Mark Steyn: A victory for multiculti over common sense

It has been sobering this past week watching some of my "woollier" colleagues (in Vicki Woods's self-designation) gradually awake to the realisation that the real suicide bomb is "multiculturalism". Its remorseless tick-tock, suddenly louder than the ethnic drumming at an anti-globalisation demo, drove poor old Boris Johnson into rampaging around this page last Thursday like some demented late-night karaoke one-man Fiddler on the Roof, stamping his feet and bellowing, "Tradition! Tradition!" Boris's plea for more Britishness was heartfelt and valiant, but I'm not sure I'd bet on it. The London bombers were, to the naked eye, assimilated - they ate fish 'n' chips, played cricket, sported appalling leisurewear. They'd adopted so many trees we couldn't see they lacked the big overarching forest - the essence of identity, of allegiance. As I've said before, you can't assimilate with a nullity - which is what multiculturalism is.

So, if Islamist extremism is the genie you're trying to put back in the bottle, it doesn't help to have smashed the bottle. As the death of the Eurofanatic Ted Heath reminds us, in modern Britain even a "conservative" prime minister thinks nothing of obliterating ancient counties and imposing on the populace fantasy jurisdictions - "Avon", "Clwyd" and (my personal favourite in its evocative neo-Stalinism) "Central Region" - and an alien regulatory regime imported from the failed polities of Europe. The 7/7 murderers are described as "Yorkshiremen", but, of course, there is no Yorkshire: Ted abolished that, too.

Sir Edward's successor, Mr Blair, said on the day of the bombing that terrorists would not be allowed to "change our country or our way of life". Of course not. That's his job - from hunting to Europeanisation. Could you reliably say what aspects of "our way of life" Britain's ruling class, whether pseudo-Labour like Mr Blair or pseudo-Conservative like Sir Ted, wish to preserve? The Notting Hill Carnival? Not enough, alas.

Consider the Bishop of Lichfield, who at Evensong, on the night of the bombings, was at pains to assure his congregants: "Just as the IRA has nothing to do with Christianity, so this kind of terror has nothing to do with any of the world faiths." It's not so much the explicit fatuousness of the assertion so much as the broader message it conveys: we're the defeatist wimps; bomb us and we'll apologise to you. That's why in Britain the Anglican Church is in a death-spiral and Islam is the fastest-growing religion. There's no market for a faith that has no faith in itself. And as the Church goes so goes the state: why introduce identity cards for a nation with no identity?

It was the Prime Minister's wife, you'll recall, who last year won a famous court victory for Shabina Begum, as a result of which schools across the land must now permit students to wear the full "jilbab" - ie, Muslim garb that covers the entire body except the eyes and hands. Ms Booth hailed this as "a victory for all Muslims who wish to preserve their identity and values despite prejudice and bigotry". It seems almost too banal to observe that such an extreme preservation of Miss Begum's Muslim identity must perforce be at the expense of any British identity. Nor, incidentally, is Miss Begum "preserving" any identity: she's of Bangladeshi origin, and her adolescent adoption of the jilbab is a symbol of the Arabisation of South Asian (and African and European) Islam that's at the root of so many problems. It's no more part of her inherited identity than my five-year- old dressing up in his head-to-toe Darth Vader costume, to which at a casual glance it's not dissimilar.

Is it "bigoted" to argue that the jilbab is a barrier to acquiring the common culture necessary to any functioning society? Is it "prejudiced" to suggest that in Britain a Muslim woman ought to reach the same sartorial compromise as, say, a female doctor in Bahrain? Apparently so, according to Cherie Booth.

One of the striking features of the post-9/11 world is the minimal degree of separation between the so-called "extremists" and the establishment: Princess Haifa, wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington, gives $130,000 to accomplices of the 9/11 terrorists; the head of the group that certifies Muslim chaplains for the US military turns out to be a bagman for terrorists; one of the London bombers gets given a tour of the House of Commons by a Labour MP. The Guardian hires as a "trainee journalist" a member of Hizb ut Tahir, "Britain's most radical Islamic group" (as his own newspaper described them) and in his first column post-7/7 he mocks the idea that anyone could be "shocked" at a group of Yorkshiremen blowing up London: "Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don't-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We're much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks" - or the bus blows, or the Tube vaporises. Fellow Guardian employee David Foulkes, who was killed in the Edgware Road blast, would no doubt be heartened to know he'd died for the cause of Muslim "sassiness".

But among all these many examples of the multiculti mainstream ushering the extremists from the dark fringe to the centre of western life, there is surely no more emblematic example than that of Shabina Begum, whose victory over the school dress code was achieved with the professional support of both the wife of the Prime Minister who pledges to defend "our way of life" and of Hizb ut Tahir, a group which (according to the German Interior Minister) "supports violence as a means to realise political goals" such as a worldwide caliphate and (according to the BBC) "urges Muslims to kill Jewish people". What does an "extremist" have to do to be too extreme for Cherie Booth or the Guardian?

Oh, well. Back to business as usual. In yesterday's Independent, Dave Brown had a cartoon showing Bush and Blair as terrorists boarding the Tube to Baghdad. Ha-ha. The other day in Thailand, where 800 folks have been killed by Islamists since the start of the year, two Laotian farm workers were beheaded. I suppose that's Bush and Blair's fault, too.

I'd like to think my "woolly liberal" colleague Vicki Woods and the woolly sorta-conservative Boris Johnson represent the majority. If they do, you've got a sporting chance. But in the end Cherie Booth and Dave Brown and the Bishop of Lichfield will get you killed. Best of British, old thing.

Get the prophetic 1914 book by Chesterton - The Flying Inn!

Read about in this part of the Philip Jenkins article (Chronicles Magazine, December 2001)

[...]

One of his least-known novels is his bizarre 1914 work The Flying Inn, in which he depicts a near-future England in which secular progressives are riding high. (The book has just been reissued by Dover.) The progressives hope to create a well-organized utopia, free of the curse of alcohol and purified from the horrors of (Christian) religious fanaticism. Then as now, the term "religious fanaticism" was defined as the obviously irrational idea that religious belief should make any difference to everyday conduct, especially when such amended conduct might cause any personal convenience to the believer or to those near him or her. If Christians behaved according to their lights, then they were ipso facto dissidents, who needed to have their personalities modified to conform to contemporary secular mores. So, too, did those bizarre and troublesome eccentrics who foil the schemes of social engineering by creating the "flying inn" of the title and organizing hit-and-run attacks that permit ordinary citizens to obtain their necessary booze and pub food. In the face of such depraved monsters, no official measures were too severe.

Chesterton's point was that the humanistic campaign for progress, science, and reason was itself a kind of fanaticism that had its own powerfully religious quality. He is often quoted as saying that "When Man stops believing in God, he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes anything," but this quote proves elusive in his writings, and it may represent a collage of several of his apothegms. What he actually did write in his 1924 story "The Miracle of Moon Crescent" was that "You hard-shelled materialists were all balanced on the very edge of belief—of belief in almost anything." Justified by their dogmatic credulity, the social engineers of The Flying Inn inflict a dictatorship worse than anything attempted in the name of orthodox religion, using draconian police powers to root out dissent. And liberal secularism finds its culmination in the purest form of world-denying fanaticism—Islam.

The amazing thing about the novel is that the ideological transformation from progressive to Muslim is accomplished so convincingly that we can readily accept it. One of Chesterton's most striking characters is the progressive prohibitionist Philip, Lord Ivywood, the naive aristocrat who leads the campaign against wine and social nonconformity: He espouses all the faddish causes of his day, including vegetarianism and theosophy, and is, in short, the very model of a modern New Age general. He represents that old patrician intellectual lineage that traces back through the Enlightenment to the thought-world of Plato's guardians. And he is clearly meant to be a thoroughly pernicious, subversive force, the deadly ivy on the native oak, which in turn symbolizes the authentic Europe:

    But Ivywood, Lord Ivywood,
    He rots the tree as ivy would,
    He clings and crawls as ivy would
    About the sacred tree.

    But Ivywood, Lord Ivywood,
    He hates the tree as ivy would,
    As the dragon of the ivy would
    That has us in his grips.

Ivywood moves neatly from representing the voice of Fabian or progressive idealism—the world of H.G. Wells or Bertrand Russell—to becoming a tool of organized Islam, which uses him as a convenient front man for the annexation of England. In the multicultural dream that he advocates, the two religions will merge to form a new synthesis ("Something called Chrislam, perhaps," glowers one disenchanted rebel). A Cross-Crescent hybrid appears on St. Paul's Cathedral (the "Croscent"), and the Koran is to be integrated into a revised Bible.

Increasingly, it becomes obvious that prohibitionism and progress are Trojan horses for full-scale Islamicization. Though ostensibly an account of the triumph of progress, the plot resolves itself into a struggle between the only two intellectual forces that have ever mattered in the world—those who accept the Incarnation and those who reject it. The two forces clashed bloodily at Tours in 732, at Constantinople in 717 and again in 1453, and now they meet once more on a battlefield in a not-quite-yet England. "There, encamped in the English meadows . . . was something that had never been in camp nearer than some leagues south of Paris, since that Carolus called the Hammer broke it backwards at Tours." In the last great battle, the struggle that saves England for the Incarnation, Lord Ivywood stands on the field under the banner of Islam, dressed "in a uniform of his own special creation, a compromise between the Sepoy and Turkish uniform." All pretense of humanistic secularism is gone. After the Muslim forces are routed, he retreats into a baffled insanity, as Christendom gains the field. He is lost in the fantasy world of those who try to create utopias without taking account of human and divine realities. He cries, "I have gone where God has never dared to go. I am above the silly Supermen as they are above mere men."

The Flying Inn can be seen less as a novel than as the creation of a whole mythical world. I here take the word "myth" as a child once defined it: a story that is not true on the outside, but is true on the inside. The story's characters have the pristine truth of mythology, speaking words that we can hear all around us in everyday life: They are archetypes. Reading Lord Ivywood's speeches, we can hear precisely the sentiments about religion that surface so frequently in the media today, about the necessity for a wide-ranging relativistic tolerance that must be applied to every religion under the sun—except Christianity. As Ivywood puts it, "Ours is an age when men come more and more to see that the creeds hold treasures for each other, that each religion has a secret for its neighbor, that faith unto faith uttereth speech, and church unto church showeth knowledge."

We think equally of Ivywood when we hear modern paeans to the glorious lost civilization of medieval Islam—that heroic, tolerant, proto-Enlightenment world that supposedly stood in such magnificent contrast to the horrors of European Christendom. Said Ivywood: "Islam has in it the potentialities of being the most progressive of all religions; so that a century or two to come we may see the cause of peace, of science, and of reform supported by Islam." While we might be troubled by aspects of the history of Islam—the pervasive despotism, the mass slavetrading, the corruption—we have to understand that (as Ivywood declares) these notions are products of "the illimitable pro-Christian bias with which the history of those Eastern tribes is told in this country." The very symbol of Islam was the Crescent, a sign of growth (and not the Cross, the death-symbol favored by other religions now out of favor). Ivywood felt that every Western progressive could agree with this sign and all it implied, the "principle of perpetual growth towards an implied and infinite perception." Ivywood has countless modern imitators. For millions today, the sublimest religious truth is to be found not in the native Christian tradition, but in the works of Islamic mystics, of Sufi masters like Rumi, though in New Age forms shorn of much of their overt Muslim content.

Ivywood stands triumphant whenever a contemporary politician or academic boasts how non-Christian immigration will transform our failed Western nations into utopian multicultural societies. When Chesterton wanted to introduce Islam as a factor in his story, he had to concoct a fantastic story of how England forged a diplomatic alliance with the Ottoman Empire. Today, such a stretch is utterly unnecessary, given the migration of mass Muslim populations across Europe and, indeed, into the United States. There are now three million Muslims in Germany, two million in France, at least a million in Britain, and perhaps 750,000 in Italy. The most thorough transformation has been in French cities like Marseilles, which have acquired a strongly North African flavor. Muslims make up around a fifth of the population of Vienna, a proportion that has more than doubled just since the late 1980's. Europe as a whole has some 15 million Muslims, many of whom are of ancient stock, particularly in southeastern parts of the continent. Meanwhile, I can only speculate how many Europeans of Christian heritage still espouse the doctrine of the Incarnation, but I imagine the proportion is tiny. The ivy has spread far.

Many things that Chesterton portrayed, seemingly ludicrously, as part of the Turkish invasion of England have appeared in the West as components of multiculturalism. In September, the U.S. Post Office issued its first stamps commemorating Islam, complete with Arabic inscription—though these items became a little scarce a week or so later, when other Muslims notoriously succeeded in obliterating the World Trade Center. Honestly, I wonder why the word "Ivywood" has not entered our popular speech, commemorated in the same way as "boycott" or—perhaps a better analogy—"quisling." So do not rule out the appearance of the Croscent ere too long—not to say Chrislam."

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