Paleocons who would choose an Islamic Europe over a secular hedonist Europe

Following Henry Hotspur’s article at Taki’s Magazine which I discuss below, several commenters, including Paul Gottfried, indicated that they prefer Islam to Bruce Bawer’s vision of society. I posted a comment about it, which I reproduce (with slight modifications) below:

The commenter “Original Jack” said:

“If I have to choose between these two give me the Muslims. Back To the catacombs!”

To which Paul Gottfried replied:

“I fully agree with the blogger who expressed a moral preference for the Muslims over their gay and neocon critic Bruce Bawer.”

Here is the implied logic of my friend Paul Gottfried’s comment. Since, at this moment, secularist hedonism including homosexual liberation is the order of Europe, and since Mr. Gottfried fully agrees with the commenter who said, “If I have to choose between these two give me the Muslims,” then Mr. Gottfried is saying that at this very moment he sides with the Muslims in their jihad campaign to take over Europe.

For years I have been criticizing paleoconservatives for their nihilistic stance of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Also, Paul Gottfried recently admitted, in an article at this website, that the paleoconservative movement in its bitterness toward its perceived enemies had discredited itself.

I hope Paul realizes the nihilism he has fallen into here and pulls back from the abyss.

He should also note that many of the neocons whom he despises despise Europe and express Schadenfreude at the prospect of a Muslim takeover of Europe.

- end of initial entry -

Thucydides writes:

Paleocon nihilism—I think you are on to something. For example, I grew weary of the attitude of the people at Chronicles, all in despair over our failure to return to a fantasized cultural unity that never was, and never could be, and refusing to try to deal realistically with the existing situation. I think of it as nihilism being manifested as utopianism. The liberals want to dump everything that is because it does not measure up to a universal ideal; some of the paleocons have a similar attitude, just a different ideal.

Adam G. writes:

Its ironic but some paleocons are among the most ideological people around, and I mean ideological in the negative way that paleocons mean it. When you’re consigning a continent of people to misery because they don’t embrace your ideas, you’re an ideologue and (to a degree) a menace.

Europe is condemning itself with its beliefs and behaviors, but I don’t want the Europeans punished for it. I want them to change course.

LA replies:

Exactly. Well put.

Paul Gottfried wrote:

Larry,

You are distorting the meaning of my remark. I do not wish to have a Europe made safe for Muslims or for practitioners of aberrant sex and subverters of the Christian family. But if I were forced to choose between Bawer’s conception of freedom as sexual license and the Muslims who might resist this trend being pushed by, among others, the noxious EU, I would pick what seems to me the less degenerate of the two evils. Needless to say, I would like to free Europe of both evils; and as you should know, I agree with your views on the Muslim threat to a decadent European (indeed Euro-American) civilization. Therefore picking me as a prime case of paleo nihilism is utterly absurd. Paul Gottfried

I replied:

Paul,

If you do not wish to have a Europe made safe for Muslims, then may I ask why you said that you “fully agreed” with the commenter who indicated that he preferred a Muslim takeover of Europe? Yes, I understand that you didn’t “really” mean it. It was more a way of expressing your disgust at present day Europe and its secular hedonism. But may I suggest that on matters of civilizational life and death one should not indulge publicly in rhetoric which may be emotionally satisfying in the moment but which conveys ideas which on their face are, indeed, nihilistic, demoralizing, and defeating to the West?

Very simply, if you don’t wish to be seen as nihilistic, then don’t make nihilistic statements.

And frankly, for years and years, the paleocon world has been peppered with such nihilistic statements.

Larry

Paul Gottfried replies:

Would you want to deliver Europe to the rule of perverts and libertines in order to save it from Muslims? If you consider Bruce Bawer a fit ally in the struggle against an Islamicized Europe, then you would quite literally do anything to keep the Muslims at bay. The problem of course is that Bawer and the European sickies represent slightly different stages in the decline of Europe into multicultural madness. Paul

LA replied:

Paul, please read my original response to the Henry Hotspur article at Taki and see what I say about Bawer.

LA sends follow-up:

You seem to have missed the entire point of Henry Hotspur’s comments on Bawer, which I was underscoring and expanding on in my blog entry on the Hotspur article. Bawer is a declared enemy against any traditionalist defense of Europe. He called Paul Belien a “little Euro-fascist” for even implying a criticism of Europe’s secular hedonism. Bawer, with his ally Charles Johnson, regards people like us as fascists and would silence us. So how can he be our ally?

But notice the difference between, on one side, people like Belien and me, and, on the side side, people like you. Belien and I stand for our civilization against both the Muslims and the secular hedonists, while you indulge in rhetoric about how you prefer Muslims to the secular hedonists.

Paul G. replies to LA’s earlier comment above:

It seems we agree on these points.

Paul G. replies to LA’s followup:

You must pardon my slight hyperbole but at this point the Bawers and their allies have become the “conservative” alternative to Islamicization. Actually I find these “conservative” allies at least as dangerous as the ones we are trying to keep from overrunning Europe. Paul.

Steven Warshawsky writes:

I am utterly flabbergasted by Paul Gottfried’s position. Faced with the choice, he appears to prefer Islamic Imams and religious police to “perverts” and “libertines.” This is not a sensible position. Under a modern, secular, “hedonist” regime (which Gottfried ascribes to Europe), people like Gottfried (not to mention everyone else) are free to live their private lives (mostly) as they choose, to work in a (mostly) free economy, to take advantage of an incredible array of modern technologies, and to enjoy a wide range of artistic productions and recreational activities. None of this exists under contemporary Muslim regimes based on sharia. Like socialists who believe it is better that all be poor so as to avoid the evils of inequality, Gottfried apparently believes it is better that all be enslaved so as to avoid the evils of liberty. How could he assert a preference (in whatever form) for a barbarian creed that is antithetical to what the American nation stands for?

Yet, ultimately, I think Gottfried is a poseur. There is no chance in hell he would voluntarily live in a country like Saudi Arabia or Iran instead of a country like France or Italy (let alone the United States, where he in fact lives, despite the rampant hedonism and immorality of our own society). None. His rhetoric reminds me of Hollywood liberals who say they will leave the country if a Republican is elected president.

Lydia McGrew writes:

Apropos of your exchange with Paul Gottfried, here is my exchange with Jim Kalb on a somewhat similar topic. My thesis, which seems similar to yours in the exchange with Gottfried, is that Islam and decadent liberalism are incommensurable evils and that it is a mistake to try to pick one to prefer over the other. I was interested to see that Kalb literally says concerning female genital mutilation and honor killings that as far as he can tell, they are not “particularly supported by Islam.”

Alan Levine writes:

I thought your rebuke to Paul Gottfried and the others who preferred Muslims to a “decadent Europe” was thoroughly justified.

I was a bit surprised, however, that no one seems to have mentioned the point that, Islam itself promotes homosexuality; the treatment of women stipulated by at least the Arabs, Iranians and Afghans and other Muslims who copy their cultural pattern, promotes homosexuality among men, at least. Furthermore, Islam, during most of its history, while not approving of homosexuality, was in practice more tolerant of it than either Christianity or Judaism. The fire-breathing of some contemporary Muslims against it is a recent thing and may even reflect an attempt to try to shift the blame for it to the West.

Lydia McGrew writes:

It is interesting your bringing up Schadenfreude over the Muslim takeover of Europe. This attitude, including the exact phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” came up here in my recent thread on the forbidding of Bible preaching in Muslim areas in England.

Does it matter to you, MZ, that Britain, the cradle of American culture in the vast majority of its aspects, is dying?

No. I’m not bothered that it is dead. And no, I don’t have any particular affection for the American project.

Whoever loses, and however one defines British society, it shouldn’t be the Christians.

The Christians lost so long ago it isn’t funny. Pick you marker, it doesn’t really matter which one, but the Christians have been fighting a rear guard action in Britain for better than 200 years. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Let the Muslims fight the secularists.

Posted by M.Z. Forrest | June 5, 2008 9:18 AM

That sort of Schadenfreude is likely to backfire on those who entertain it. I think people say things like that because they don’t actually have to live in a Muslim country and also (perhaps) because the Baptists or low-church evangelicals—like the street preachers in the UK story discussed in the 4W thread who were told by a Muslim police officer not to evangelize in Muslim neightborhood—are the canaries in the mine for Muslim oppression, and Christians of more dignified denominations feel themselves smugly secure. If, for example, their own priests were being murdered and churches desecrated while the Muslim police were “unable” to find the culprits, they might start thinking a Muslim victory wasn’t such a great deal after all.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 09, 2008 07:55 PM | Send