America Alone
The End of the World as We Know It
By Daniel Pipes
The New York Sun, November 23, 2006
Edited by Andy Ross
Mark Steyn on the Islamist threat to the West:
— Traumatized by
fascism, post-World War II European states were constructed to insulate the
political class from populist pressures. As a result, the establishment has
come to regard the electorate as children.
— The Soviet menace during the Cold War prompted American leaders
effectively to take over their defense. This had the unintended effect of
freeing up Europe's funds to build a welfare state.
— The nanny state
infantilized Europeans, making them worry about such pseudo-issues as
climate change while feminizing the males.
— It also annexed most of
the core functions of adulthood, starting with the instinct to breed. Birth
rates plummeted, leaving an inadequate base for today's workers to receive
their pensions.
— Structured on a pay-as-you-go basis, it amounted to
an intergenerational Ponzi scheme under which today's workers depend on
their children for their pensions.
— The demographic collapse meant
that the indigenous peoples of countries like Russia, Italy, and Spain are
at the start of a population death spiral.
— It led to a collapse of
confidence that in turn bred civilizational exhaustion, leaving Europeans
unprepared to fight for their ways.
— To keep the economic machine
running meant accepting foreign workers. Europe's elites welcomed almost
anyone who turned up. Islam is now the principal supplier of new Europeans.
— Muslims are profoundly changing Europe: Islam has youth and will,
Europe has age and welfare. Premodern Islam beats post-modern Christianity.
Much of the Western world will not survive the twenty-first century.
— The larger forces at play have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its
remorseless transformation into Eurabia. Europe's successor population is
already in place, and the only question is how bloody the transfer of real
estate will be.
— America will emerge as the lonely survivor of this
crucible.
Steyn's advice to Americans:
— Avoid the bloated
European welfare systems, declare them a national security threat, shrink
the state, and emphasize the virtues of self-reliance and individual
innovation.
— Avoid imperial understretch, don't hunker down in
Fortress America but destroy the ideology of radical Islam, help reform
Islam, and expand Western civilization to new places.
— Failing that,
expect a new Dark Ages, a planet on which much of the map is
re-primitivized.
AR Europe is stronger than
Steyn's words suggest. Direct military confrontation is precisely the wrong
way to defeat Islamism, since it has a deep pool of potential recruits and a
global bloodbath would be worse than the disease. Islamism is primitive and
disgusting but many Muslims see this too. Western decadence is also
disgusting, and many post-Christians see this too. A reasonable conclusion
to an admittedly tense confrontation is eminently possible. American
fundamentalism is more likely to start a nuclear war that spoils the
environment for everyone than "save" the world for traditional Christian
values. As for Steyn's insult to European men and to environmentalists
everywhere, there are wimps in the U.S.A. too and we can both limit global
warming and help cut off funds to Arab extremists by moving to nuclear power
in a big way and fast. Islamists with no funding are a nuisance, not a
threat to civilization as we know it. Dan Pipes should have been more
critical — or did he just want to provoke a debate?
By Theodore Dalrymple
Claremont Review of Books, March 14, 2007
Edited by Andy Ross
Mark Steyn's jokes are often brilliant. Quoting the Imam al-Qaradawi to the
effect that "Israelis might have nuclear bombs but we have the children bomb
and these bombs must continue until liberation," Steyn comments, "Thank
heaven for little girls; they blow up in a most delightful way."
Steyn argues that, because of unprecedented low birth rates of the native
populations, and because of the presence of ever larger numbers of Muslim
immigrants with very high birth rates, Western Europe is being rapidly
Islamized, and many countries will have Muslim majorities in the not very
distant future. The low birth rates of its native populations are caused by
the welfare state. The laughably weak pieties of multiculturalism render the
native population incapable of resisting Islamization without engendering
any loyalty on the part of Muslim immigrants.
Steyn warns us that
many of the predictions made by pundits in the recent past that caused the
more susceptible of us to lose sleep now appear ridiculous to us. These
predictions turned out to be wrong because those who made them failed to
understand that a projection is different from a prediction.
Projection may be risky, but at the moment it is all we have to guide us.
The alarmist predictions of Islamization depend upon the supposition that
the populations of Islamic origin in Western Europe will not change in their
allegiance to Islam, and of course this is debatable. So far, the trend
seems to be in the wrong direction.
The principal immediate
attraction of Islam to young Muslims brought up in the West is actually the
control and oppression of women. After all, if you can be sultan of your own
home, you need hardly look elsewhere for a sense of achievement or
importance.
French and British policy towards their large Muslim
populations has been very different. There is apartheid in France: not
official or legal, of course, but de facto. Whether it is better or worse to
segregate, intentionally or not, your social problems in this way, as the
French have done, or to disperse them everywhere so that nowhere is free of
them, as the British have done, I leave to
moral philosophers to decide.
Steyn is right that the main struggle is one of ideas. Political
correctness, which is to thought what sentimentality is to compassion, means
that the intelligentsia of the West has disarmed itself in advance of any
possible struggle. But I think Steyn is mistaken that Islam is ideologically
strong and confident. Shrillness and intolerance are not signs of strength,
but of weakness. Fundamentalism is a response to an awareness that, if the
methods of intellectual inquiry that were used to challenge Christianity
were permitted in the Muslim world, Islam would soon fall apart. But if
Islam fell apart in the Islamic world, what source of self-respect would be
left?
On the matter of military intervention, the export of
democracy, and Realpolitik, I also disagree with Steyn. The idea of bringing
democracy by military means cannot work unless there is some cultural basis
for its introduction, as there clearly was in Germany, and as there was in
India by the time the British left, 200 years after they arrived. The
British did not impose the Westminster model on India. The Indians adopted
it for themselves. Likewise with Israel.
I agree with Steyn's
analysis of the decline of cultural confidence in the West. Without a notion
that there is something in human life worth striving for, no great thing is
ever achieved.
AR An insightful review of an unsettling book but ultimately reassuring. Still, I think the book is not worth reading. I have better things to do with my time.
