Steyn’s treason

Mark Steyn, the self-styled “Global Content Provider” cum Energizer Bunny, won’t stop, and neither will I. He has again re-cycled the purportedly Churchillian but actually treasonous and defeatist message he presented last month at the Claremont Institute’s misnamed Winston Churchill dinner and then in the pages of The New Criterion, only now his message is even more treasonous and defeatist than before. Writing in The Spectator, he again lovingly quotes his favorite line from Britain’s cultural-leftist prime minister, Tony Blair: “As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you leave behind?” Which Steyn takes to mean, not just, “What do you leave behind when you give up your empire?” but, “What do you leave behind when you give up your country?”

And which he also takes to mean: “What do you leave behind when you give up your civilization?”

For, as Steyn makes clear, it’s not just Europe or Britain that he thinks is doomed by supposedly irreversible demographic trends (and once again, among these supposedly irreversible demographic trends he doesn’t even mention Muslim immigration, which is reversible), but the entire West:

A decade after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history triumphalism, the ‘what do you leave behind?’ question is more urgent than you might think. ‘The West’, as a concept, is dead, and the West, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.

For any Steyn-besotted conservative readers out there who still Do Not Get It, you must understand that Steyn is not trying to awaken us Westerners to an impending mortal danger or rousing us to defend ourselves. He’s telling us it’s over. He’s saying that the only thing left for us to do is to assimilate the ascendant Muslims into our civilization even as we disappear—as though a civilization that lacks the will and ability to defend its very existence would have the will and ability to assimilate hostile aliens!

In asserting that Western civilization is not dependent on or essentially bound up with the historic Western peoples, but is a fungible abstraction infinitely transferrable to alien peoples, even to the most alien people, the Muslims, Steyn demonstrates once again that he has become the ultimate neocon. He is now openly promoting the civilizational abandonment and betrayal that has always been implied in the neoconservative view of the West as a universal abstraction, but has never been stated so explicitly before.

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[Correction: Steyn’s Spectator article was written in April 2004, not recently, as I explain here. Also, here is a selection of my recent articles on Steyn.]

An Indian reader living in the West writes:

Yes, Steyn’s article is a certification of impending death to a cancer patient, almost.

I discussed Steyn with a close friend who reads about politics. His view of it was that Steyn’s writing is extremely irresponsible for two reasons that are contradictory to one another.

The first possibility, as you’ve said quite often, is to drive people to despair so they do nothing.

The second is the possibility that this kind of talk drives people into extreme irrationality and immoderation. The writings of many German writers after the defeat in WWI had a similar effect on the German mind. Once an individual has been convinced that it’s all finished, he becomes incapable of even formulating a constructive vision of the future. The result then is a kind of nihilism that takes pleasure in destruction. The Nazis were like that. Nothing productive ever emerged from Nazism. And part of this reason was that many Nazis took pleasure in destruction for the sake of it.

Unfortunately, they succeeded in destroying Europe in their present and laying the seeds of its ultimate destruction in the future. The utter loss of nationalism in Europe is not a coincidence. It was the excesses of the Nazis that gave a bad odour to nationalism of any kind. As a result, a kind of empty hedonistic cosmopolitanism has ended up replacing it.

Will the West ever emerge from the hideous consequences of the hideous war of 1914-1918? As the reader puts it, German defeat and humiliation led to German despair, which led to German nihilism, which led to German genocidal nationalism, which led to the horrible destruction of World War II, which led to Europe’s rejection of all nationalism, which is now leading to Europe’s suicide.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 14, 2006 02:22 PM | Send