A champion of our civilization

Since everyone’s thinking about the pope’s stunning quotation about Islam, this may be a good day to revisit what another great defender of the West said 66 years ago, during the dark days of World War II—or, rather, what he would have said, if he had spoken the way a certain conservative idol of our time speaks.

The speech is, in fact, a mixture of Winston Churchill’s “Never surrender” speech in June 1940 and Mark Steyn’s article, “It’s the demography, stupid,” in the January 2006 issue of The New Criterion, which was received by conservatives as though it were a major, Churchillian utterance of our time, and indeed Steyn was honored by the Claremont Institute at their annual Winston Churchill dinner where he gave a speech based on his New Criterion article. The reality of all this, readily seen by anyone with an intellect not disordered by neoconservatism, was that Steyn, in this article and several similar pieces published at the same time, far from being Churchill-like, was the anti-Churchill, invoking, predicting, and gloating over the imminent death of Europe. My parody, posted in January 2006, shows how Churchill would have spoken in June 1940 if, instead of being Churchill, he had been Steyn.

My original discussion of Steyn’s atrocious article—which I remind you was absolutely lauded by mainstream “conservatives”—is here.

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Mark J. writes:

In the Steyn article that is linked in this piece, he concludes:

“There will only be very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the midpoint of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings? Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy?”

To my mind, the most egregious aspect of his piece is that he has this last part exactly backwards. What matters most is the survival of our people, not our culture. If my people disappear, I couldn’t care less, frankly, whether “pluralist, liberal democracy” survives or not. Pluralistic, liberal democracy is a tool that my people (white Westerners) have found useful so far in furthering our survival interests. It’s a great tool, but it’s only a tool. It is survival as a people that matters. This, I think, is the real danger of Steyn’s viewpoint: like multiculturalist liberals, he is willing to see his people vanish as long as his political ideal survives. His priorities are exactly backwards.

LA replies:

I think you’re giving him too much. He has not just erased Western peoplehood in favor of Western culture, he has erased the culture as well. “Pluralist liberal democracy” and similar phrases have been the self-understanding of Western society for at the last 20 or 30 years. It is a slogan of late-liberalism. There is nothing left of our country and culture in “liberal pluralist democracy.” It is synonymous with “the open society.” Anyone who defines his ideal as “liberal pluralist democracy” is a liberal, period.

Carl Simpson writes:

Like yourself and Mark J., I find this final paragraph very disturbing. In fact, I don’t think I exaggerate in describing it as bordering on being genocidal in nature.

“There will only be very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the midpoint of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings? Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy?”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave us a wonderful, concise explanation of the basic morality of nationhood:

“The disappearance of nations would impoverish us no less than if all men became alike with one nature and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a special facet of God’s design.”

Note first of all the smug tone of historical inevitability—a typical dogma among leftists of all stripes. So Steyn has forseen the future? If the nations whose demise he so readily accepts—and all but celebrates—die out, does he not realize that there will be no liberal democracy in the same sense he refers to? Besides, there is so much more to our civilization than liberal democracy to begin with! Steyn reveals himself here as a nihilist, a neo-Jacobin to the core, driven by pure ideology. When Steyn writes of the Russian demographic disaster, for example, he’s overtly gleeful and celebratory. Steyn thus proves to be no better than the David Duke followers who openly cheered at the AR conference last spring when a speaker mentioned that Israel would likely be destroyed by Muslims winning the “jihad of the womb” in the next few decades.

Despite all the cleverness, the great talent and humor, there’s nothing at the core. That’s my beef with Steyn. I think it’s a fairly profound one, too. I’ve stopped reading him for the most part. The lights are on, but there’s nobody at home—a cloud without rain.

Arlene M. writes:

Subject: Steyn as Fallaci’s successor?

On this thread at Free Republic, discussing Oriana Fallaci’s death, poster #5 thinks Steyn can take up where Fallaci left off. Considering Steyn’s flippant cluelessness on the threat to the West, it seems absurd to compare the two. But such is the mindless adulation of Mark Steyn at FR and Lucianne.com. Steyn is almost revered on the same level as President Bush among that crowd.

If Steyn is our best hope for defending the cause of the West, we really are in trouble.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 15, 2006 04:16 PM | Send