Is Steyn calling for ethnic war against Muslims in Europe?

Within the last year, Mark Steyn, in his typical unserious mode, has written off our civilization, accepting as a given, without the slightest objection or furrow of his brow, the Islamization of Europe. He has also, in a break from his typical unserious mode, expressed cultural despair. And now he’s saying that Europe is, right now, at a fateful tipping point. Either Europe does something about the growing Muslim menace right now, or it will be demographically too late. But it’s not clear what he is calling for. Is he calling for ethnic war against Muslims, or is he saying it’s too late for the Europeans to win such a war? In any case, his final point is that Europe must act outside the box of the usual EU politics—though in the past he has completely accepted the ascendency of the EU and its death grip over Europe. VFR readers know my view of Steyn: I don’t trust anything this guy says. I think he has the intellectual substance of a mosquito. But he is widely read, and, what is more unaccountable, respected. So when he seems to be hinting at the need for immediate, draconian action against Muslims in Europe (and, moreover, in a further unusual twist, when he speaks in personal terms of his own stake in the future of the West), we ought to pay attention. Here is an extended excerpt of his article in the New York Sun:

Now go back to that bland statistic you hear a lot these days—“about ten percent of France’s population is Muslim”. Give or take a million here, a million there, that’s broadly correct—as far as it goes. But the population spread isn’t even. And when it comes to those living in France aged 20 and under, about 30% are said to be Muslim and in the major urban centres about 45%. If it came down to street-by-street fighting, as Michel Gurfinkiel pointed out in The New York Sun, “the combatant ratio in any ethnic war may thus be one to one”—already, right now, in 2005. By 2010, more elderly white Catholic ethnic frogs will have croaked and more fit healthy Muslim youths will be hitting the streets. One day they’ll even be on the beach at St Tropez, and if you and your infidel whore happen to be lying there wearing nothing but two coats of Ambre Solaire when they show up, you better hope that the BBC and CNN are right about there being no religio-ethno-cultural component to their “grievances”.

Back in March, Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, wrote to protest a column of mine. “Mark Steyn seems obsessed with trying tirelessly to prove that he was right about the ‘big things,’” he grumbled, “forgetting that he is not the story.”

Au contraire, I am the story. That’s to say, I’d have been happy to recycle for another decade or so the same Clinton sex jokes that provided me with a very easy living during the Nineties were it not for the fact that I’ve got three kids under the age of ten, and it seems to me that by the time they’re in young adulthood a lot of the places I know and love—including, believe it or not, France—will be a lot less congenial, if not lost forever. I’m in this thing for me and mine. I am the story. And so are you. And, if you’re a European and you reckon you’re not, you’d better be a childless centenarian in the late stages of avian flu. Unless you act, you’re going to lose your world.

So the question is: do you think M de Villepin’s one last shot of failed French statism will do the trick?

Finished laughing yet? Okay, on we go. Most likely, those continental demographic trends will accelerate—as they did during the decline of the Roman Empire, when the imperial capital’s population fell at one point as low as 500. Some French natives will figure they don’t have the stomach for the fight and opt for retirement elsewhere. The ones who don’t will increasingly be drawn down the old road to the neo-nationalist strongmen promising quick fixes. That’s why I call it the “Eurabian civil war”: The de Villepin-Chiraquiste tendency will be to accommodate and capitulate, but an unreconstructed minority will not be so obliging and will eventually act.

So what can be done? When your electorate’s split between a young implacable ethnic group and elderly French natives unwilling to vote themselves off their unaffordable social programs, there aren’t a lot of options your average poll-watching pol will be willing to take. M de Villepin put it very well: “What does it matter where this path leads, nowhere or elsewhere?” The Euroconsensus leads nowhere. Time to try elsewhere.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 14, 2005 10:13 AM | Send