Western liberals’ ultimate embrace of Islam

We need to face the possibility that the left-liberal citizens of the West really do hate our civilization and really do desire that it come to an end. True, they may not be completely consistent (and certainly not consciously explicit) about this, since they still want their material comforts and familiar way of life to continue, for the time being. Nevertheless, civilizational surrender and suicide is the true end toward which Western liberals are moving.

That chilling thought came to me as I was reading over the last paragraph of my critique of Mark Steyn’s New Criterion article, in which he stated as a conclusive fact that much of the West is going to disappear and be taken over by Islam in our life times:

[Steyn’s] notion that the dying-out and retreating Europeans would be in a position to preserve their culture and somehow bestow it on the triumphant Musulman is too ridiculous for words. However, perhaps Steyn is inchoately glimpsing, not the assimilation of the Muslims into a somehow still intact European culture, but an image from deeper in the past and outside our own civilization, namely that the surviving whites of Europe, having converted to Islam, will offer the use of their skills and knowledge to the Muslim rulers, just as Christian and Jewish converts serving under the Abbasid Caliphate provided it with many of its cultural and scientific works. In any case, it is an embrace of doom to which this “conservative” pied piper is leading his readers.

As I read this, I suddenly realized that my whimsical image of Western Christians and Jews serving some future Caliph of Europe is a prospect that would be highly pleasant and attractive to many Westerners. I realized that these spiritually emptied-out elites are not just anti-Western, as has been said a million times, and do not just seek to harm and weaken the West before its enemies, as has been said a million times, but that they literally do not want our civilization to continue, it’s too guilty, too powerful, and its guilt and its power are too much of a burden for them. How do you go on upholding something that you don’t believe in anyway? It is similar to what I have called the hilarious dilemma of liberal patriotism, in which, for example, the Democrats at their 2004 Convention felt constrained to indulge in a four-day-long extravaganza to dramatize their fervent commitment to national defense, when, as everyone knows, the very idea of national defense is repellant to most of them. By the same token, Western liberals can no longer stand pretending to care about and to be responsible for a civilization that they no longer believe in. They resent the charge; they’re weary of the task. If the opportunity were offered to them, they would much prefer to be the retainers and attendants of a Muslim Caliph of Europe, no longer having to carry the unwanted and disliked burden of Western-ness and white-ness, but serving in a subordinate though still useful and honorable role in a new Islamic Golden Age. They would be happier and more fulfilled that way.

Is this the true motive of the dhimmi-like mindset that is now rife in the West? Is this the true consummation of the Western intelligentsia’s five-centuries-long romance with Islam?

If it is, then the European awakening and turnabout that I have hoped would result from the horror of losing much of our civilization to the Muslims may not occur. Instead, as Europeans see their civilization being defeated and destroyed by the triumphant Musulman, they will accept what has happened, and convert.

—end of article— A reader writes:

Your latest post is full of despair, but I am confident that we will awaken to the danger before it is too late. Strong men will emerge to lead us against the onslaught of the Muslims and the Third World. One thing that will be very important is that we hold our own traitors accountable for their crimes against our people and our civilization, and punish them to the fullest extent of the law. With respect to our nihilism and self-hatred, what do you expect? I am only 24 years old and I can tell you that we young Westerners are inculcated in the public schools these days with a sense of guilt and hatred for our people, our history, our culture, and our civilization. When you compound that with the effect of the white-hating media on our children, you have a pretty bad outcome. By the time we are adults the damage is pretty severe. But you must have confidence that we can turn it around. Never give up. I never plan to!

My reply:

No, no, no, it is not full of despair, that’s not it at all. It is a glimpse, an intuition, into what may be in the souls of many Westerners, explaining what they really want and where everything that they’ve been doing has been really heading all along, it’s a statement of spiritual trends that we need to understand and oppose, not a Steyn-like prediction of determined doom in the material world.

And good for you. I don’t either.

Paul Gottfried writes:

Your comments about the Western future under Islam are much too optimistic. The Baghdad-based dynasty to which you refer, for all its blood-curdling brutality, was vastly more civilized than the present even more obscurantist Muslim presence that is taking over a very decadent, feminized Europe. Moreover, the Christians and Jews who served the Caliphate had no other political choice. They had not handed over their own civilization as an act of multicultural suicide.

Steve D. writes:

In the linked article, you wrote:

“We need to face the possibility that the left-liberal citizens of the West really do hate our civilization and really do desire that it come to an end.”

I think you’re absolutely right about that, and it becomes obvious whenever you watch white people at an Obama rally. They look positively ecstatic at the prospect of finally getting that crushing load of guilt off their shoulders.

But consider this also: a lot of conservatives look at the rot of our society, and conclude that this civilization doesn’t deserve to live anymore. That may explain the lethargic attitude of people who ought to know better. I don’t believe their attitude of depressed acceptance is solely due to a societally-imposed desire not to make waves, although that is certainly part of it. Rather, conservatives are coming to agree with liberals about putting Western civilization out of its misery. They look around, and they just don’t see anything left worth fighting over.

That attitude is philosophically untenable; but this is primarily an emotional matter, to all liberals and now, possibly, to many conservatives.

LA replies:

I think you’ve just gone beyond anything I’ve explicitly said before about this, and I think you’re right. If the conservative lack of will to resist anti-West liberalism (which I’m constantly criticizing) has an end point, a culmination toward which it is heading, what is that endpoint? It is the actual surrender of the West. And this is no surprise, is it? Modern conservatives share the basic premises of liberalism—they are liberals. Therefore if liberals’ ultimate end is to surrender the West to Islam, it follows that conservatives’ ultimate end is also to surrender the West to Islam.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 04, 2006 07:49 PM | Send