Moderate Muslims against moderate Islam; paleconservatives against white America

Here are two articles from last summer that are worth a re-read. The first is about Australia’s leading “respectable” Muslim who says modern Islam is a Western fiction that Westerners have invented for their own purposes and imposed on Muslims; the respectable Muslim bristles at being made to wear this foreign suit of clothes and insists on being his real self, an “undiluted Muslim.” The second is a discussion of why paleocons, contrary to general beliefs and expectations, do not believe in white America.

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Tom S. writes:

I very much enjoyed the discussion on Paleo-Cons that you linked to—I agree that they are not true conservatives, and that they are not on the side of White America, Black America, Jewish America, or any America at all. They are enemies of our country. As noted—no wonder they can cooperate so readily with the destroyers on the Left.

It’s also interesting to note how, like the Left, the Paleo-right keeps calling for madder music. Just as the Left continues to expand the definitions of “racism” and “discrimination” to include almost any possible human activity, the Paleos continue to push back the temporal frame of the civilization they wish to “conserve.” They started out by denouncing the New Deal and World War II, then reached back to the “tyrant” Lincoln, and the whole structure of the post-1865 United States. Now, Joseph Sobran has denounced the American Founding as a mistake, and I’d be willing to bet that more Paleos will follow his lead..

But the end is not yet. After all, Richard Weaver traced the “fatal flaw” in Western Civilization back to William of Occam—can it be long before the Paleos (misinterpreting both Weaver and Occam, as they always do) reject Western Civilization itself as a mistake? And what then? Do not the roots of Western Civilization go back to Judea, and the Light that was made manifest there? Some European New Right parties have rejected Christianity—will the Paleos follow?

The Paleo-Cons are well named, for they seem to reject everything in human history that has happened since the end of the Paleolithic. Well do true conservatives reject them.

LA replies:

I’m chuckling at this, because this is an old conservative in-joke that I haven’t thought about in a while: how far back do we push the point where things went wrong with America or the West? I had a conservative friend in 1991 who came up with the theory that things went wrong with the West in the eighth century B. C. with the invention of money, in other words, long before Western civilization even began. A couple of us had some jollity at his expense over this, which he didn’t take well.

You’re right on the paleocons. When I discovered paleoconservatism in 1987 and thought I had found a home, I thought paleoconservatism meant among other things devotion to the true federal constitutional order; I didn’t realize it meant the rejection of the entire post-1860 U.S. Yet that’s what it came to mean. And the rejection has progressed deeper into the past, as you point out.

But to be fair we must admit that such a belief is not necessarily a matter of crankiness or cultural despair. The U.S really is in a tremendous crisis and this raises two legitimate questions: Was there a flaw in the country from the start that made this inevitable? And has America passed the point where it can be saved? While I do not answer those questions in the affirmative myself and will fight to defend America to the end, I cannot dismiss out of hand the possibility that the answer to both questions is yes, especially the second question.

Now what happens to people who do answer yes to both those questions? They tend to lose all loyalty and sense of filiation with America. And since human affection abhors a vacuum, they don’t stop at that point. Having lost belief in America, they begin actively to oppose her and side with her enemies. This is a huge and growing problem today, on both the left and the right.

However, I do not think it’s at all correct or fair to say that paleocons as such are anti-American. Serge Trifkovic, for example, who writes at Chronicles, has made serious proposals to defend America from sharia-supporting Muslim immigrants. At the same time, however, even the paleocons who are not themselves anti-American are buddies with the paleocons who are, and never, ever criticize them. Consider the way Peter Brimelow publishes every column by that raving bigot Paul Craig Roberts, despite numerous complaints Brimelow has received from readers and colleagues who say that Roberts demeans the vdare website and drives away readers who would otherwise be interested in its immigration restriction message. Why does Brimelow do this? Roberts, he says, is his friend, as though that explains and excuses everything. If Roberts were really Brimelow’s friend, would he insist, as the price of friendship, that Brimelow publish every unhinged hateful thing he happens to write, even if it contributes nothing to vdare’s primary mission and actively harms it? It would appear that, as Jared Taylor is to David Duke and the legions of Jew-haters in the AR circle, so Brimelow is to Roberts: he’s just a guy who can’t say no, to a nutcase.

And so, refusing to draw lines that must be drawn, even the more sane paleocons continue to marginalize themselves.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 28, 2006 02:19 PM | Send