Sad but true, as no Western nation will elect political leaders who appreciate the stakes. If, for example, the French took their predicament seriously, Le Pen would be their president. If more Americans took these concerns seriously, Buchanan would enjoy a far greater following than he does, Mr. Auster’s reservations about him notwithstanding. The Western response is thoroughly confused: The late Pim Fortuyn stood against increased Moslem immigration to The Netherlands, but he took his stand in defense of secular libertinism, not any earlier Dutch tradition.

While it is a hopeful sign that Putin is willing to say what the European world is up against, one wonders what conception of European civilization the former chekist wants to defend. His previous patron, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, has a record of cultural and social destruction we are all too familiar with; one that will blight Russia for a long time to come. Still, President Bush has looked into his soul, so I guess I just have to trust him. HRS

The ‘clash of civilizations’ idea is frankly a load of bull droppings. The majority of Muslims are not interested in a massive world war with the West, and, as Putin acknowledges, most Muslims feel threatened by radical Islamists, who oppose traditional Islam as it opposes the radicals.

These extremists have old roots, as one of the first sects to split off from mainstream Islam were the Khawarij, who declared the vast majority of Muslims apostates and then waged war on them under a literalist-extremist mandate. The early Muslim community fought and crushed these extremists, and that is what has to happen today. And that is what often happens, when Western powers and Muslim governments will cooperate in imprisoning and killing modern day Khawarij.

One must be careful not to fall into the extremists’ plan to create a world war, and if you know traditional Muslims personally, (who are the majority) you will find that they want no such war either.

To say that a conflict doesn’t exist because a “majority” of the common people on the other side do not desire such a conflict is an obvious fallacy. It is not a question of what the majority of people in the Muslim societies happen to feel, but what the dominant forces in those societies are actually doing. Did a majority of the people of the Soviet Union desire world-wide Communist conquest? Did a majority of the people of Nazi Germany desire world-wide Nazi conquest and the elimination of all Jews (and ultimately Slavs as well)? The answer in both cases is no, yet that didn’t change the fact that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were seeking those things and had to be stopped.

It’s remarkable how people resort to this “the majority of the people don’t want it” argument whenever it’s a question of opposing something that they themselves don’t want to oppose. For example, pro-immigration conservatives such as Linda Chavez have repeatedly argued that there is no reason to worry about immigration fueling multiculturalism, because a “majority” of Hispanic immigrants have no interest in multiculturalism, they just want to earn a living, raise their children, blah blah, and multiculturalism is just the work of a small cadre of radical elites. But this ignores the fact that the mass of Hispanics by their very presence in this country help strengthen and legitimize the entire multiculturalist movement, and furthermore that the mass of Hispanics do nothing to OPPOSE the multicultural movement.

All political/cultural movements are led by a small number of leaders/activists while the rest of the people follow along. So, once again, it’s not a question of what the mass of the people in those societies, as individuals, actively want. It’s a question of what those societies, as societies, are DOING.

What you say about the little importance of majority opinion may be true, but radical Islamists are by no means an elite in Muslim societies leading them and making those societies as a whole legitimate targets. Radical Islamists are not an elite, they are a minority, who use terrorism to attempt to create a disproportionate influence.

It might be helpful to note that “elite” can refer to a majority and usually refers to a minority.

Whatever the precise degree of power of the Muslim militants and the precise nature of the relationship between them and the mass of their society, the Muslims militants and supporters EXIST as a real social force in those countries and must be destroyed or suppressed so as to allow more civilized elements to take their place. So the practical problem is no different from the problem of defeating Nazi Germany or stopping Soviet Communism. Now, maybe there are moderate Muslim forces that can do the job. But we haven’t seen much of them yet. So, at the very least, it seems to me that the power of the West must be brought to bear to resist and contain the militants to allow the moderates to rise to the fore. However you want to describe that process, it translates into a conflict between the West and a major force within Islam, if not with the whole of Islam. That sounds to me very like a civilizational conflict.

While one can debate how interventionist Western, formerly Christian, states should be in suppressing threatening Islamist movements, is seems obvious to me that the least Western nations should do is end immigration from countries that breed threatening Islamists. The attitudes of the governments and elites in those countries is beside the point as long as they remain nurseries for Islamism.

Western governments have a duty to look after the physical security of people within their nations’ territory, especially their citizens. That alone is sufficient grounds for a prudential exclusion of natives of breeder-states; the State Department’s proposed greater scrutiny of Canadian citizens from such places - especially given that Canada is even more lax than we re immigration - is entirely reasonable.

While this is more controversial today, I believe Western governments have a duty to safeguard their people in another way: Governments should honor and protect their nations’ heritage and culture, as the natives of any country should be free to live in a home that is familiar to them. At a time when Christian faith is weak and cultural disintegration too prevalent in the West, it is gross negligence to contribute to cultural chaos by encouraging mass immigration from radically different societies. In the case of importing Moslems fanatically devoted to the expansion of their religion and its strictures, it is recklessly irresponsible.

Finally, in participatory democracies, mass immigration means an ever-growing dilution of the political power of the natives. Unless those natives have clearly expressed their preference for it (as in the United States and every other Western nation they emphatically have not), governments should not unilaterally pursue or permit this gradual disfranchisement of native citizens.

So whether or not we pursue the destruction or suppression of Moslem militants in Moslem countries, we should certainly suppress alien Moslem militancy here. (The case of Black Muslims, Americans, is obviously very different.) HRS

Actually, mass immigration, especially from the third world (Muslim or otherwise), does much more than dilute participatory democracy.

An egalitarian multicultural society can’t have widespread participation in self-government. Self-government requires there to be a political people that can deliberate and decide things somewhat rationally. There has to be a sort of public mind, which requires common history, habits, understandings, standards, loyalties, etc.

In a large radically multicultural society that kind of common mind can’t possibly exist among the people at large. As a result the society will not in fact be democratic. It will be ruled by some much smaller group who are able to deliberate, decide and act collectively. The more fragmented the people are — the more multicultural they are, for example — the less influence they will have in public affairs.

Mr. Kalb has elucidated one of the things I was hinting at when I said governments should safeguard their nations’ heritage and culture. Maintaining an ethnic balance that preserves the historic “public mind” of a nation is an aspect of that duty. (Unless the public mind concludes that its own destruction is warranted. As I said before, I don’t think any Western nation - as distinct from government - has yet reached that conclusion, although governments may yet achieve that result, thanks to the negligent indifference of most citizens.)

Mr. Kalb’s last paragraph is as good a summary of the motives of our globalist elites as I have seen lately, even if many of those globalists aren’t fully aware of them themselves. Better a congeries of squabbling peasantries that cannot join to impede plans for their improvement than a single monolithic peasantry that might. HRS

I agree that Mr. Kalb’s comment is important. Politics, as Aristotle said, is men discussing together the common good. If the people composing a society are so different from each other that they can’t discuss the common good together, then politics comes to an end, to be replaced by some administered or despotic state.

I agree with Mr. Sutherland’s, Mr. Kalb’s, and Mr. Auster’s comments one thousand percent. A point implicit in what they all said, which perhaps bears explicit mention, is pertinent to the shocking swoop by London police in order to make arrests of Londoners suspected of harboring and giving voice to “hatred” — that is, on suspicion of thinking the wrong thoughts and and voicing them. (Can anyone believe I actually had to say that just now, about London???) This was reported by the BBC, as discussed and linked-to in Mr. Auster’s Nov. 13th blog entry.

A hint of the relevance of this to the other topic is seen in the fact that the police officer who made the initial denunication of Mrs. Barton in Michigan was a Hispanic, who may not therefore have been steeped in traditional U.S. and Western-European notions of free speech, as we natives of these cultures all have been since the cradle.

The Left, who are as fully aware of this difference as we are, MUST see every non-traditional-source immigrant who displaces a traditional-source one as one less potential opponent to their plans for ultimately severely restricting freedom of speech here, through the ploy of outlawing what they deem “hate speech.”

Finally, of course, it shouldn’t even be necessary to ask the obvious question, “Who gets to define ‘hate speech’?” One man’s hate is another man’s love.

Some Londoner uses strong language or a few choice epithets in response to some Muslim’s praise of 9-11 right in front of his face? Why is that necessarily construed as “hate speech,” rather than, say, “love-for-New-York-City-and-distress-at-those-killed” speech?

Some other Londoner is reported (by some Peking-type neighborhood spy system which the Blairites have apparently set up) to have been heard using epithets or strong language against the fact of so many Pakistanis seeming to overwhelm his native city, the past several years? Why is that construed as hate speech rather than “love for my native London and desire to see it remain what is was when my parents bequeathed-it-to-me-and-theirs-to-them” speech?

Why does it always seem that this Leftist stuff can only ever go one way? Why never the other way?

Rhetorical question. We know why, don’t we. And we know who the eternal target of the Left is.

I have often wondered whether American traditionalists would gain by a significant relationship with Russia. Russia seems to be the only western nation that is intensely protective of its culture and is not trying to invade America. In addition, Russia is only 50 miles from America.