throughout my exploitation, the other girls I encountered or who were abused alongside me were almost exclusively White.”
“Things would escalate around Eid [the festivity at the end of Ramadan] and holidays, parties got bigger, got worse, got more violent.”
“The main clash that I had with the religion side of it was I grew up as a Christian. I would wear my cross because it was something really special to me. It was just used as a way to break me down. They said: ‘Where is your god now? Has your god forsaken you?”
“It was all of the White girls in every home that I went to. I remember a man that went to the back of a van, and I saw 15, 20 girls locked in dog cages.”

Of course, these crimes were most likely not perpetrated to further Islam, but they’re frequently the result of a mindset in which the Muslim in-group is protected and the out-group attacked, given the most common national heritage of the perpetrators, the fact that sometimes hundreds of them were involved,24 the nature of the victims, and the quotes above. The most likely read is that this is downstream of the Islamism we mentioned before: Many of the perpetrators shared an Islamist belief where the law of the land was less important than the protection and advancement of the community.

This, however, would have been impossible without abetting from the rest of society—again, because of Islamism

The Deliberate Fudging of Islamophobia and Islamismophobia

In the Rotherham case (~1,400 girls raped):25

Several [council] staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.
There was a widespread perception that messages conveyed by some senior people in the Council and also the Police, were to 'downplay' the ethnic dimensions of CSE.

This fear of being called racist is relevant, as this is in fact a consistent accusation from Muslim organizations. Many times, these are valid. Islamophobia is real, and has serious consequences. Muslims in the West have been shot, run over, and stabbed because of it. They have faced discrimination in employment, housing, and schooling, and suffer from insults and harassment. It is right to decry it.

Other times, however, the criticism is not of islamophobia, but of islamismophobia. It’s not against Islam, but against Islamism. Yet many Muslim leaders purposefully fudge these two, to protect Islamism under the umbrella of Islam.

"Islamophobia" is the password Islamists whisper to walk past the gates.

For example, something stunning happened in Australia last year. A few Muslim nurses boasted that they had killed Israeli patients, and that they would do it again.

Source

In that situation you’d expect the moderate Muslims to decry them. Over 50 Muslim organizations or leaders came out to defend them!26

Let’s lay out the problem clearly:

There are some normal Islamic behaviors and some Islamist ones.
The Islamic behaviors get improperly criticized (islamophobia). The Islamist behavior gets properly criticized (islamismophobia).
Islamist leaders purposefully fudge the two and call both “islamophobia”.
Since Western leaders don’t know how to differentiate between islamophobia and islamismophobia, and they want to treat people equally (human rights), they start policing each other to eradicate islamophobia. Inadvertently, they also shut down islamismophobia.
This opens a path for Islamism to grow.

The key points above are 3 and 4. Let’s take examples of them. First, how Islamist leaders fudge islamophobia and islamismophobia, like in the case of the Australian nurses.

An Islamist group created the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), which the UK government has said consistently opposed programmes by successive Governments to prevent terrorism. For example, it opposed naming 21 Islamist organizations (including Al Qaeda) as terrorist.27 The MCB spent 80% of its charity budget on the Center for Media Monitoring, or CfMM, whose entire goal is to monitor British media to accuse them of islamophobia. This could be a great goal if, indeed, it called out only islamophobia. It doesn’t.

The CfMM called a report of “a knife-wielding man yelling Islamic slogans” islamophobic.28 It called the reporting on the grooming gangs “shoddy science underpinning a narrative favoured by the media.” A coordinated takeover to islamize state schools, proven by the government? According to the CfMM, it was a hoax. It recommends eliminating the terms Islamism and Islamic extremism: If they don’t exist, you can’t accuse people of them, and thus any criticism must be islamophobia!

This would not be a problem if the CfMM was an obscure organization without repercussions. Alas, it has engaged with over 1,000 journalists, editors, regulators, and policy makers, including the BBC29, the Sun, the Express, the Daily Mail… It organized feedback sessions for the BBC and fed into its terminology book. It was instrumental in developing the press regulator’s guidance on the reporting of Islam.30 It has trained journalists from The Standard, The Independent, and Scottish TV. It pressured the BBC to withdraw an inconvenient interview clip (the BBC caved). It recommends flooding newspapers with complaints when they report negatively on Islamism:

If they don’t verify what they are reporting, they are going to get flooded with people emailing them and complaining. And that will discourage them from doing it in the first place, because it costs them, in effect, money, because they have to pay their staff for every hour that they are looking at corrections and looking at complaints.

Let’s move on to another organization. Still in the UK, the National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP) represents the most Muslim police officers. This should immediately heighten your senses, because it’s precisely the type of organization where Islam the religion can translate into Islamism the political movement. As such, you should expect them to be extremely thoughtful in separating Islam and Islamism. Yet last year, it published this document, Confronting anti-Muslim hatred and Promoting Human Rights. The entire document tries to claim that Islam is always good, that what bad people do in the name of Islam is therefore not Islam, and so we should completely remove the concept of Islamism. Of course, if Islamism doesn’t exist, any criticism of Islamism must be… Islamophobia. Here are some excerpts.

Terms such as 'Islamist' blur the distinction between extremism and the peaceful practices observed by the majority of Muslims, perpetuating anti-Muslim hatred and casting unwarranted suspicion over the entire religion.

See what they did? They say calling people “islamist” is racist! Absolutely not! It’s the exact opposite! Terms like Islamist allow us to separate between extremism and peaceful practices!

The following passage is also informative:

Islamic teachings advocate for peace, compassion, and fairness, principles diametrically opposed to the motivations behind religiously justified violence. Media, policymakers, and society at large must exert concerted efforts to distinguish between the distorted political or violent interpretations of religion and the genuine practices of its followers.

Later, it tries to erase the word “Islamist”, and replace it with words like “right-wing terrorist”31. In other words, it’s trying to hide the fact that the extremist religious beliefs behind political Islamism cause Islamic terrorism! And then blame these instances on the right! This represents the police speaking!32

You can see the pattern here. First, Islamism is too broad, it doesn’t represent Islam, let’s not use the term. Then, call criticism to Islamism islamophobia. Accuse the authors, and train the media in avoiding any criticism altogether.

What is the result of all this effort? What is the attitude of Western leaders about criticising Islamism? Reporters have said that accurate stories were not published for fear of being branded islamophobic, that the CfMM and other activists would be able to use any official definition of “Islamophobia” to suppress their reporting, that a newspaper discouraged a journalist from writing about Muslims because the CfMM complained he wrote too many stories about Muslims…

This fear of being called racist, xenophobic, or islamophobic33 has enabled what The Telegraph reported on the Telford Grooming Gangs:

Aware that taxi drivers were offering children rides for sex, in 2006 [the council] suspended licensing enforcement for drivers, allowing high risk drivers to continue practicing, “borne entirely out of fear of accusations of racism; it was craven”.
Senior council staff were terrified that the abuse of children “had the potential to start a ‘race riot’”. The result was stasis, despite officials acknowledging in at least one case that abuse by Asian men had gone on for “years and years”.
A senior police officer allegedly said the abuse had been “going on” for 30 years, adding “with it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out. Politicians were terrified [of the impact on] community cohesion.
As a result of this combination of factors, the council went to great lengths to “cover up information and silence whistle-blowers”. In the words of witnesses, “if you want to keep your job, you keep your head down and your mouth shut”.

The police, the council, and the entire community failed to stop behaviors downstream of Islamism because of their fears to be called islamophobic. Here are other examples of anti-Islamist actions stifled by the fear of being labeled islamophobic:

In the Islamist Manchester Arena bombing that killed 22 people and injured over 1,000, a security guard didn’t stop the perpetrator before the attack for fear of being branded racist.
After a French teacher was beheaded by a Jihadist over the false accusation of a student34, the response from the state and the media was not supportive enough, and now 40% of French teachers say they self-censor on sensitive topics.
According to the UK government, “fears of being accused of being racist, anti-Muslim, or culturally insensitive may inhibit Islamist-related referrals”.
Channel 4 had a documentary about grooming gangs ready to air in 2004, but didn’t “over fears that it could lead to race riots”. Grooming gangs would continue for over a decade.
The South Wales police has been told to log every event where a person is accused of islamophobia, therefore leaving a public record against critics of Islam and Islamism. No other religion has anything like that.
On New Year’s Eve of 2015, over 1,000 women were sexually assaulted in Germany (especially in Cologne) by large groups of North African and Arab appearance. The police originally labeled the night as “Cheerful mood—celebrations largely peaceful”. A later report included the word rape, which a minister’s office allegedly35 asked to remove. Newspapers had to apologize for covering them up
An Islamist who killed 14 people in California in 2015 was not reported by neighbors for suspicious activity because she didn’t want to profile him.
Denmark has made it illegal to burn the Quran, to placate Islamists.36

So that’s the mechanism by which Islamists stifle freedom of speech, which then prevents the West from calling out its problems. And that bleeds into day to day coercion.

Daily Crime and Coercion

This Sikh had to close his restaurant because of Pakistani harassment when he said he didn’t serve halal food:

This debate ended when a Muslim student stood up to threaten a Jewish student and then repeatedly yells “Allahu Akbar”.

This is a Church being desecrated in the UK:

I’m reminded of the behavior of pro-Palestinians in New York a few years back:

Apparently37, this video depicts girls in Antwerp, Belgium, being verbally attacked and groped on a bus for not wearing veils, and for showing too much skin.

These women were harassed on the street because of what they wore:

The poster, an Iranian journalist, added:

“When I say that Germany has its own “morality police,” I am referring to the so-called “Sharia Police,” self-appointed enforcers of Sharia law. I have received direct messages from many Iranian women sharing their concerns about morality enforcers in European countries, who are often silenced and labeled Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, or right-wing.
Whether we like it or not, these Sharia or morality police known as “Amr bi al-maruf”, a collective duty of Muslims to encourage righteous behavior and discourage immorality, exist in many European countries. Often linked to mosques, they impose their version of religious law, targeting women and girls for not wearing the “proper hijab.” This mirrors the experiences of women in Iran. In Iran, when Sharia Police violently harass women for not covering their hair, officials often mislead the world by claiming these are just religious groups, not the official police.
Sources in the Muslim community in Germany report that these so-called Sharia Police have appeared in cities like Wuppertal and Berlin, harassing women under the guise of promoting hijab and Sharia laws. This issue extends beyond isolated incidents, with moral enforcers emerging in schools and neighborhoods with Muslim majorities.”

Here’s another woman harassed by this local Islamist policing.

This Spanish girl had to leave the beach because of sexual harassment by North Africans. She didn’t want to be racist and sat nearby. She didn’t report it for the same reason.

Going to a beach and pointing fireworks at beachgoers while screaming “Allahu Akbar” should not be allowed.

Source

This man is saying that blasphemy deserves death.

Source

This guy harasses girls and old men, but is not in prison because people don’t report him, and they don’t report him because police, the media, or society might call them islamophobic.

Another example here.

Just to be clear, all these behaviors are not just anti-social. They’re illegal: coercion and harassment. Their erosion of public life might not be ideological (these people are not trying to impose Islam) but they’re fueled by Islamism in two distinct ways.

The first is impunity. These acts exist because reporting them, policing them, or naming the pattern carries a social cost, the cost of being called racist or islamophobic, which is precisely the cost the organizations described earlier work to manufacture.

The second is the imposition of an Islamist world view: a woman's visibility is a legitimate object of male policing, blasphemy is an injury that warrants force, burning a church’s door is acceptable because Christians don’t fight back, screaming Allahu Akbar scares people… all of these are downstream of a political project that taught the Islamist script. An ideology works most powerfully once it stops looking like an ideology and becomes simply how things are.

This is how the universal human rights for which Western societies have shed so much blood die a slow death.

So what can we do about it?

My Message to Conservatives, Liberals, Politicians, and Moderate Muslims

As we said, Islamophobia is real and many Muslims suffer from it as a result. It’s bad because it attacks a religion and the people who follow it.

But it’s also bad for the islamophobes themselves. The more islamophobia there is, the more Muslims feel bundled as a whole, rejected by their religion. They get radicalized, or don’t stop the extremists anymore (they’re in the same bundle, at the end of the day). That galvanizes Islamism, which then promotes actions that fuel further islamophobia, in a terrible vicious cycle.

But also, the examples in the previous chapter are not an expression of Islam. They’re an expression of Islamism, and Islamism is a threat to human rights that can’t be tolerated.

To break the cycle, we must differentiate between islamophobia and islamismophobia.

Moderate Muslims are islamismophobic too. They are as appalled as you or me by these behaviors. They want them to end. And they can only end when we call them out for what they are: Not isolated incidents, but the expression of Islamism, the political side of Islam that tries to coerce others into the religion or face consequences, which means it’s against universal human rights.

So here’s my message to each group.38

To Moderate Muslims

You’re in a difficult position. You have your personal, legitimate faith, which on one side, Western society pressures you to abandon, and on the other, Islamists push you to radicalize. When these two sides clash, you’re caught in the middle.

You can help solve this problem by drawing a clear line between yourselves and Islamists. That way, you can blame the problems on the true cause (Islamists), and not on Islam.

Always keep that narrative in mind. If there’s a terrorist attack? You can say: “These are Islamists. Islamism is a political ideology that tries to impose Islam on others. It’s a scourge and we need to get rid of it. This does not represent me, nor a majority of Muslims. I defend human rights.”

If you do that, it will be clear that you are on the side of human rights, and you are enemies of Islamism. It will be much easier to fight it.

The harder fight might be on a day to day basis. When somebody decries islamophobia that is islamismophobia, we should all correct them, but your voice carries more weight than anybody else’s. When somebody coerces, harasses, or erodes civil life, we should all call them out, but if the perpetrator seems to be Muslim, it’s even more important and valuable that you do.

Some conservative Muslims might prefer to fudge the line between Islam and Islamism, but it’s important that you help them clarify it. There really are only two sides to this: Either you’re in favor of human rights, or in favor of Islamism. There isn’t an in between. Islam is compatible with human rights; Islamism is not. As conservative Muslims’ strongest connection to the rest of Western society, it’s important that you help them see that.

To Western Conservatives

Stop conflating Islam and Islamism.

It’s OK to want to eat halal.
It’s OK to want to wear a hijab.
It’s OK to abide by Sharia Law for yourself, as long as you also respect civil law.
It’s OK to build a mosque.
It’s OK to sound a call to prayer in public.
It’s OK to pray in public, when your creed tells you to.
It’s OK to disapprove apostasy and blasphemy.
It’s OK to be a Muslim immigrant.
It’s OK to open a new mayoral term with a Muslim prayer.
It’s OK for Western schoolchildren to go to the mosque to learn about Islam.39
It’s OK to celebrate a specific Islamic event in public.40

All of these are Islamic, and they’re OK. You should not denounce them. That’s Islamophobic. You should be able to differentiate them from Islamism, for four reasons.

First, if you don’t, you’re against the universal human value of freedom of religion, a core bastion of the Western values that you claim to respect.

Second, when you attack a legitimate religion, you attack all of its members. More specifically, you alienate the 20–50% of moderate Muslims who are also fighting the Islamists, because you’re putting both in the same bucket, so they’ll want to defend themselves together. The more Islamophobic you are, the more you’ll radicalize Muslims.

Third, you also alienate the left, who will have a legitimate beef with you.

Fourth, by eliminating your islamophobic thoughts and remarks, you can leave only islamismophobic ones. Every time somebody accuses you of islamophobia, you will know they’re wrong, and you’ll have a good opportunity to educate them on the very important difference between Islam and Islamism.

To Western Liberals

It’s important to call out islamophobia, and any other type of discrimination.

It’s equally important to make the distinction with islamismophobia, because Islamism is quite common. Otherwise, you’ll be unwittingly abetting Islamism, losing your moral clarity, and undermining the human rights that are so important to you.

Islamism is against some of the most important rights you’ve fought for: those of women and LGBTQ+ people. But they’re also against other very important rights: freedom of religion, freedom of speech, animal rights (dogs). Virtually everything Liberals fight for is against what Islamism wants.

Finally, the Left allied with the Islamists in Iran in the 1979 revolution. As the Islamists took power, they turned against the Left. The alliance between Left and Islamism is a one-way relationship.

So first, realize that one of your biggest enemies is Islamism.

When you see a behavior that triggers your concerns about islamophobia, stop for a moment and think about whether you’re actually seeing islamismophobia. If it’s against Islam, you should decry it as islamophobia. If it’s against Islamism, you should join the criticism.

This also means you have to stop the knee-jerk reaction of labeling everything as far-right islamophobia or racism. For example, the head of a French extreme-left party called a law against the Muslim Brotherhood islamophobic. It’s not, it’s islamismophobic. He's enabling Islamism. Banning another Islamist organization has also been called islamophobic.41

To Western Politicians

Politicians who want to do the right thing are also in a tough spot:

Right-wing politicians conflate Islam with Islamism to stoke hatred and call for the expulsion of all Muslims and immigrants
Left-wing politicians call any reaction to Islamism “islamophobia” and use racism to incite conflict with the right
Emotions garner votes, so moderate parties bleed voters on both sides
It’s not always easy to tell what should be acceptable and what shouldn’t.

But I believe the vast majority of people are reasonable. They want Islam and don’t want Islamism. So here’s what politicians should consider:

Is an action consistent with a personal belief? Then it’s OK.
Is it consistent with Islamism (or any other politically extremist view that tries to undermine universal human rights)? Then it should be fought.

This has ramifications for many policies to fight both islamophobia and Islamism, such as policing, free speech, and immigration. We’ll cover these and more in the next article.

Takeaways

Islam is personal and persuasive. Islamism is communal and coercive.
If you’re in favor of human rights, you’re in favor of freedom of religion, and you’re in favor of Islam.
If you’re in favor of Islamism, you are supporting a political movement that is trying to eliminate other religious beliefs and individual freedoms. You’re against human rights.

So it’s crucial that we differentiate between Islam and Islamism. If you want to do that, you can ask questions like:

Should civil law always be above Sharia law?
Are women equal to men?
Is homosexuality acceptable?
Should people be allowed to have dogs?
Should it be legal to eat pork?
Should it be legal to leave the Muslim faith?
Should it be legal to burn the Quran and draw the Prophet Muhammad?

A moderate Muslim would answer yes to each.
A conservative Muslim might say: “I disagree with these personally, but I respect the rights of others to do and think these things.”
An Islamist would say no to some or all of them.

This will highlight the bright line between Islam and Islamism, drawn by universal human rights.

Up next: What can politicians do to reduce this problem, and two-tier policing

Judaism and Islam emerged from pastoral societies, where the state was weak. As such, they both proposed rules that cover spirituality and state law. They give plenty of details on what you should and shouldn’t do, and what the consequences are for each action. Meanwhile, Christianity emerged under a very strong state, the Roman Empire, and so it purposefully focused on morality and spirituality, avoiding the state’s role in shaping law. This is why Jesus said “My kingdom is not of this world.” These roles quickly blurred (Christianity became part of the Roman Empire, Islam created states), but the original influence explains this divergence we see nowadays. The result for Islam is much more prescriptive on people’s day to day life, from what to eat, how to dress, who to marry, how to divorce, how to deal with foreigners, etc. This law is not always clear in the Quran, so the Hadiths tried to interpret it a few centuries later, based on what was written in the Quran, and what was known at the time from the living memory passed down over generations, including reports about Muhammad’s sayings, actions, approvals, and conduct. Since the Quran is frequently ambiguous, the Hadiths were much later than the Quran, and the process to gather them was highly political, there are different Hadiths, who differ in substantial aspects. We can see the interpretability of these texts through the Shia / Sunni gap, which emerged immediately after the death of Muhammad, and was cemented over the following centuries, including through Hadiths: Each school follows different ones. From then, there has been a scholarly evolution of interpretations of Quran and Hadiths, which have led to very different interpretations of what Sharia law should be. This means that there’s not one single Islam, that legitimate Islamic beliefs can differ widely from each other.

The Islamism table above is doing two things at the same time: It’s bundling within Islamism coercive behaviors and, sometimes, speech. This is purposeful, because Islamism is not a behavior, it’s a system of thought. That thought is against universal rights and can sometimes translate into behavior. But shouldn’t free speech be protected, including Islamic speech? Otherwise, isn’t that specifically targeting a religion? This is what this article is about.

“Constistent” doesn’t mean that all Islam says this. It just means that Islam can be consistent with the views on the left of this series of questions, while Islamism will tend to be consistent with views on the right. Traditional interpretations of Islam (like those of other religions) are in some areas tolerant, in others less so, depending on who you ask.

Notice this is slightly different from what I said before on the Islam column. There, I mixed moderate and conservative Muslim views, but excluded Islamist views. Here, I’m highlighting moderate positions.

Note crucially that Turkey and Qatar have not.

From here, transcribed with Turboscribe, translated with ChatGPT

The national data in the UK is not good enough to tell. There are four Grooming Gangs that are known, though. In those, the perpetrators were usually Pakistani. In some cases, also North African or East African. The victims nearly all White. The reports consistently showed that authorities suppressed action in fear of being called racist. When you look at lists of convicts, the individual names of perpetrators include Asad, Ajmal, Mohammed, Ahmed, Taukeer, Mohsin, Javid, Haroon, Zahir, Wajid…

Case in point, Pakistan just condemned two men to death for raping a French tourist woman in front of her children.

And dozens and dozens of moderate Muslim organizations. From ChatGPT: UK: British Muslims for Secular Democracy; Muslim Women’s Network UK; Inclusive Mosque Initiative; Nisa-Nashim; The City Circle; Muslim Youth Helpline; Ahmadiyya Muslim Community UK.Germany: Liberal-Islamischer Bund; Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque; JUMA — jung, muslimisch, aktiv; HEROES Germany; CLAIM; Muslim Jewish Leadership Council.France: Musulmans Progressistes de France; Lallab; Homosexuel-le-s Musulman-e-s de France; Coexister; Les Bâtisseuses de Paix.Netherlands: Stichting Maruf; Femmes for Freedom; Al Nisa; Yoesuf Foundation; European Queer Muslim Network.Belgium: Merhaba; Kif Kif; BePax; European Muslim Network; European Queer Muslim Network.Denmark: Democratic Muslims; Exitcirklen; Sabaah; KVINFO-affiliated Muslim women’s initiatives.United States: Muslims for Progressive Values; Muslim Reform Movement; American Islamic Forum for Democracy; Muslim Public Affairs Council; Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity.Canada: Canadian Council of Muslim Women; Muslims for Progressive Values Canada; Noor Cultural Centre; Canadian Muslim Vote; Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at Canada.Australia: Muslim Women Australia; Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights; Islamic Council of Victoria women’s initiatives; Together for Humanity.

This is a simplification. Depending on the country and questions, this estimate is going to be 10-20% for radical Islamist positions, with a large group of 20–50% additional people who hold conservative views that might bleed into Islamist attitudes.

With the caveat that, sometimes, the word “justice” is used as a stand-in for Sharia, especially when

All Arabic is transcribed by TurboScribe, translated by ChatGPT (shared when ChatGPT allows), edited by me for length to focus on what I consider the Islamist positions.

Transcribed by Turboscribe. Translated by ChatGPT.

This is not an imam but the leader of the MB in the UK

All the data below is extracted from these reports, through NotebookLM. It might contain some mistakes, but I spot-checked and didn’t see any.

In the UK they established the Islamic Society of Britain (ISB), dominated the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), and played a critical role in establishing the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), which successfully sought dialogue with the UK government. In France, the movement built a solid network over 40 years around a central umbrella structure, Musulmans de France (formerly the UOIF), which currently manages 139 affiliated places of worship (about 7% of all mosques in France). Across Europe, they established the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe (FIOE)—now the Council of European Muslims—to act as a massive umbrella for MB-linked groups across the continent. They also created the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organisations (FEMYSO) to mobilize youth and conduct political lobbying.

European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR)

There’s no data on this, and the MB is a broad umbrella anyway, but if you add up all the money uncovered by different reports from different countries, it can easily reach that number, and probably higher.

The Qatar Charity NGO has poured millions into Europe to finance MB mosques and projects through its "Ghaith" program. In Spain alone, Qatar Charity funneled approximately 17 million euros by 2015 to construct and expand MB-linked hubs, including the Islamic Cultural Center of Catalonia in Barcelona.

The Islamic Cultural Center of Valencia (CCIV) became so active in local integration and youth issues that they successfully secured hundreds of thousands of euros in public subsidies from regional governments and city councils. They even established partnerships for sociocultural projects with private entities like the Obra Social Caja Madrid.

It is not the only one. For example, countries with a lot of immigration that settle in enclaves will be living among peer immigrants, and the pressure to integrate will actually be weaker than that of the previous generation, which was a smaller minority so suffered more pressure to integrate.

Governor of Punjab until 2022.

Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin

How can you find hundreds of people willing to participate in such a crime if they are not all willing to protect each other?

This mixes religion, immigration status, race, and government action, so it’s out of full scope for this. I will cover it more in another article.

Here’s the original letter, here’s a transcript. Here’s exactly what it says about the behavior of the nurses: “Healthcare should be provided justly to all. [...] We recognise the importance of professionalism and ethical responsibility within healthcare and that the nurses' actions breached the codes of conduct for health professionals. The statements made by the nurses regarding "killing Israelis" were clearly emotional and hyperbolic, as supported by subsequent investigations. Healthcare professionals are bound by their duty to treat and care for all individuals.” If you pay attention, there is zero condemnation. The rest of the message is about how this is manufactured outrage to cover uphide the deaths in Gaza.

Just to give you more examples. Here you can see it claimed 45% of all hate crime offenses targeted Muslims. But in fact it’s only 45% of religious hate crimes. It was 2.2% of all hate crimes. It probably purposefully mixed denominators (religious hate crimes instead of all hate crimes) to make the stat look shocking. It has continued making similar claims

The section is introduced as: “Certain articles are embellished with extraneous details to the story and don’t provide any further context to the incident being reported on. The purpose of their inclusion seems to be targeted at portraying Muslims and/or Islam in a negative manner.” Among others. Many more examples in the link. Table 13, page 104.

The CfMM met with the director general (who was “very impressed”) and the managing editor of the BBC (who called the CfMM a “powerful machine”).

The only religion for which this was done

It also proposes Irhabist, which is Arabic for terrorist, and Anti-Western Terrorist

There are a few more examples in this document:

These certainly overlap a lot, as over 30 countries are over 90% Muslim. As a result, grooming gangs that were completely Pakistani were also completely Muslim. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference, and they blur. This can lead to either racism, xenophobia, islamophobia, or a combination of them. Here, I am focusing on the impact of Islamism, trying to disentangle it as much as possible. But it’s impossible to do perfectly given the correlations.

She claimed he had expelled Muslim students from a freedom of speech class in which he was going to show a picture of Muhammad. This didn’t happen, and the girl wasn’t even in class that day.

Officers said the state interior ministry's control centre wanted the word 'rape' deleted from an internal report. The minister denied he had mandated that.

Another: In the UK, there are more right-wing terrorism reports than Islamic terrorism ones, despite the Islamic terrorists being much more active and dangerous.

I can’t get the transcription to work, so I’ll rely on the text in the tweet, which might in fact be a mislabel. There were no community notes though.

These aren’t perfectly described groups, but I think they’re good enough.

Same as Muslim children should go to churches to learn about Christianity, but since they already live in a majority-Christian society, they get more exposure than the other way around.

Here’s an interesting example of an NYPD officer who wears a hijab. I think it’s OK to wear a hijab at work. But also, police is a public job, so it should be treated as religiously neutral. Overall, I think it should be possible to wear one as a police officer, but I also respect that other countries might have a different position on this. If they don’t want to allow a hijab though, then no other religious symbols should be allowed, like in France of Quebec. The principle must be the same for all.

Another example: US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib used the term “From the River to the Sea”. This is a slogan traditionally used to say that the entire region of Palestine (present-day Israel, Gaza, and West Bank) will become Muslim. This is considered Islamist, as it promotes the political expansion of Muslim rule over what is today not Muslim rule. She was censored for it. The censoring was called Islamophobic. I think this example is a bit muddier, because it’s arguable whether the entire logic here is valid. Maybe actually Tlaib didn’t mean that, and maybe that’s a contentious edge case of Islamism. But for the same reason that it’s unclear whether her statement is Islamist, it’s unclear whether her censuring is islamophobic.The movement Queers for Palestine legitimately worries about the plight of Gazans, but it should note that ~95% of Gazans don’t accept gay relationships, that the ruling Hamas is supported by a large share of Gazans, and that Hamas is a terrorist Islamist organization.

Why kinship societies kill their old - David Oks

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 08:27:16 +0000

A resident at a “witch camp” in northern Ghana

Here is the story of a murder.

In northern Ghana, on the western bank of the Volta river, there is a village called Kafaba. There’s not much I can say about Kafaba that would make it seem special or remarkable in any real way: indeed there’s no real sense in which Kafaba is very different from the other villages nearby. Like the other villages around it, Kafaba is a farming community, populated by members of an ethnic group called the Gonja; and like the other villages around it, Kafaba is very poor.

Our story starts in the summer of 2020. It was a difficult time for the people of Kafaba.

The rains that year had been spasmodic and disappointing, heralding a bad harvest to come. So things were already uneasy. Then, in early July, Kafaba’s “youth shed”—a gathering place for the young people of the town, affiliated with the local branch of Ghana’s ruling party—burned down. One misfortune might be bad luck: but for the people of the town, superstitious and fearful, two misfortunes in a row suggested some malevolent force at work. People began to talk of witchcraft: Kafaba, they said, had been cursed.

And so the people of Kafaba invited a soothsayer into town. The soothsayer called herself Sherina Mohammed, though she operated under other names; and she spent her days traveling around the Gonja region, performing miracles and hunting witches. She arrived in the third week of July, spoke with the locals, and soon announced that she’d identified the witch who was cursing Kafaba. It was, she said, none other than the oldest woman in the village, a 90-year-old widow named Akua Denteh.

Akua Denteh had resided in Kafaba for decades. She had raised six children there, and since the death of her husband she’d lived with one of her granddaughters, farming yams and maize. After her death, she was described as a pious and simple woman. But clearly there was some reason to dislike her: among those accusing her, it seems, was the same granddaughter who looked after her. And so people began to talk of Akua Denteh the witch.

Witches, of course, must be confronted.

And so one night, the soothsayer and a few accomplices—the granddaughter among them—confronted Akua Denteh at her home. They dragged her to another location, where they spent a long night attempting to torture a confession out of her. They whipped her, beat her, and forced her to drink concoctions that the soothsayer had prepared. The soothsayer demanded that Akua Denteh give her the names of the people she had killed through magic; but the old woman continued to deny that she was a witch. At some point, the soothsayer held a machete to Akua Denteh’s chest, and the old woman’s resistance broke: she admitted that she was a witch. The soothsayer had what she needed. She told the granddaughter that she was lucky to be alive: Akua Denteh would have killed her next.

And witches, of course, must also be dealt with.

And so on the morning of July 23, the soothsayer and the granddaughter dragged Akua Denteh to the town square, announced that she had been “limiting the progress of the town” through her witchcraft, and began to beat her with whips and rocks. Soon the whole village gathered to watch. Several people took out smartphones to record the scene: a few women even joined in. Akua Denteh begged the attackers for mercy: but it was no use. Eventually she fell unconscious, and when she stopped responding her attackers simply left her body in the street. The next day, never having regained consciousness, Akua Denteh died.

Such things, horrible as they are, are not unheard of in northern Ghana. It wasn’t even the soothsayer’s first murder: she had been involved in two previous killings of alleged witches. The next month, in the same Gonja region of northern Ghana, another alleged witch was attacked by a mob and nearly killed. Murders, though, are only the most extreme expression of the witch phenomenon: typically those accused of witchcraft flee before they can be killed, relocating to one of the “witch camps” that dot the region.

But the Akua Denteh killing was different. Videos of it circulated widely on WhatsApp and Facebook: and the public was furious. Soon Ghana’s president condemned the murder; lawmakers introduced a bill to make witchcraft accusations illegal; and the police descended on Kafaba and arrested the chief of the village and various others who had been involved in Akua Denteh’s death. Almost all of them were eventually released for one reason or another; ultimately only the soothsayer and Akua Denteh’s granddaughter were convicted of a crime.

Akua Denteh’s family, for their part, defended her memory. She had simply been a loving mother and grandmother: she had certainly not been a witch. Indeed, as her eldest son told a radio interviewer: “If my mother was a witch, I would have killed her myself.”

There are quite a few people in the world who agree with that sentiment.

It’s strange to think, in our age of self-driving cars and mythically capable machine intelligences, that so many people around the world not only believe in witchcraft but are also willing to murder their relatives on its account. Witch accusations and witch killings remain alive and well not just in northern Ghana but in much of the world. We see them in Papua New Guinea; in eastern Indian states like Bihar and Jharkhand; and across much of sub-Saharan Africa, from Burundi to Liberia to the Central African Republic.

And there’s something peculiar about many of these cases.

Consider, for example, a few recent stories from Zambia. In January 2026, an 80-year-old man was poisoned to death by his children and grandchildren, “on suspicion of practicing witchcraft.” In March, a 17-year-old beheaded his 80-year-old grandmother with an axe “accusing her of practicing witchcraft.” And then in April two village elders—one 70, the other 67—were “accused of practicing witchcraft” by the people of their village, confronted by “an expert witch-hunter,” and made to drink a poisonous concoction that killed them.

You’ve probably noticed the pattern here. The victims are elderly; and they are killed by people who know them well, typically by younger members of their own family. Sometimes this occurs directly, with a family member murdering an older relative; in other instances it happens through the intermediation of a hired witch hunter.

I find this pattern very strange and very surprising.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay on funerals in sub-Saharan Africa. I talked a lot about kinship: the reason that people are willing to spend such enormous amounts on funerals, I suggested, was to signal adherence to the sharing obligations that define family life in kinship societies. In a kinship society, your family is the basic unit of economic and social life; you support them when they’re in need, and they do the same for you; and these sharing obligations are the price of membership in the kinship network, which amounts to the only safety net you have. At the apex of the kinship system, of course, sit the elders: the members of the group who have accumulated a lifetime’s worth of social debts owed to them. Kinship societies are societies that venerate elders. Among the Gonja, for example, each day starts with a younger member of the household prostrating at the open door of an elder in order to greet them.

And yet these same elder-venerating societies also murder their elders in horrific ways. Why is that? Why do kinship societies kill their old?

I want to propose a cold sort of answer: witch killings function as a way to ration resources.

Kinship societies are redistributive societies: they redistribute from the young, productive, and healthy to the old, unproductive, and sick. Of course, all societies have some sort of redistribution. But in kinship societies, that redistribution occurs within the household: and—particularly in bad years, when households are close to scarcity—amounts to a zero-sum choice between feeding the young and feeding the old. The young, productive, and healthy would like some way to escape these obligations: but they can’t do that without violating the fundamental norms of kinship.

So witch killings are a way out: they allow you to repudiate kinship obligations while publicly reaffirming your commitment to them. By accusing your grandfather of witchcraft and killing him, you can dispose of an unwanted dependent without ever admitting that you wanted him gone. Of course, you might really believe that your grandfather is a witch: but that’s also a tremendously convenient thing to believe. There’s a reason why the people targeted by witchcraft tend to be marginal members of the household whose consumption can’t justify itself. Witch killings are a perverse sort of resource management.

And to understand how people arrive at that point—how the logic of venerating elders is also the logic of killing them—we should think a little about what families do in the first place.

A woman in hiding after being accused of witchcraft in the Central African Republic

Kinship societies are tense societies

You can think of the human family unit, in a very bare-bones sense, as a mechanism for sharing resources across time. When you’re young and unable to provide for yourself, your older relatives feed you and care for you. Eventually things flip: you become old enough to provide for yourself, and you have children of your own who you need to feed and look after; and your older relatives become unable to provide for themselves, and need you to look after them as well. Eventually you’ll be too old to look after yourself, and your children, and their children, will look after you, just as you looked after them.

And that means that at any given moment, family life is a constant process of redistribution from net producers to net consumers—with the identity of those producers and consumers changing over years and decades.

Of course, giving up your resources for your relatives is always painful. Usually you do so because you love them. But even setting aside the question of love and filial piety, there are ways to justify the expense. Children, for example, are an investment: you care for them now, and eventually they’ll care for you.

But it’s a different story with the old.

Let’s say you’re a farmer in a poor and traditional society, and you live in an intergenerational household of some kind: you live with your wife, your children, your mother, your grandmother, and perhaps a few others who are more distantly related to you. (Or, as is often the case, not really related at all, but “part of the family.”) You and other able-bodied adults are the net producers; everyone does something, whether it’s farming or working around the house or selling your surplus in the market. Your grandmother is the oldest person in the household. For a while she does her part, helping raise the kids and such; but at some point she won’t be able to do that. At some point, she’ll have become a pure dependent.

Of course, some version of this problem surfaces everywhere in human life: every society has some process of redistribution that takes from the net producers and gives it to the net consumers. In modern societies, that redistribution is mediated by impersonal institutions, like pensions, schools, and healthcare programs; and that means that the cost is spread across millions of strangers, with no individual household bearing the full weight of its dependents, whether they’re young or old.

But that’s not the case in traditional societies. In such societies, redistribution takes place inside the home, with producers forfeiting resources to support their elders directly: and because those societies tend to be poorer and much closer to scarcity, that reallocation is much more painful. You are taking food off your plate, or your children’s plate, to give to your grandmother. Probably you love and care about her a great deal. But as a purely material matter, it would be better for the household—for everyone, really—if she were just gone.

You can see where this logic might lead.

Looking at the historical record, we can find quite a few examples of societies that practiced one form or another of elder-killing. The Aché hunter-gatherers of Paraguay, for instance, traditionally killed women who were too old to be useful with an axe to the head, and killed men who were too old to be useful by sending them away and telling them never to return. Sometimes senicide occurs with the consent of the elders: accounts of Inuit elder-killing practices, for example, typically suggest that victims were willing to die, and might even request the killing in order to spare others the burden of supporting them. (Immanuel Kant, discussing Inuit senicide practices in his Lectures on Ethics, called it a “loving service” motivated by “true filial love.”)

But such open killing of elders is typically only a feature of nomadic hunter-gatherer societies, in large part because social groups tend to be small, mobile, and relatively egalitarian. But in settled societies, elders are able to accumulate decades’ worth of standing and social debt: and that authority makes open senicide not just taboo but structurally impossible. You can’t simply dispatch the person on whom the entire social order of the household depends.

And this results in a great deal of suppressed tension. Elders are burdens; but no one can say so. Kinship societies, under the surface, are very tense societies. We can see that tension sublimated in traditional folklore: countless societies around the world have stories that focus on why old people are useful as repositories of wisdom despite being materially unproductive. (This is the “wisdom of the hidden old man saves the kingdom” motif, which you can see everywhere from Serbia to Ghana to Japan.) You might occasionally see senicidal or “death-hastening” practices—like the Tamil practice of thalaikoothal, in which elders are made to drink coconut water until their kidneys fail. But these are not, and never can be, acknowledged in the open.

And so life in kinship societies is defined by the demands of the elderly. It’s only natural, then, that this breeds a simmering resentment toward them, a resentment best expressed, to comport with kinship obligations, in the language of witchcraft: it is not you who betrays the kinship obligation, but the elder. The anthropologist Sjaak van der Geest, who spent years in the southern Ghanaian town of Kwahu Tafo, regarded this “ambivalence towards old age” as the central fact of the town’s intergenerational life. In public, the young people of the town honored the old for their wisdom and spiritual authority; but in private, they spoke of the old as practitioners of bayie, witchcraft, who had achieved their advanced age at the expense of their relatives.

When van der Geest asked young people what made them resent the elderly, the most frequent answer was that they “did not go.” The old would tell van der Geest the same thing. Why were old people accused of bayie? “It’s because you’ve grown old, that’s why you are being called a witch. You won’t go,” one old person told him. Won’t go where? Simple: “you won’t die.”

A woman suspected of witchcraft in the Central African Republic

Witch killings are about rationing resources

In 2005, the economist Edward Miguel published a study of witch killings in Sukumaland, a poor and almost entirely agricultural region of northwestern Tanzania. Sukumaland was a hotbed of witch killings. Between 1970 and 1988, it had seen about 3,000 people killed as witches, not counting those merely driven from their villages. And the pattern of those killings was always the same. The targets would be elders, typically older widows; some negative event would occur, for which the elder would be blamed; and as things reached a crescendo a younger member of the household would arrive at their hut at night and kill them with a machete. In the words of one woman, who had escaped murder by fleeing to a witch camp:

I ran away from Rusule in Shinyanga District after being suspected of being a witch. … There were many deaths in the family … then rumour began to spread in the village that I was the one who killed them. … [M]y own children started to hate me, … some of them started taunting me as a witch. I tried to explain but they did not give me the chance to vindicate myself. I knew what would befall me in view of what had happened to others previously, for they were brutally killed. Thus, when … one of the grandchildren whispered to me that they were about to kill me, I left the same evening. … I have lived in this camp for three years now, and though I love my family, there is no way of going back to face certain death.

But the most interesting part is the pattern that Miguel found in these murders: they clustered in years of irregular rainfall, either droughts or floods, and thus when agricultural conditions were worst, and thus when households were most desperate for food. The frequency of witch killings roughly doubled in years of irregular rainfall, while the frequency of every other type of murder stayed flat. And there was no spike in witch killings during disease outbreaks, even though witches were thought to be responsible for disease. Witch killings correlated with economic stress in the household, and only with economic stress in the household.

That pattern suggested a disturbing reading of the Sukumaland witch murders: they were a way for households to ration resources. In a famine year, an elderly relative is the most expendable member of a household, and their death frees food for everyone else; so you have plenty of incentive to get rid of them. But you can’t just kill them openly: you need to find a framework through which the killing is not only excusable but even virtuous. Witchcraft is that framework. By accusing your elder of being a witch, you can declare that the elder defected first: she had been cursing the family for her own evil purposes.

So killing her isn’t a breach of your kinship obligations: it’s an enforcement of them. The same with hiring a witch hunter. Witch hunters exist because there’s a market for their services: and the essence of the value they provide is providing an outside verdict that sanctifies what the family already wanted to do. Strange as it sounds, accusing your elderly relative of witchcraft and murdering them with a machete is the respectable option.

And this perverse logic also shapes who is targeted.

If witch killings are a way to shed dependents in difficult times, then they’ll tend to target the household members who are costliest to carry and least able to defend themselves. Widows are vulnerable because they are old, consume without producing, and lack the protection of a living spouse. And they are particularly vulnerable when they’re not surrounded by their own kin. Societies with high rates of witchcraft murder tend to be patrilineal—where descent and inheritance flow through the male line—and patrilocal, meaning a wife moves at marriage into her husband’s village and typically stays there even after her husband’s death.

The town that van der Geest was staying in, for example, was an Akan town; the Akan are matrilineal and matrilocal, so elderly widows were surrounded by their own kin, and while there was plenty of witchcraft gossip there were no witchcraft murders. The Sukuma, by contrast, are predominantly patrilineal and patrilocal. The elderly widow, in such a system, is surrounded by in-laws rather than kin: structurally, she is by far the most vulnerable person in the village, and the first to be a witch when things get tough.

This logic is particularly brutal in times of deprivation, like famines: but the same basic logic applies when inheritance is at play. In the tribal belts of eastern India—states like Jharkhand, Bihar, and Odisha—witch killings are usually instruments of land grabs. A widow holds a claim on her dead husband’s plot; her brothers-in-law want the land for themselves; some misfortune occurs, or is manufactured; the brothers-in-law pay an ojha, a local diviner, to name the woman as a witch responsible for the incident, and then either kill or excommunicate her; and the plot reverts, after she’s gone, to the men who accused her. (Researchers who interview the accusers find the property motive barely concealed.) We see the same on the Kilifi coast of Kenya, where elderly people are regularly accused of witchcraft by their families and then murdered for their land. So common is this pattern that elderly people have taken to dyeing their hair to look younger: “When they see the grey hair of their grandmother,” one local activist told the BBC, “they claim she is a witch and execute her.”

And that same brutal logic also explains why it’s not only old people who are accused of witchcraft.

This is what we see, for example, with the rise of the “child witch” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Until a few decades ago, Congolese society had no concept of child witchcraft: witchcraft was understood as something practiced by elders, not children. But starting in the 1980s, the DRC experienced several mass mortality events—two civil wars and a brutal AIDS epidemic—that left hundreds of thousands of children orphaned. Those orphaned children went to live with their relatives: but in their new households they were marginal members without close blood ties. And so when times got tough, households would turn on them the way they might otherwise turn on an elderly dependent. Families would go to revival churches and pay pastors for “deliverance” services: the pastor would diagnose the child as a witch, attempt an exorcism, and when the exorcism inevitably failed the child would be expelled from the household and left to roam the streets. In the 2000s, 70 percent of the tens of thousands of “street children” in Kinshasa had ended up there because of a witchcraft accusation.

Who, then, is the witch? The witch in all cases is the member of the household whose consumption is most difficult to justify: witchcraft is simply the dark side of kinship. This doesn’t mean that people don’t actually believe that their relatives are witches: it’s very easy to believe something that’s advantageous to you, especially if you resent the burden they impose. But it’s not a coincidence that witches are always the most unwanted members of a kinship group: the belief is flexible enough to justify the need.

Mediating institutions mean you don’t have to kill dependents

When people talk about witch killings, or about other practices that seem archaic or grotesque, they tend to treat them as problems of belief. And indeed belief in witchcraft plays an important role in justifying the murder of family members. But witchcraft accusations, expulsions, and killings have a particular function: there’s a reason why we’ve seen them in so many different societies across history, from early modern England to contemporary northern Ghana. They are an excuse to kill dependents, and particularly the old and infirm.

There’s something deeply ironic about the fact that the societies that place the greatest emphasis on family obligation are also the ones that butcher those who can no longer support themselves—the very people who would benefit most from a warm and loving family. In kinship societies, the family is above all else an economic unit, a pool for the sharing of resources; and whatever measure of love enters into the equation, its members cannot escape the cold logic of necessity. That logic does not require declaring your grandmother to be a witch in order to justify murdering her. But the tension between family love and economic necessity is a constant force in societies defined by kinship: it is, indeed, the central antinomy of traditional life.

The best thing that can be done, then, is to divorce the one from the other: to make the family less of an economic unit and more of a personal one. Human societies will always have to deal with the problem of dependence: some share of the population will inevitably require resources they can’t generate themselves. But mediating institutions—like pensions and social insurance—turn that inevitable redistribution from a household burden into a societal one: and by doing so they defuse the resentment that builds when a household must choose between its young and its old.

That, I think, is the deepest case for impersonal institutions: that they weaken the link between love and material obligation. Families, of course, will still be economic units, dedicated to the sharing of resources, and that will always lead to tensions: these questions are the substance of daily life, whether in rich countries or poor ones. But the more that family life is governed by love and affection rather than material necessity, the better for everyone.

The Akan have a proverb, abusua do funu: “the family loves the corpse.” I quoted it in my essay on funerals, as a sort of wry comment on the tendency to spend more on funerals than on the living. But really it’s much darker than that: it’s one of the proverbs that Ghanaian taxi drivers paint on the backs of their cars as charms against witchcraft, alongside others like sura nea oben wo, “fear the one who is close to you” and otan firi fie, “hatred comes from the home.” They are sayings about the dangers that lurk within the family unit. The family loves the corpse because the corpse no longer eats. The living elder, in bad times, is not always loved at all.

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异乡的乡音 | JustGoIdea

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:58:52 +0000

异乡的乡音

02 Jun, 2026

坐在街边小店里喝饮料，这几日的夜晚微风习习，甚是凉爽。旁边是一家中餐馆，不知什么时候添了点唱机。断断续续的歌声随风飘来，并不那么真切。可人在异国他乡，听见这样的声音，心里还是会轻轻一动。

也正是这样的声音，让我忽然想起十几年前在 CHCH 的夜晚。那时受邀到一位老华人家中聚餐。饭后，我们一行人去了花园里的木屋，打开点唱机选歌。让我意外的是，曲库竟然还算新，2010 年以前的许多流行歌都有。大家唱着、跳着、觥筹交错，气氛很热闹。几位上了年纪的大叔兴致起来，还拉着我们几个十几二十岁的年轻人一起对唱京剧样板戏的选段。

那些唱段，我当然听过，但毕竟离我们这一代已经有些远了，并不怎么会唱。可在那样的氛围里，也就跟着屏幕上的歌词唱了起来。唱得未必准确，也未必懂得其中所有意味，却觉得那一刻很自然。

现在想想，那些唱段对几位长辈来说，恐怕并不只是「歌」。那是他们年轻时听着长大的声音，是时代留在身体里的记忆。虽然人无法完全选择自己伴随什么声音长大，但那些旋律、腔调、唱词，夹杂着复杂的历史，也夹杂着青春、酒桌、朋友、热闹与某种已经远去的生活经验。对年轻人来说，它可能只是历史的残响；对他们来说，却是生命的一部分。

那一晚让我感到奇妙的是：在异国他乡，一群原本素不相识的人，只因为同文同种，便可以坐在一起吃饭、喝酒、唱歌、说笑。我们未必真的了解彼此，年龄不同，经历不同，观念也可能不同；可一旦饭菜端上桌，熟悉的语言聊起来，老歌唱起来，许多隔阂便暂时松动了。

在故土，「同文同种」常常不算什么。人们还会因为地域、阶层、年代、观念而彼此区分。可是到了远方，语言、口音、饭菜、歌声，突然都变成了一种暗号。不必解释太多，就能让人感到：原来你也从那里来。

这种亲近很真实，像是在漂泊之中临时形成的一个小共同体。大家短暂地把孤独放下，把异乡感放下，在一首歌、一杯酒、一句玩笑里，互相确认了一下彼此的来处。

所以乡音最动人的地方，也许并不在于它多么优美，而在于它证明：人曾经从某处来，也曾经和一些人共享过相似的声音、语言和记忆。

异乡的风一吹，那些声音就又回来了。它们不完整，断断续续，甚至未必悦耳，可正因为如此，才更像真实的故乡。故乡并不会完整地归来，它只是偶尔藏在一阵夜风里，一首老歌里，一桌饭菜里，或者一群素不相识却忽然可以欢聚的人之间。

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Why China got rich, and India didn't - David Oks

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 01:55:37 +0000

Here is a question that I think about a lot.

In the year 1950, much as today, the two largest countries in the world by population were China and India. China was a good deal larger at the time, holding 22 percent of the world’s population to India’s 15 percent; but really the two were in a very similar position. Both of them were giant countries that had assumed their current state—India as the independent Republic of India, China as the People’s Republic of China—in the preceding three years. Both of them were among the very poorest places on earth. And both of them were about to spend decades trying, by very different means, to make themselves rich.

For China, that experience was one long nightmare. China had already been wrecked by a prolonged civil war and by a brutal Japanese invasion in the decades prior, the whole experience killing tens of millions of people. The civil war ended in 1949, with a Communist victory; but what came next was no less catastrophic. The Communists’ leader, Mao Zedong, immediately embarked on campaigns of vengeance against enemies of all stripes, murdering well over a million people in the process; he then launched on an ill-fated agricultural modernization campaign, the Great Leap Forward, that produced the largest famine in history, killing somewhere between 30 and 45 million people; and then a frenzied period of ideological radicalization, the Cultural Revolution, that suspended national life for a decade and killed another 1.6 million. By the time that Mao died in 1976, China was internationally isolated, economically stagnant, and still desperately poor.

For India, the experience was a much gentler one. India had been a colony of the British, and it was able to achieve independence without taking up arms. British institutions like the Indian Civil Service—the colonial bureaucracy, rechristened as the Indian Administrative Service—carried over into the new Indian state. There was a bout of extreme violence in the late 1940s, as the country was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan: but even that was incomparable to what China experienced. And after that episode, India enjoyed long decades of peace, stability, and democratic rule. It was led by a broad-minded secularist named Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been educated at the finest British institutions and governed in the name of science, reason, and social progress; and throughout its entire post-independence period India maintained open elections, an independent judiciary, and a free press. It never experienced anything like the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution.

I suspect that if I’d been around in the year 1950, it would have been obvious to me that India would succeed and China would not. I would have made the same bet in 1960, when China was starving tens of millions of its own people while exporting grain abroad; and I would have done it again in 1970, during the insanity of the Cultural Revolution. Nor would I have been alone. As late as 1985, prominent economists were writing articles in the New York Times suggesting that “far more than China today, India is an economic miracle waiting to happen.”

But they were wrong.

In the five decades since the death of Mao Zedong, China has grown much faster than its fellow Asian giant. China has become a manufacturing superpower and the single fastest-growing economy of the last 50 years; its per capita GDP, on par with India’s in 1976, is now about 2.5 times higher. And so Chinese people have become much better-off than their Indian counterparts. In 1987, median purchasing-power adjusted income in China was $1.88 per day, compared to $2.94 per day in India. Chinese median wages surpassed Indian ones in the early 2000s; and by 2022, China recorded a median income of $13.36, against $5.54 in India. In the 35 years between 1987 and 2022, Chinese median income rose 611 percent, while Indian median income rose only 88 percent.

So what happened? Why did China get rich, and India didn’t? What explains the Sino-Indian divergence?

Last year, I visited India and got the chance to pose these questions to a few prominent Indians, including several members of the Indian parliament. The most common answer that I heard from them was simply that India reformed later. Both India and China operated under strict state control of the economy for much of the post-1950 period; but while China began liberalizing its economy in 1978, India waited until 1991. And so China simply has a 13-year head start: no wonder it’s grown more than India has.

But that doesn’t explain why China has continued to grow faster than India. Between 2000 and 2022, long after both economies had liberalized—and with China already being considerably wealthier—Chinese growth still significantly outpaced Indian growth. So even decades after liberalization, India still underperformed China. The timing of liberalization can’t explain the divergence.

The same is true of policy more broadly. There are all sorts of ways in which Indian economic policy remains inefficient and distortionary in ways that inhibit growth; but the same is true for China and indeed for practically all countries. I don’t think that policy differences explain why India has so reliably underperformed China even at much lower levels of income.

The same is true, I should add, of explanations that cite “Chinese culture” and “Indian culture.” It’s obvious that China and India have different cultures, and that those cultures lead people to behave in different ways. But that doesn’t explain why China started to outgrow India when it did. In the early twentieth century, long before Mao or Indian independence, India was richer than China, and Indian and Chinese cotton mill workers displayed broadly similar levels of productivity. Whatever cultural advantage that China might enjoy over India, it wasn’t operative a hundred years ago.

So I want to propose my own explanation for why China got rich and India didn’t. The moment of divergence, I think, came not in 1978, or in 1991, but around 1950.

Rapid industrial development requires human capital: workers who are literate enough to be trained, healthy enough to show up, disciplined enough to come in on time, and sufficiently unencumbered by traditional life that they can sell their labor to whoever offers the most for it. Traditional agrarian societies produce almost none of these people: the peasants who made up the bulk of both India and China in 1950 tended to be illiterate, sickly, and restricted in all sorts of ways. For people to be productive workers in modern economies, all of that must be cut away. The more advanced European states spent much of the last millennium doing exactly that. And between 1950 and 1980, China succeeded—frequently through brutal means—in replicating that process: over the course of a few decades, the Chinese state modernized its society at the barrel of a gun. By 1980, as its economy opened to the world, China was a socially modern country that just happened to be extraordinarily poor. It had the human capital for rapid industrialization.

But India never underwent that transformation. Its traditional social order survived independence more or less intact; and the Indian state never managed to develop its people’s human capital as China had. When India finally opened its economy to the world in 1991, its people were simply not prepared for industrial modernity in the way that China’s were. China invested in its people; India did not.

So how did China do it? And why wasn’t India able to do the same?

The Communist road to capitalism

In 1949, after decades of war—either against the invading Japanese or against their Nationalist foes—the Communist Party of China triumphed over all its enemies and achieved complete power over mainland China. The remaining Nationalist forces fled to Taiwan; and Mao Zedong, paramount leader of the Communist Party, announced the formation of the new People’s Republic of China.

Mao had three overriding objectives for the governance of China. The first was the absolute consolidation of Communist power over the country; the second was the reconstruction of social life along Communist lines; and the third was the economic transformation of China, from an impoverished and agrarian society into a wealthy and industrial one.

On the last goal—making China prosperous and powerful—Mao failed entirely. China remained bitterly poor throughout his time in power, and all his interventions in economic policymaking proved to be disastrous. But on the first two goals, eliminating opposition to Communist rule and reshaping Chinese society according to his whims, Mao was remarkably successful: between 1949 and 1976, the Communist Party totally transformed Chinese life.

It’s hard for us today to grasp just how brutal that transformation was. From 1950 onward, every force in Chinese life that might contest the hegemony of the Communist Party was ruthlessly suppressed and destroyed. The landlords and “rich peasants” who had comprised the traditional leadership class of the villages, for example, saw their lands expropriated by the Chinese state in the 1950s; they were forced to sit through public sessions in which the peasants would “speak bitterness” to them, typically culminating in their being beaten to death. Several hundreds of thousands of people were killed in this way. During the same time period, another several hundreds of thousands were killed as “counterrevolutionaries” opposed to Communist power.

But it wasn’t just landlords, rich peasants, and “counterrevolutionaries.” Practically every representative of traditional power in Chinese life was crushed. The hundreds of secret societies and sects that had dotted Chinese life, counting about 13 million members in 1949, were destroyed in the “Withdraw from the Sects” campaign; Confucianism and other pillars of the old order were attacked and suppressed; the hundreds of thousands of small shrines that had structured Chinese folk religion were declared “superstitious” and obliterated; major faiths were brought under state supervision, and at the peak of Communist enthusiasm in the 1960s religion was banned entirely and countless ancient temples destroyed. The famous Jing’an Temple in Shanghai, built in the third century, was turned into a plastics factory.

Even family patriarchs lost much of their authority. Decisions that had once been vested in families and elders—about, say, marriage or the allocation of land—were stripped and transferred either to individuals (in the case of marriage) or the state (in the case of land). In 1950, the Chinese government passed the New Marriage Law, which banned arranged marriage, concubinage, and child betrothal, gave women the right to own property and divorce freely, and allowed women to keep their own names upon marriage. This was a radical departure from the patriarchal order that had governed Chinese marriage for all known history: and while it led to a tremendous amount of conflict, the Chinese state simply crushed opposition—branding elders as “landlords” and encouraging women to “speak bitterness” about their in-laws and grandparents. The mass mobilization of women into the workforce, under the slogan that “women hold up half the sky,” was similarly transformative: tens of millions of women were pulled out of domestic seclusion and into economic life, and thus freed from the control of their families. And so the traditional Chinese kinship unit—not merely a “family” but an autonomous institution governing the lives of its members—was destroyed.

All this meant that between 1949 and 1976, the Chinese state effectively destroyed traditional Chinese society: the social landscape of the old China, with all its complexity and custom, was simplified and smoothed away.

And in its place, the Chinese state forged a new nation along its preferred ideological lines. Economic development always eluded Mao; but human development—mass education and mass health—proved more attainable. Literacy campaigns and mass education helped raise the literacy rate from roughly 20 percent in 1949 to almost 70 percent by 1982. These gains were concentrated among women: Chinese women went from “virtual complete illiteracy” to a literacy rate of about 50 percent during the same period. The progress in health was similarly rapid: child mortality fell by 80 percent between the early 1950s and the late 1970s. Even with all the horrors of Maoist rule—including, it should be remembered, the largest famine in history—between 1949 and 1976 China recorded one of the largest sustained increases in life expectancy of any country in history, rising from about 41 years in 1949 to 61 by 1976. And for the first time in history, Chinese women were meaningfully included in public life: by the late 1970s, China had a female labor force participation rate exceeding that of many rich countries.

And so by the time that Mao died in 1976, Chinese society had been utterly transformed. It was still a deeply poor and largely agrarian country; but it had education and health outcomes far exceeding what you’d expect from a country at its level of income. And it had crushed the traditional social structures that had previously governed every aspect of Chinese life. It was a socially modern country that just happened to be extremely poor: in 1980, China had the same life expectancy as Mexico despite having a per capita GDP 80 percent lower than Mexico’s.

And this meant that by the late 1970s, even before the “reform and opening up” process started, China was perfectly prepared for industrial capitalism. The old constraints—kinship, tenancy, female seclusion—had been swept away; the Chinese workforce was mobile, trainable, and cheap. That mismatch, between China’s level of human development and its level of wealth, was bound to be resolved by rapid economic growth.

When analysts from the World Bank visited China in the early 1980s, they reported that its low-income groups were “far better off in terms of basic needs than their counterparts in most other poor countries”; if China’s “immense wealth of human talent, effort and discipline can be combined with policies that increase the efficiency of resource use,” their report said, “China will be able, within a generation or so, to achieve a substantial increase in the living standards of its people.” And that’s exactly what happened.

India’s failed social modernization

On the surface, India’s trajectory was a much happier one. India didn’t need to fight a war of independence to gain independence: power passed from British hands to Indian ones more or less by negotiation. The partition of India was horrific, killing between half a million and two million people; but it still paled in comparison to the scale of the Chinese Civil War, the Sino-Japanese War, or the Great Leap Forward. And in the decades after independence, India enjoyed stability and democratic governance. It never saw the barbarities that China experienced under Mao.

But India also never underwent the social transformation that China did.

The great power in India in the decades after independence was the Indian National Congress, which had been the central vehicle for winning independence. Between 1947 and 1989, Congress found itself out of power for only three years; its hold on power wasn’t absolute, but it was certainly dominant. But Congress wasn’t really an ideological movement. It had started in the late nineteenth century as a forum for educated Indians seeking moderate reform, and then transformed into a mass movement for independence. It was a big-tent party whose membership amounted to the entire cross-section of Indian life: left-leaning secularists, Hindu traditionalists, upper-caste chauvinists, lower-caste activists, landlords, socialists, and many members who were simply non-ideological and attracted to the charisma of the party’s leaders or the power that membership offered.

And so even though Congress dominated Indian politics for decades, it never offered a coherent program for remaking Indian society. If the Chinese Communists sought out endless antagonisms, Congress avoided them; if the Communists imposed radical change from above, crushing all who stood in their way, Congress was happy to defer to existing interests and hope for social cohesion and gradual progress.

This doesn’t mean that the leaders of the Congress Party didn’t have their own ambitions for transforming India: Nehru, who served as prime minister from independence until his death in 1964, had a strong dislike for the “superstition and deadening custom and tradition” of traditional Indian life, and wanted to solve the “insanitation and illiteracy” and “hunger and poverty” that marked the country. But Congress wasn’t united behind him: Nehru simply didn’t have the power to achieve this in a real way.

In 1950, for example, Nehru and his law minister—the famed lower-caste activist B. R. Ambedkar—introduced the Hindu Code Bill, a sweeping reform of Hindu personal law. (Under the Indian constitution, different religious communities were governed by different systems of personal law.) The bill would have outlawed polygamy, granted women the right to divorce and inherit property, and permitted inter-caste marriage. It was similar in structure to the New Marriage Law that the Chinese government passed the same year, though it stopped short of banning arranged marriages like the New Marriage Law had. But the Chinese government had imposed the New Marriage Law by fiat and steamrolled those who stood in its way. Nehru and Ambedkar, by contrast, found themselves frustrated by a wave of opposition from Hindu traditionalists: even India’s president attacked the bill, suggesting that introducing concepts “foreign to Hindu law” would “cause disruption in every family.”

And so the Hindu Code Bill died in parliament. Ambedkar resigned in disgust; and while Nehru ultimately succeeded in reforming Hindu law, he was forced to agree to enormous concessions. The law that regulated Hindu inheritance, for example, exempted agricultural land from its purview entirely, and so didn’t touch the vast majority of useful property; the law that regulated marriage included a right to divorce, but also a provision for the “restitution of conjugal rights” that gave husbands a court-enforceable right to compel their wives to return home.

But it didn’t really matter what the laws said: enforcement was weak to nonexistent. Divorce and intercaste marriage, whatever their legal status, remained vanishingly rare, because the village and the family enforced the old rules regardless of what the law said; customs that compelled women to renounce their inheritance claims, like the Rajasthani custom of haq tyag (“sacrifice of right”) or the Haryanvi custom of karewa (forced remarriage of widows to control their land rights), remained common. Even the officials charged with enforcing the laws subverted them: the administrators who registered inheritance claims, for example, would routinely pressure daughters to sign away their rights in favor of their brothers.

And that was the general pattern of attempts at social modernization in India in the twentieth century: highly publicized reforms, followed by little change on the ground. In 1961, the Indian government made dowries—payments made by a bride’s family to the groom’s family at marriage—illegal, since the practice entrenched the subordination of women and encouraged domestic abuse. But the law went entirely unenforced; dowries remained as popular as ever, and all the abuses linked to dowries still flourished. (Between 1999 and 2016, dowry-related murders accounted for 40 to 50 percent of all female homicides recorded in India.) The same was true of attempts at land reform. Several Indian states attempted land reform in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s; but enforcement was lax. Landlords managed to simply evade the rules through legal means, like transferring holdings to relatives, or registering land under fictitious names; or they simply bribed or intimidated government officials. And so very little really happened.

All of this meant that the Indian state was never able to achieve the social modernization that the Chinese state accomplished. The dense web of kinship obligations and customary authority that governed social life remained intact. Caste panchayats still adjudicated disputes; joint families still pooled and redistributed income; and women remained bound by all the strictures of traditional life.

Nor was the Indian state able to accomplish the dramatic improvements in human capital that occurred in China. Just as it was unable to reform social life, it was unable to provide effective services; health outcomes remained dismal. Within a single generation, India’s health outcomes went from comparable to Chinese ones to dramatically worse. The gap between Indian and Chinese life expectancy widened from three years in 1950 to 11 years in 1980. Child mortality told the same story. In 1950, 27 percent of Indian children died before the age of five, compared to 32 percent of Chinese children; by 1980 it was 17 percent in India, against 6.3 percent in China.

And the same with education. Nehru and his successors were keenly interested in technology and the peaks of scientific achievement; but they could never muster similar enthusiasm for mass education. So India established a network of world-class technical institutions, like the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management, while neglecting everything else: even today, India’s elite technical universities receive the majority of government funding for higher education, while educating only 2.6 percent of the university population.

Indian mass education, meanwhile, remained abysmal. In 1990, only 55 percent of Indian children had completed primary school three to five years after the expected completion age, against 87 percent of Chinese children; and even those who did go to school often got little out of it. In 2009, when India participated in PISA—the Programme for International Student Assessment, which ranks students across countries based on test scores in math, science, and reading—it ranked 72nd out of 73 countries. (China ranked at the top.) The Indian government responded to this embarrassing result by never participating in PISA again. This lack of investment in education is visible in Indian literacy rates, which only exceeded China’s 1990 level in the early 2020s.

This lack of progress was particularly brutal for Indian women. There was no great liberation of Indian women as there had been of Chinese women: all the abuses of traditional life, from dowry murders to forced marriages, remained common. Literacy rates for women remained extremely low; in 1981, only 26 percent of Indian women knew how to read. And with women’s lives still determined by the whims of their families, the vast majority of women remained in the home: by the late 2010s, India recorded a female labor force participation rate of about 27 percent, one of the lowest rates in the world—closer to Afghanistan, at 18 percent, than to China, at 61 percent.

(India’s low rate of female labor force participation, in fact, means that India’s labor force remains significantly smaller than China’s, despite India having a larger population: in 2019, in fact, China’s labor force was 45 percent larger than India’s.)

All of this meant that by the time that India liberalized its economy in the early 1990s, it simply didn’t have the pool of high-quality, low-wage labor that China could command. Thanks to its elite technical universities, India did have a relatively small number of highly-educated engineers, who became the backbone for India’s IT services economy; but it didn’t have the workforce for manufacturing-led growth. Its workers were less literate, less healthy, and less productive than what China could offer; they were bound by caste and kinship obligations that made them reluctant to migrate for work or sell their labor freely; and because so few women participated in the labor force, India had a higher dependency ratio than China, with each working Indian supporting far more people who weren’t working.

India did grow after liberalization, of course; and by historical standards its growth was generally quite fast. But it never saw the manufacturing boom and explosive growth that China exhibited. It hadn’t accomplished the prerequisites.

Human capital is what really matters

I think that people make economic development more complicated than it needs to be. It’s true, of course, that certain policies are better than other policies, and that all sorts of things go into successful economic management: disastrous decisions can ruin everything, though (as Mao’s many disastrous decisions might suggest) not permanently.

But when you come down to it, countries are large groups of people. And the most important thing for the success of those groups is simply who’s in them: this is as true for countries as it is for companies, music bands, and sports teams. Human capital is what really matters. Whether the people can read; whether they’re stunted due to undernourishment; whether their families let them work outside the home. Human capital isn’t the only thing that matters, and of course you also need institutions that can harness the country’s human capital. But you need the human capital to be there in the first place.

One of the nice things about countries, though, is that you can change who the people are. You can teach them to read and make sure they have enough to eat; you can make sure they have the freedom to make their own decisions. This isn’t easy, and it takes a long time for it to have an effect—not least because childhood undernutrition and poor schooling have consequences that can’t really be reversed. But you really can change who the people are.

What made China a “miracle waiting to happen” in 1980 was that it had spent decades doing exactly that. By the time it opened its economy to the world, China had hundreds of millions of capable, disciplined, healthy, and literate workers; it had freed them from the constraints of traditional culture, such that market logic could triumph unimpeded by the old order; and because it had failed almost totally in economic development up to that point, it could offer those workers at unbelievably low wages. It’s not hard to see why it grew so rapidly once it opened its economy to the world.

The Indian government never made the catastrophic decisions that the Chinese government did in the 1950s and ‘60s. But it also never made the basic investments that the Chinese government made, and it never managed to challenge the traditional social order with a fraction of the ferocity that China did.

And so in all sorts of metrics—life expectancy, child mortality, literacy, female labor force participation, childhood wasting, childhood stunting, anemic pregnancies, maternal mortality—an enormous gap opened up between China and India well before they liberalized their economies. I think the true moment of divergence was not in 1978, when China began to reform its economic system, but in 1950—when China passed the New Marriage Law, while India failed to pass the Hindu Code Bill. It was then that the direction of future things was written.

India, in other words, never really did the basics. Health and education outcomes in India have improved significantly over the last few decades; and while India hasn’t exhibited the world-historical growth of the Chinese juggernaut, it has still brought an extraordinary number of people out of poverty since the start of the 21st century. At current levels of growth, India will be about as wealthy as China on a per capita basis sometime in the 2040s. It’s impressive, in fact, that India has managed to grow so much without having accomplished the social transformation that China did. Given how brutal that social transformation was, perhaps that’s a good thing.

But it was also a tragedy for the people of India. They remain significantly poorer and worse-off than their Chinese counterparts. The situation for Indian women in particular remains horrific.

So I hope that this history of the Sino-Indian divergence conveys a simple lesson: if you want your country to go from poor to rich, the most important thing is investing in your people.

When I was in India last year, one of the main things I noticed about Indian policymakers was their firm belief that with a few adjustments—industrial policy here, market liberalization there—India could start to match China’s growth record. And I don’t condemn them for thinking along those lines: good policies certainly do help a country grow. But China’s explosive growth wasn’t simply a matter of “freeing the markets,” reducing the role of the state, and announcing that it was now glorious to get rich; nor was it simply a matter of government intervention to support the manufacturing sector and subsidies for favored companies. China succeeded because it spent decades on the basics of human development and social modernization. India did not. The rest is just commentary.

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It's Not Just X. It's Y.

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 02:29:39 +0000

Against the Quantification of Integrity

When the measure of language becomes its target, it ceases to be good language.

💡

Nerd Rating: 1/5. I discuss the origins of certain linguistic tics in LLMs and what it means for writing, student assessment, and thinking.

"It's not x, it's y."

Large Language Models gravitate toward this type of construction, called negative parallelism. It has its uses: it sets up a contrast. It's useful, especially, for reframing assumptions: "You think it's like that, but it's really like this."

It's all over social media, especially on LinkedIn, and the construction has sparked a backlash amid an ongoing war against automated language production. If you use em-dashes – you might be a bot. If you describe things that delve, quietly, or genuinely (or create lists of three, like that one), you might be a bot.

Recent overuse by language models has led many to declare it bad writing. I'm not so sure. Nobody called JFK a lazy writer when he said, "ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country." Negative parallelism is a rhetorical device, and any rhetorical device is only as lazy or inspired as what it contains.

Automated Language Production

Now, we have AI detectors that claim to protect you from the witch hunt by looking for these patterns. You take your own writing and you run it through Grammarly, which will analyze word patterns that AI detectors might flag. Then it offers ideas for how to change them, which a) gives Grammarly the power to write for you and b) makes your writing lose any sense of rhythm or intent.

Grammarly's review of this section has flagged 27 examples of text I should change to avoid the accusation that I am a machine. For example, Grammarly identified the above phrase – "automated language production" – as 11 times more likely to be AI. It suggests that a human would be "against mechanized language synthesis" instead. The simple two-word combo, "align with" was flagged as 43x more likely to be AI-generated. Real humans say "corresponds." These are small suggestions that add up until the result resembles nothing I chose. The human voice replaced by a machine trying to sound human.

As a result, I just paid Pangram – another AI-detection company – $20 to verify that a recently submitted journal article wasn't AI-generated before submission. It wasn't, and I knew it wasn't. It agreed. That's what I paid for: not to learn whether I wrote it, but to be told it wouldn't flag me. Because if Pangram's AI system found me guilty, that's the end of my career. That's literally extortion.

And if it had flagged it, then what? It would give me a score (four valuations: high, very likely, somewhat likely, human) to assign my integrity a category. In the ecosystem we're all building, I'd have to use Grammarly to rephrase everything: using a machine to write for me to prove that I didn't use a different machine to write for me.

A Culture Hostile to Reason

Our instinct in making sense of these machines is to examine the training data. That training data is no longer "just the Web." The web is the raw meat, but this sausage is heavily pre- and post-processed. Post-training optimizes the model for whatever it's designed to do. This includes techniques such as RLHF (reinforcement learning with human feedback) and RLVR (reinforcement learning through verified rewards). RLHF has humans rank replies, then the system emphasizes those kinds of replies.

RLVR is weirder, and I suspect it's why we see "It's not X, it's Y" so often. Dismissing negative parallelism as lazy gets in the way of understanding why it's showing up everywhere. This type of language is such a powerful framework for thinking that we mistake it for a model's capacity for thought. We credit computation for the work that's done by language.

Weird Dogs

RLVR isn't a structure that watches for words and triggers some sub-process. Instead, you train a model, like you would any model. When that model is done, it predicts tokens. Lots of people are still in denial about this. Token prediction involves producing a list of candidates based on their mathematical distribution in the training data, ranking them by their likelihood given the previous words in the prompt or sequence.

RLVR intervenes by having the model solve math problems by writing their way to a solution, reproducing the language we would use when thinking out loud about how to solve it. When the model arrives at the correct answer, the language it used most often to get there is then emphasized in the finished model. This is (partly) what the industry calls reasoning.

What day was it that we saw that weird dog?

So, think of it like this: You are sitting with a friend. Your phones are dead. Your friend asks: what day was it that we saw that weird dog? You start by saying, "It was Thursday." Your friend says: "No, it wasn't Thursday, because Thursday I was out of town." So you say that's right, so it must have been Wednesday, because Wednesday was your mutual friend's birthday, and you both went to the party, and you saw the dog on the way to the party. Your friend says: "That's right, except, Wednesday was our friend's birthday but the party was on Friday. So we must have seen the dog on Friday."

The two of you have articulated your way to the answer, a verifiable one: you could pop on your phones and check your photos and see that yes, the weird dog picture was taken on Friday. In dehumanizing terms, your gut instinct ("it's Thursday") is what a model might spit out at first guess, and that's where models used to stop.

But you didn't. Your friend countered: "It wasn't [Thursday], it was [Wednesday]." There are more words, which narrow the window of possible answers, and then you arrive, through "its-not-x-its-y-ing," at the correct date. The two of you had actual memories and visceral experiences to work with. Language was the vessel through which these experiences were communicated and conflicts were resolved. The model, by contrast, extends language in longer and longer bursts, replicating the pattern of reasoning you two just engaged in. These longer runs re-enact that deliberation within language rather than through it.

Other high-entropy states get filled by words like "suppose..." which triggers longer speculative passages. "Because," "consider," "alternatively," even "wait" can occupy these positions. These are words that lead to language that brings contrast, exceptions, and abstraction along for the ride. If they get to a correct answer on a math problem, they get pushed to occur more often.

The Reason We Reason

When we talk about a weird dog or have conversations like it, the point of the question was not to identify the date on the calendar when the dog was encountered. It was an opening for a reminiscence. It was posed to reconstruct the memory, to revel in its surrounding context, and to deepen a connection between friends through a shared experience.

Defining reasoning this way assumes that the point of asking a question is to get an answer, that answers can be verified, and that nothing is lost in immediate closure.

Defining reasoning the way it has been used in LLMs assumes that the point of asking a question is to get an answer, that answers can be verified, and that nothing is lost in immediate closure. This has real effects on writing, and the openness to doubt is something we lose in the rapid prototyping of thought that occurs with a language model. Ambiguity, doubt, and uncertainty matter more to some ways of thinking than any immediate answer. The inner life grows in the spaces between the industrial complexes that harness every remnant of our externalized thought.

Nonetheless, the language we use in these states is the same. When AI detectors flag text as AI-generated, is it because it follows a certain structural pattern of that reasoning? Pangram and reasoning models both detect structural patterns based on how humans reason when writing. Pangram's model is trained on pre-2021 data; it then inserts AI-generated versions of the same text into its training.

So, if we publicly shame people whose text looks like it might have been written by a machine – because it mimics the language used for human reasoning – and people stop writing in ways that they internalize as "AI writing" out of fear of false detection, it sends a signal that your language for reasoning must be policed, or you too could be held up to public scrutiny.

In the end, shaming people for writing that gets flagged as AI can lead people to sidestep structures the model has learned from us: structures that are effective tools for argumentation. We take the tools of critical thinking out of the kit at the time we most need them.

For Good Measure

There's another angle to this. An AI-based essay assessment tool was tested in the UK against human graders. The system rewarded writing structures that I can't help notice look a lot like RLVR-based reasoning: "giving out higher marks based on essay length, vocabulary range and sentence complexity, which are often unrelated to academic standards," all of which are hallmarks of AI reasoning.

In other words, the LLM grades humans based on the criteria engineers use to assess the LLM.

The LLM grades humans based on the criteria engineers use to assess the LLM.

There's this old adage from economics called Goodhart's law. The econo-nese version of it is that "any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." Or: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. It could be tweaked to apply to large language models: "when the measure of language becomes its target, it ceases to be good language."

There is danger in evaluating for language patterns over its content, and both generation and detection incentivize this. Automated grading is somewhere between the two: rewarding students for employing the form of reason over the act of reasoning will only make them more tempting and more common. And yet, punishing the form risks punishing reason. Ultimately, we have to think critically in all cases, instead of deferring to the judgments of machines.

Against Automatic Thinking

I'm not convinced by the old "if you haven't done anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about" line. I've seen 99.8% cited as a measure of accuracy in automated surveillance systems since 2018. As Arvind Narayanan has noted, that is on a per-paper basis, which compounds every time we use it. So up to 10% of college students could be falsely accused. If we collectively run every bit of text through an AI model to check whether it is AI-generated, we will generate false positives on an even larger scale.

These models concentrate real authority; companies promise they will reason on our behalf. We normalize something dangerous when we run every two-line phrase through an AI interpreter, post the result online, and say "see? They're plagiarists!"

We create a culture of self-censorship and AI-detector-pressured rewriting and paraphrasing as people strive to avoid these witch hunts. That is the opposite of protecting human expression. We should resist normalizing a trust in any machine's ability to determine matters of guilt. If using AI to write is, at its worst, an industrialization of the mind, then AI detection, at its worst, becomes a surveillance system for thought.

Monthly, for the Second Week in a Row.

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