Rhetorical Outbursts

We caught Mark Steyn on C-SPAN over the break, giving a typically funny and perceptive speech. He’s recently moved to New Hampshire from Canada, and his observations about America are of the sort it generally takes an immigrant to see.

The video is available here for RealPlayer, but you’ll have to move slider over to 1 hour and 32 minutes to skip to the beginning of his speech. It’s well worth it.

The upshot of his speech is also available in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. . . .The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.

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Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it’s not what this thing’s about. Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It’s not the HIV that kills you, it’s the pneumonia you get when your body’s too weak to fight it off. . . . Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there’s an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.

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The default mode of our elites is that anything that happens–from terrorism to tsunamis–can be understood only as deriving from the perniciousness of Western civilization. As Jean-Francois Revel wrote, “Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.”

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Best-case scenario? The [European] Continent winds up as Vienna with Swedish tax rates.

Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot sooner–and we’re already seeing a drift in that direction.

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[T]o keep the present level of pensions and health benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?

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This ought to be the left’s issue. I’m a conservative–I’m not entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut: I’m with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the West’s collapsed birthrates? Even if one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by “a woman’s right to choose,” in any sense.

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According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60% of British Muslims want to live under Shariah–in the United Kingdom. If a population “at odds with the modern world” is the fastest-breeding group on the planet–if there are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational institutions–how safe a bet is the survival of the “modern world”?

There’s a lovely thought.