Posted on 11/16/2006 3:12:01 PM PST by GMMAC
These are the first three of five excerpts from
America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it, by Mark Steyn.
Published by Regnery Publishing, Inc. Copyright © 2006 by Mark Steyn.
America Alone: The End of the World (part 1)
Mark Steyn, National Post
Published: Tuesday, November 14, 2006
John O’Sullivan, a former editor of National Review, once observed that postwar Canadian history is summed up by an old Monty Python song. I’m a Lumberjack and I’m Okay begins as a robust paean to the manly virtues of a rugged life in the north woods but ends with the lumberjack having gradually morphed into some sort of transvestite pick-up who sings that he likes to “wear high heels, suspenders and a bra” and “dress in women’s clothing and hang around in bars.”
I know what he means. In 2005, I chanced to see a selection of images from the Miss She-male World celebrations outside Toronto’s City Hall. And what struck me was not that “she-males” should want to have a big ol’ parade showing off their outsized implants.
No, what seemed more pertinent was that the local government should think Miss She-male World is an event that requires municipal approval. Of course, if they hadn’t approved, they would have been guilty of being “non-inclusive.”
John O’Sullivan isn’t saying Canadian men are literally cross-dressers, but nonetheless a once manly nation has undergone a remarkable psychological makeover. In 1945, the Royal Canadian Navy had the third-largest surface fleet in the world; Canadian troops got the toughest beach on D-Day. But in the space of two generations, a bunch of tough hombres were transformed into a thoroughly feminized culture that prioritizes the secondary impulses of society — rights and entitlements from cradle to grave — over all the primary ones.
In that, Canada’s not alone. If the O’Sullivan thesis is flawed, it’s only because the Lumberjack Song could also stand as the postwar history of almost the entire developed world. To understand why the West seems so weak in the face of a laughably primitive enemy, it’s necessary to examine the wholesale transformation undergone by almost every advanced nation since World War Two. Today, in your typical election campaign, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much every party in the rest of the West are all but exclusively about those secondary impulses: government health care, government day care, government paternity leave. We’ve elevated the secondary impulses over the primary ones: national defense, self-reliance and reproductive activity. If you don’t “go forth and multiply” you can’t afford all those secondary-impulse programs whose costs are multiplying a lot faster than you are. Most of the secondary-impulse stuff falls under the broad category of self-gratification issues: We want the state to take our elderly relatives off our hands not because it’s better for them but because otherwise the old coots would cut into our own time. Fair enough. But once you decide you can do without grandparents, it’s not a stretch to decide you can do without grandchildren.
I’ve always loved Lincoln’s allusion to the “mystic chords of memory” because it conveys beautifully the layers of a healthy society: The top notes are the present, but the underlying harmony is critical, too; it places the present in the context of history and eternal truths, and thereby binds us not just to the past but commits us to the future, too. Yet since 1945, throughout the West, a variety of government interventions has so ruptured traditional patterns of inter-generational solidarity that Continentals now exist almost entirely in a present-tense culture of complete self-absorption. In the end, the primal impulses are the ones that count. Robert Kagan’s observation that Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus doesn’t quite cover it. The Lumberjack Song and the She-male World get closer: We’re Martians who think we can cross-dress as Venusians and everything will be all right. And like some of the hotter-looking transsexuals on display at Toronto’s City Hall, the modern Western democracy is perfectly feminized in every respect except its ability to reproduce.
Americans don’t always appreciate how far gone down this path the rest of the developed world is: In Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is now somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way to important jobs like the health department. I don’t think Donald Rumsfeld would have regarded it as a promotion to be moved to Health and Human Services. Yet the secondary impulses are so advanced that most of America’s allies no longer share the same understanding of basic words like “power.” In 2002 Finnish prime minister Paavo Lipponen gave a speech in London saying that “the EU must not develop into a military superpower but must become a great power that will not take up arms at any occasion in order to defend its own interests.”
No doubt it sounds better in Finnish. Nonetheless, he means it: For many Europeans, the old rules no longer apply. Yet in the long run this redefinition of the state is killing them. As Gerald Ford used to say when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” And that’s true. But there’s an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back.
That’s the position European governments find themselves in. Their citizens have become hooked on unaffordable levels of social programs which will put those countries out of business.
This is the paradox of “social democracy.” When you demand lower taxes and less government, you’re damned by the Left as “selfish.” And in my case that’s true. I’m glad to find a town road at the bottom of my driveway in the morning, and I’m happy to pay for the Army, but, other than that, I’d like to keep everything I earn and spend it on my priorities.
The Left offers an appeal to moral virtue: It’s better to pay more in taxes and to share the burdens as a community. It’s kinder, gentler, more equitable. Unfortunately, as recent European election results demonstrate, nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: Once a fellow’s enjoying the fruits of government health care and the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and if it’s going to bankrupt the state a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks coming till he’s dead, it’s fine by him. “Social democracy” is, it turns out, explicitly anti-social. To modify Polybius, it’s “avarice” dressed up with “pretentiousness.” And it leads to societal “indolence.”
Somewhere along the way these countries redefined the relationship between government and citizen into something closer to pusher and addict. And once you’ve done that, it’s hard to persuade the addict to cut back his habit. Thus, the general acceptance everywhere but America is that the state should run your health care. A citizen of an advanced democracy expects to be able to choose from dozens of cereals at the supermarket, hundreds of movies at the video store and millions of porno sites on the Internet, but when it comes to life-or-death decisions about his own body he’s happy to have the choice taken out of his hands and given to the government.
From America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it, by Mark Steyn.
Published by Regnery Publishing, Inc. Copyright © 2006 by Mark Steyn.
Fallujah, then & now (part II)
The U.S. wants to be a compassionate crusader.
Nice idea. But in the Middle East, compassion comes off as weakness
Mark Steyn, National Post
Published: Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Can America win its "long war"? If you think the question's ridiculous, well, other countries are certainly asking it. Because, if America can't, nobody else in the developed world can.
A good place to start any consideration is the Sunni Triangle. A few weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein, I drove into Fallujah. What a dump -- no disrespect to any Fallujans reading this. I had a late lunch in a seedy cafe full of Sunni men. Not a gal in the joint. And no Westerners except me. As in the movies, everyone stopped talking when I walked through the door.
I strongly dislike that veteran-foreign-correspondent look, where you wander around like you've been sleeping in the back of the souk for a week. So I was wearing the same suit I'd wear in Washington or New York, from the Western Imperialist Aggressor line at Brooks Brothers. I had a sharp necktie I'd bought in London the week before. My cuff links were the most stylish in the room, and also the only ones in the room. I'm not a Sunni Triangulator, so there's no point pretending to be one. If you're an infidel and agent of colonialist decadence, you might as well dress the part.
I ordered the mixed grill, which turned out to be not that mixed. Just a tough old stringy chicken. My tie would have been easier to chew. The locals watched me -- a few obviously surly and resentful, the rest somewhere between wary and amused. As a parodic courtesy, mein host switched the flickering black-and-white TV from an Arabic station to the BBC, which as usual was full of doom and gloom about the quagmire.
And I gave no further thought to Fallujah until a year later, when four American contractors working in Iraq -- Scott Helvenston, Wesley Batalona, Jerry Zovko and Michael Teague -- were ambushed while driving through town. They were dragged from their vehicles, shot, burned, mutilated, and what was left was dangled from a bridge over the Euphrates while the natives danced in the streets.
There's not a lot to be said for the oh-my-God-that-could-have-been-me routine. But, watching the scenes on TV, I did think back to my lunch 11 months earlier, and wondered about some of those inscrutable toothy grins at the adjoining tables. Would those fellows have liked to kill me? Well, I'll bet one or two would have enjoyed giving it a go.
So why didn't they? I'm not brave, and certainly not suicidally brave. And, if I'd known the Sunni Triangle was the most dangerous place on Earth, I wouldn't have been there driving around on my own in some beat-up rented Nissan.
But, of course, Fallujah wasn't dangerous in those days. Why? Because, as Osama gloated after September 11, when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they go with the strong horse. And in May 2003, four weeks after the fall of Baghdad, the coalition forces were indisputably the strong horse. They'd removed Saddam Hussein -- the self-declared new Saladin -- in nothing flat. And so, even when a dainty little trotting gelding of a touring writer comes through the door, they figure he's with the strong-horse crowd and act accordingly.
What happened within the next year was that America ceased to be perceived as a strong horse. It was a range of factors, from the West's defeatist media to the Bush administration's wish to be seen as, so to speak, a compassionate crusader. Nice idea. But to the Arab mindset there's no such thing. So the compassion got read by the locals not as cultural respect but as weakness.
The object of war is not to destroy the enemy's tanks but to destroy his will. America is extremely good at destroying tanks. If you make the mistake of luring the United States into a hot war -- i.e., tanks, bombers, ships, etc. -- you'll lose very quickly. The Taliban did, and so did Saddam Hussein. That's why my lunch in Fallujah required no personal courage on my part: Just about the safest time to visit anywhere in the Muslim world is in the month after the United States has toppled its dictator.
But an enemy folds when he knows he's finished. In Iraq, despite the swift fall of the Saddamites, it's not clear the enemy did know. Even during the combat phase we were playing the compassionate crusader. The Western peaceniks' prewar "human shields" operation proved to be completely superfluous, mainly because the Anglo-American forces decided to treat not just Iraqi civilians and not just Iraqi conscripts but virtually everyone other than Saddam, Uday and Qusay as a de facto human shield. The main victims of Western squeamishness in those few weeks in the spring of 2003 turned out to be not American or coalition troops but the Iraqi civilians who two years later were providing the principal target for "insurgents." It would have been better for them had more Baathists been killed in the initial invasion. It would have been preferable, too, if the swarm of foreign jihadi from neighboring countries had occasionally been met with the "accidental" bombing of certain targets on the Syrian side of the border.
Colin Powell famously framed Iraq in Pottery Barn terms: you break it, you own it. But Saddam's Baathist apparatus and other parties concluded the opposite: we didn't have the guts to break it; therefore, we didn't own it.
From America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it, by Mark Steyn.
Published by Regnery Publishing, Inc. Copyright (Copyright) 2006 by Mark Steyn.
TOMORROW
A third excerpt from America Alone: Steyn on Western guilt, political correctness and 'root causes'
Loving thine enemy (part III)
The more the Islamists step on our toes,
the more we waltz them gaily around the room
Mark Steyn, National Post
Published: Thursday, November 16, 2006
After September 11, the first reaction of just about every prominent Western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush did, so did the Prince of Wales, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, the prime minister of Canada and many more. And, when the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died away, you couldn't help feeling that this would strike almost any previous society as, well, bizarre. Pearl Harbor's been attacked? Quick, order some sushi and get me into a matinee of Madam Butterfly!
Seeking to reassure the co-religionists of those who attack you that you do not regard them all as the enemy is a worthy aim but a curious first priority. And, given that more than a few of the imams in those mosque photo-ops turned out to be at best equivocal on the matter of Islamic terrorism and at worst somewhat enthusiastic supporters of it, it involved way too much self-deception on our part. But it set the tone for all that followed, to the point where with each bomb or plot -- from September 11 to London to Toronto -- the protestations of Islam's good faith grew ever more fulsome.
Consider the name given to the current conflict: "war on terror." Wait a minute. Aren't wars usually waged against named enemies? Yes, but, to the progressive mind, the very concept of "the enemy" is obsolescent: There are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated. In part, it's societal forgetfulness. In an electronic age, a present-tense culture, we assume that social progress is like technological progress: It can't be reversed. Just as you can't disinvent the internal combustion engine, so you can't disinvent women's rights. Just as the horse and buggy yielded to the steam train and the Ford Model T and the passenger jet, so the advanced social-democratic society will march onward to state day care and 30-hour work weeks and gay marriage and ever greater ethnic diversity -- and nothing can turn it back, certainly not a lot of seventh-century weirdbeards. Many of us figure the Islamist plan to re-establish the caliphate is the equivalent of that moment in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie when Plankton roars, "I'm going to rule the world!" Towering over him, SpongeBob says, "Good luck with that."
But you never know: It might be that we're the plankton. "Our enemies are small worms," Adolf Hitler told his generals in August 1939. "I saw them at Munich." In Europe today, as in the thirties, the political class prostrates itself before an insatiable force that barely acknowledges the latest surrender before moving on to the next invented grievance.
Indeed, a formal enemy is all but superfluous to requirements. Bomb us, and we agonize over the "root causes." Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that "Islam is a religion of peace." Issue bloodcurdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels, and we fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims. Behead sodomites and mutilate female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups can't wait to march alongside you denouncing Bush and Blair. Murder a schoolful of children, and our scholars explain that to the "vast majority" of Muslims "jihad" is a harmless concept meaning "healthy-lifestyle low-fat granola bar." Thus the lopsided valse macabre of our times: the more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room.
As French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel wrote, "Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself." During the Danish cartoon jihad, The New York Times gave a routinely pompous explanation of why it would not be showing us the representations of the Prophet: Sensitive news organizations, the editors explained, had the duty to "refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols." The very next day, the Times illustrated a story on the Danish controversy with a piece of New York "art" from a couple of seasons earlier showing the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung. Multiculturalism seems to operate on the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke in which the American tells the Soviet guy that "in my country everyone is free to criticize the president," and the Soviet guy replies, "Same here. In my country everyone is free to criticize your president." Under the rules as understood by The New York Times, the West is free to mock and belittle its Judeo-Christian inheritance, and, likewise, the Muslim world is free to mock and belittle the West's Judeo-Christian inheritance. If one has to choose, on balance Islam's loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than the Western elites' loathing of their own.
Insurgencies, whether explicitly terrorist or more subtle, persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets. The IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: They want it, and they've calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off.
From America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it, by Mark Steyn.
Published by Regnery Publishing, Inc. Copyright (Copyright) 2006 by Mark Steyn.
TOMORROW
A fourth excerpt from America Alone: Steyn on Islamic terrorism and Western self-censorship
Thanks for the post, GMMAC!
The copy I ordered for my DH for Christmas, arrived this week, signed by Mark Steyn himself.
:-D
Steyn rocks!
:-)
In fact the French fought a vicious war against Algerian muslims that lasted 8 years, 1954-62, killed hundreds of thousands and was anything but PC. The fighting was similar in nature to the Iraqi insurgency.
LOL!
Thanks!
jm
I know and my apologies to the French but I was playing to a stereotype and I was wrong.
The Manhattan wing of conservatism will soon disown Steyn because he makes the claim that demographics is destiny. He had better enjoy his popularity now before he gets tagged with the PC heresy charge of "racism."
In DC this week Hugh learned that no leadership candidates have read this book or other similar books. Boehner, in fact, said he gets his news from the newspapers. EGAD!
I cannot agree more.
I read it in one marathon session on a Saturday and re-read it again a week later at a more leasurely pace.
I have since been passing it to my friends.
the most common reaction from them is "I had no idea it was that bad".
Cheers,
knewshound
http://www.knewshound.blogspot.com/
I can't wait to read it, but I have to.
Darn!
;-)
This is our problem as a so-called advanced society. I am going to say some things that a lot of people might not like, but that is the beautiful thing about this board.
Killing a Jihadi man who has 3 wives and 10 children does nothing more than removing one....and creating 13 jihadi stand-ins. I say that to illustrate this point.....a "scorched earth" policy in Iraq would have its detractors, but it would also give pause to the "on the fence" Jihadi sitting with his time bomb and TNT, that he would know that not only is he going to be visiting his virgins soon courtesy of the US military, but that his wives and children would soon be popping up in the virgin paradise right behind him.
If this sounds callous and shallow, so be it.
The only way to stop a human being who is willing to die for their cause is to do exactly that. Kill them. Call me what you will, but I am not willing to strap explosives to my chest to remove Muslims from this earth, but if they are willing to perform this act on me, then I have no issue putting hot lead between his eyes. Any eyes.
The 'crusaders' of PC just took our 'House and Senate'. . .
PC is firmly embedded in our culture; and it really did not take long; and whenever we thought it could not get worse or more rediculous; it did. Worse, there really is no end to it.
Am left wondering; just how 'freedom of speech' of the most meaningful kind; can be.
Fabulous book. A must-read.
Thanks GMMAC
FMCDH(BITS)
A great Christmas gift; and 'gifts'. . .the only problem is, I do not like 'depressing/scary books!'; at the same time; I like to support the Authors who share the truth of matters at hand' so to speak. Particularly when they are wonderful writers. . .and funny really helps.
That said. . .think Steyn is worth the read. . .and the risk of my 'going there'. . . ;^)
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