Steyn articulates global neocon nightmare

Mark Steyn may be a brilliant critic of the left, but he is no friend of our historic civilization. Writing in the Telegraph, (“All the good things they never tell you about today’s Iraq,” 9/19/04), he gives a frightful new twist to the neoconservative vision:

[I]n the end, the reality is this. A few weeks ago, Prof Bernard Lewis, the great historian of the Muslim world, told Die Welt that “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century”. That seems demographically unavoidable.

Given that much of what we now know as the civilised world will be Muslim, it seems prudent to ensure that what is already the Muslim world is civilised. And, for those who say that Islam is incompatible with democracy, we might as well try to buck that in Iraq today than in France, Scandinavia and Britain the day after tomorrow.

There are two points to be observed here. First, Steyn accepts, without the slightest demurrer or the tiniest pang of a troubled feeling, the prospect that the historic cradle of Western man will be Islamic within a hundred years. He doesn’t see the Islamization of Europe as an inconceivable disaster for our people and our civilization. He barely sees it as a problem. He simply sees Islamization as both inevitable (a view he has expressed previously) and unobjectionable.

Second, Steyn concludes that since the West is going to become Islamic, the West must assure that the Muslim world itself is civilized, since otherwise the uncivilized Muslims in the Muslim world will egg on the Western Muslims against the West. But, he says, if we democratize the Muslim lands, they will not push Western Muslims to create trouble in the West.

What does this all mean? It means that the West’s openness to Muslim immigration—a pet neocon project—requires the West to take over, Westernize and democratize the whole Muslim world—another pet neocon project. Instead of seeing Islamization as an inconceivable disaster and thinking of ways to forestall it, by ending Muslim immigration and perhaps initiating (as I have proposed) a net out-migration of Muslims, neocons like Steyn instantly surrender to the Islamization of the West. Indeed, they even seem to welcome it, because it justifies and makes necessary the neocon-led democratization of the whole world. Democratization of the Eastern Muslims, and assimilation of the Western Muslims, become two complimentary parts of one global process of homogenization and the elimination of everything historically distinctive about the West.

The lesson is that we can never count on the neocons to defend our historic civilization, to defend European man, or to defend America as a particular nation. The neocons truly seek a single humanity in which all historic cultures and peoples have been dissolved into the global cosmopolitan democracy that represents the neocons’ ultimate ideal. That ideal is horrible enough. But as we know,—and can see every day from Baghdad to Londonistan—the ideal is unattainable. We will not end up with the rootless global democracy of which the neocons dream. We will end up with global jihad and dhimmitude.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 18, 2004 07:48 PM | Send