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Steyn in Vancouver
Here is a brief excerpt from Mark Steyn’s speech in Vancouver this past week. And here is a summary of Steyn’s speech by Jim Matkin. Matkin writes:
His conclusion is America stands alone—Europe is “too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia,” and the situation is going to get very much worse as the Muslim culture dominates through population change.I understand Steyn is a hero to many people because of his entertaining writings and his being brought before a human rights commission in Canada for his critical comments about Islam. But I must say what I think. In this speech, Steyn restates the thesis of America Alone, and the thesis is deeply wrong, offensive, and, in my view, treasonous to the West. He writes off Europe as though it were nothing. Instead of saying that the Islamization of Europe is an inconceivable horror that must be resisted at all costs, he says the Islamization of Europe is a done deal. And when he has made this point in his previous writings, he has repeatedly given voice to a kind of satisfaction at that prospect. Steyn appeals to the neocon perversion of conservatism which despises Europe. Steyn on the prospect of the Islamization of Europe is as bad as Joseph Kennedy in 1940 on the Nazification of Europe. No, Steyn is worse—because Kennedy did not express the frivolous Schadenfreude toward Europe in which Steyn has repeatedly indulged. It makes me sick at heart that conservatives admire this man, instead of being disgusted by him. It suggests that they remain hopelessly out of touch with reality. Steyn’s lack of seriousness is also shown by the way he starts off the speech, with a jocular comparison of his situation to Sen. Larry Craig making gestures in a toilet stall. This is the kind of thing that is loved by today’s “conservatives”: contempt for Europe, combined with jokes about homosexual encounters in men’s washrooms.
In his speech Steyn says:
What we’re up against is not primarily defined by what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those are still essentially military campaigns and we’re good at those. … it might be truer to say that this is a Cold Civil War—by which I mean a war within the west. The real war is a domestic war: the key terrain is not the Sunni Triangle but every major city within the western world….When I first read this, I enthusisatically thought that Steyn was saying that the problem is not terrorism or jihad, it’s Islam itself. But then I realized he is not saying that. He’s saying that the problem is not Islam at all, it’s the leftism within the West that makes us surrender to Islam and seeks to silence criticism of Islam. Which is of course one of his standard arguments. As I have pointed out many times, the argument leaves unaddressed the key issue. Let’s say that we won this civil war against the left and, as Steyn has called for, “regained our civilizational confidence.” Fine. What would we then DO about Islam? Steyn, like so many other deeply unserious Islam critics, avoids that question by suggesting that if we defeated the left and regained our civilization confidence, the Islam question would automatically, magically disappear without our having to take any steps against it. So this “heroic” figure Steyn—in addition to his cowardly writing off the entire homeland of Western civilization—also recoils from the question of what “America Alone,” the embattled hero of his book, should DO about Islam. And his neocon audience eats it up, because they also like to imagine that they are bold opponents of Islam, without wanting to take any actual position against Islam, which would actually cost them something.
Another thing. Steyn’s on-again, off-again Canadian nationality seems to be off again. In the beginning of the speech he says:
I’m honoured to be here. The only other invitation I’ve had from Vancouver is from the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal which begins its case against my “hate speech” next Monday. I confess until this case came about I’d always assumed Canada had freedom of speech. I was south of the border, and you may remember that business from last year when Senator Larry Craig had his unfortunate run-in with the undercover cop in the Minneapolis Airport men’s room. [Italics added.]He describes himself as someone who has no ties with Canada at all. He doesn’t live there, and he doesn’t know about its laws. Yet Steyn has also described himself as a Canadian citizen who has a home in the U.S. but also spends a lot of time in Canada. And of course he regularly writes in Canadian publications such as Macleans, where he presents himself as a Canadian knowledgeable in Canadian life and politics. Yet here he says that he lives elsewhere and didn’t have clue about Canada’s restrictions on speech until he himself was sued. This is a further example of how Steyn shifts his identity, as well as his positions, constantly and cannot be trusted. He’s a trickster, playing games with some of the gravest issues of our time, and becoming very popular in the process. Someday people will realize this, and will be embarrassed at their present, gushing admiration for him.
Kidist Paulos Asrat (previously identified as KPA) writes from Canada:
You wrote about Steyn’s vacillations about where he lives. A few years ago, he wrote about his wonderful Quebec home, along with his home in New Hampshire. His whole reason for living in Quebec was for the wonderful “culture.” The food, the fashion, the French cities. He said he had abandoned English Canada for the more exciting French one. Despite the “one nation,” there really is a divide between the English and French. Loyalties are strong. If he had lived in Quebec for political or professional reasons, it would have been different. But it was more like an exotic vacation place for him, away from the Rest Of Canada (as non-Quebec Canada is known). I realized his frivolity then, and I stopped reading him. His New Hampshire and UK links didn’t bother me so much. Perhaps because of the English connection. Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 03, 2008 09:25 PM | Send Email entry |