Mark Steyn On The Looming Threats Facing Our Nation
(Updated & Bumped)I was on a One Jerusalem conference call with Mark to discuss his new new book, America Alone. In it, he opines on the growing threat of anti-Americanism in Old Europe and the growth of radical Islam throughout the world. His conclusion is that America will have to stand alone in this must-win struggle to preserve Western civilization.
(There's more below the fold)
(I asked the very last question. Yes, that's me with the high pitched, nasally voice. You can find my question a little after the 1:08 minute mark)
Other bloggers who participated the call:
Pamela of Atlas Shrugs, Avi Green at Tel-Chai Nation, Pastorius of Infidel Bloggers Alliance, Jerry Gordon of Israpundit, Omri of Mere Rhetoric, Judith Weiss of Kesher Talk, John Hawkins of Right Wing News, Judith , Anne Lieberman of Boker Tov Boulder, Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit, Rick Richman of Jewish Current Issues, Banagor of Broadsword, Kim Priestap of Wizbang, Tigerhawk, Barak Moore of IRIS blog, Thomas Lifson of American Thinker.
After listening to Mark Steyn speak about the threat that fundamentalist Islam poses to Western civlization, it's apparent that he is one of the few journalistic voices willing to buck multiculturalism and political correctness and describe the future impact of current events in surprisingly stark terms. He plays a numbers game that is hard to discount, considering the declining birth rates among Western nations as compared with the birth rates of Middle Eastern Muslims and their compatriots residing in Western countries. His point is that we Westerners will have trouble maintaining the liberal nature of our civilization as our percentage of population and political influence erodes over time. This is the core theme of his book, and it is one that I look forward to examining. 
As a long-time fan of Mark Steyn I looked forward to reading this interview with him out of Human Events, just as I have long-anticipated his book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
One of Steyn's consistant themes over the past few years is a warning that Europe was not merely the sick patient of the West - that she was actively transitioning from life unto death, and death will bring no victory, only only backward momentum.
[...] For as long as I have been reading Steyn, he has used demographics to powerfully make his point. He does so in this book as well, and the numbers are sobering. America Alone is a book you will want to read, and I urge you to. The world is going to look very, very different in another generation, and your children will be dealing with it. You need to anticipate it.
Several bloggers asked [Mark Steyn] various questions about multiculturalism, which he sees as a defense mechanism that allowed Europeans to come to grips with more basic structural deficiencies. His read of the emergence of European multiculturalism is causal: "we need more plumbers, but we're certainly not going to do that work... we'll bring in kind of violent unassimilated immigrants, and to make ourselves feel better about their violent unassimilated we'll celebrate our tolerance for it". The causality between demographics, cultural exhaustion, and the welfare state is probably impossible to untangle, but his description is certainly how it happened on the ground. And it's certainly why European journalists and authors find it so hard to criticize the "youths" that are rioting now.
On the other hand, he's not trading on any simplistic nostalgia for a Europe that never existed. We're not dealing here with a simple Huns-at-the-gate scenario: political Islam is not just barbaric primitivism. Instead, it is the intersection of the East and West, the Muslim world and the Christian world. In several places he alluded to the standard academic trope for this, which is that fundamentalist Islam is the intersection between the developing world and modernity. People driven by an ancient ideology now have access to planes. It seems like Steyn is still marked by the shock of traveling to Europe and the Middle East after 9/11 and discovering that France's Muslims were far more hostile and alienated than any of the people that he met in the Arab world. Osama Bin Laden might have lived in a cave, but the Hamburg 9/11 terrorists and the French gangbanging rioters live in apartments, have televisions, and drink Coke.
Steyn is also quite skeptical about the potential for secular values or secular movements to form a bulwark against political Islam as it spreads across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. He explicitly and extensively criticized the anti-theism of Chris Hitchens and the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins as empirical failures. He didn't use either of those labels, although that's what he was alluding to - Hitchens's anti-theism is well-known, and Wired just posted an essential article on New Atheism if you're getting caught up on the high-tide of broad Leftist anti-jihadism. A secular society might be sound in theory, but it's simply not appealing enough to form the basis for an ideology. What's needed is something that can provide a backbone to the people who'll be fighting the good fight for the next two or three generations - if anything can. As Steyn said, "history is on the march very quickly in Europe"
posted by Granddaddy Long Legs @ 10/26/2006
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