Unreal civilization
RG writes:
As we VFR readers surely realize, it’s laughable to observe mainstream media and commentators try so very hard to report and explain the phenomenon of growing friction between various nation’s citizens and recent Muslim immigrants, yet save VFR, 99% of them don’t state the obvious remedy: Stop or at least reduce Muslim immigration.
Reminds me of the old story we learned as children, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. No one has the backbone to state the obvious truth.
LA replies:
My amazement at this never wears off.
I was just looking at the closing chapter of Mark Steyn’s book. He has a ten point plan about how to save the West from Islam. It doesn’t mention immigration.
And of all the conservatives who lauded his book, none mentioned that he doesn’t mention immigration. So they didn’t notice this, or, if they did, weren’t bothered by it. It didn’t even strike them as a strange omission. It’s unreal.
David G. writes:
I listened briefly to Dennis Miller speaking to Mark Steyn the other night and there was a sense of jocularity as they yukked it up over the weak-kneed French and their inability to end decisively the ongoing rioting by the youths of the “banlieues.”
It’s so different here in America they attested. American citizens are armed and they would never tolerate such an overt display of gangsterism. Miller said something like ‘try to pull an American out of his car and you’re likely to get shot.’ (So much for car-jacking horror stories, I guess.) One five star review of Steyns book, America Alone, at the Conservative Book Club web site includes this comment:: “Rioting Muslim youths that get away with it in England would be shot in Texas.”
This fear of awakening the armed citizenry is supposedly part of what allows us to reach a modus vivendi between our way of life and that of the latent Muslim jihadists among us. This is beyond pathetic. To think that the Second Amendment, which was designed to protect citizens from a corrupt government, would be relied upon to protect citizens from a group of immigrants who don’t belong here, is pathological. I think that this nearly qualifies as an unprincipled exception on the part of Steyn and Miller under the second definition of the term.
In reality, following the use of fire-power by an ad hoc militia, it would take less than 24 hours for any such group (or separate individuals) to be denounced as vigilantes. There would be calls for inter-neighborhood meetings and inter-faith councils to promote healing, tolerance and closure. Urban studies would be undertaken with renewed vigor and the government would seek out Muslim liaisons from ‘the community’ to confer with. Yet Steyn and Miller see armed-America as the great wall of separation between our social make-up and that of Europe’s. In the long run, in a liberal society embracing open immigration, this is a distinction without a difference. For just as the urban riots of the 1960’s ended up being an indictment of institutional racism, so the (hypothetical, at this point) Muslim v.American riots would produce a monumental shift in terms of our response to Muslim aggression—with a net gain in favor of the Muslims!
Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 02, 2007 04:15 PM | Send