Valse Macabre

Waltzing Gaily on the Road to Ruin

Paul Richardson
2011
The following are comments on the message of Mark Steyn’s, America
Alone: The end of the world as we know it., (2006), USA, Regnery
Publishing, Washington, DC

Before sharing quotes from the book, I want to give some background on the
book’s basic premise and also some thoughts that aren’t in the book. The
basic premise of the author is that birthrate demographics, esp. in Europe
and Russia will mean that the Muslims will take over Europe in only one to
two decades. Their birth rate is 4 to 5 times that of the native Europeans.
Also, the majority of Islamic "congregations" in the free world are true to
the Wahabbi sect's radical beliefs as spoken by Bakri in a quote later. This
is because the Saudis (home of Wahabbism and bin Laden) have taken
billions of their oil profits over the last 5 or so decades and invested them in
creating schools and mosques in our back yards to convert and radicalize
Islamic believers. The book says about 80% of the mosques and maddrassas
are a result of that “flood of oil money.”

While not in the book but a thought of mine, Augustine in his City of God
laid down the principle of separation of church and state. That is,
Christianity should be basically nonpolitical. The Muslims have the opposite
belief that their religion is political and hence, the Sharia law. They have a
long tradition of conversion (they call it reversion) by force. And in the past
when they have taken over a land they placed heavy taxes on nonbelievers
who become basically their serfs. The societies always have gone into
decline since they can't seem to progress beyond the 7th century and the
serfs tend to escape to places with more freedom if they can.

One of our biggest problems is the multiculturalism that has been a constant
drumbeat within our education system from K-12 to colleges and
universities for decades. British Prime Minister Cameron in remarks at the
European Union Security Conference on February 5, 2011 lamented that
multiculturalism has not worked for good but to increase Islamic extremism.
Steyn puts it well in the book quoting French philosopher, Jean-Francois
Revel who wrote, “Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is
and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.”

We must stop ignoring reality and face the truth that our civilization is in
great danger if we don’t make changes immediately in our approach to the
threat.
America Alone Quotes

“Our enemies are small worms,” Adolf Hitler told his generals in August
1939. “I saw them at Munich.” In Europe today, as in the thirties, the
political class prostrates itself before an insatiable force that barely
acknowledges the latest surrender before moving on to the next invented
grievance. Indeed, a formal enemy is all but superfluous to requirements.
Bomb us, and we agonize over the “root causes.” Decapitate us, and our
politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that “Islam is a religion of
peace.” Issue bloodcurdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all Jews and
infidels, and we fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims. Behead
sodomites and mutilate female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups
can’t wait to march alongside you denouncing Bush and Blair. Murder a
schoolful of children, and our scholars explain that to the “vast majority” of
Muslims “jihad” is a harmless concept meaning “healthy lifestyle lo-fat
granola bar.” Thus the lopsided valse macabre of our times, the more the
Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room.

As French philosopher 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.” During the cartoon jihad, the New York Times
gave a routinely pompous explanation of why it would not be showing us
the representations of the Prophet: sensitive news organizations, the editors
explained, had the duty to “refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious
symbols.” The very next day the Times illustrated a story on the Danish
controversy with a piece of New York “art” from a couple of seasons earlier
showing the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung. Multiculturalism seems
to operate on the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke in which
the American tells the Soviet guy that “in my country everyone is free to
criticize the president,” and the Soviet guy replies, “Same here. In my
country everyone is free to criticize your president.” Under the rules
understood by the New York Times, the West is free to mock and belittle its
Judeo-Christian inheritance, and, likewise, the Muslim world is free to mock
and belittle the West’s Judeo-Christian inheritance. If one has to choose, on
balance Islam’s loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less
damaging than the Western elites’ loathing of their own.

After the carnage in Spain, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed told Lisbon’s
Publica magazine that a group of London Islamists were “ready to launch a
big operation” on British soil. “We don’t make a distinction between
civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents,” he said, clarifying
the ground rules. “Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of
an unbeliever has no value.” The cleric added he expected to see the banner
of Islam flying in Downing Street. “I believe one day that is going to
happen. Because this is my country, I like living here,” he said. “If they
believe in democracy, who are they afraid of? Let Omar Bakri benefit from
democracy!”

This book isn’t an argument for more war, more bombing, or more killing,
but for more will. In a culturally confident age, the British in India were
faced with the practice of “suttee”—the tradition of burning widows on the
funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably
multicultural: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well.
We also have a custom when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around
their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my
carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we
will follow ours.”

Insurgencies, whether explicitly terrorist or more subtle, persist because of a

lack of confidence on the part of their targets. The IRA, for example,
calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally
but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily,
they also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The
only difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now
have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the
whole world the way the IRA views the bogs of Fermamagh: they want it,
and they’ve calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them
off.

At the heart of multiculturalism is a lie: that all cultures are equally “valid.”
To accept that proposition means denying reality—the reality of any
objective measure of human freedom, societal health, and global population
movement. Multiculturalism is not the first ideology founded on the denial
of truth. You’ll recall Hermann Goering’s memorable assertion that “two
plus two makes five if the Fuhrer wills it.” Likewise, we’re asked to accept
that the United States Constitution was modeled on the principles of the
Iroquois Confederation—if a generation of multicultitheorists, the ethnic
grievance lobby, and even a ludicrous resolution of the United States
Congress so wills it.
Still, it’s harmless, isn’t it? What’s wrong with playing make-believe if it
helps us all feel warm and fuzzy about each other?

Well, because it’s never helpful to put reality up for grabs. There may come
a day when you need it.

And given the governing principle of multicultural society—that Western

man demonstrates his cultural sensitivity by preemptively surrendering—
and smart Islamists, surveying the Madrid bombing and the aftermath, must
be contemplating the benefits of a twin-track strategy.

There are three possible resolutions to the present struggle:

1. Submit to Islam
2. Destroy Islam
3. Reform Islam

Because most of us don’t take number one as a serious possibility, we’re

equally unserious about being forced to choose between two and three. But
submission to Islam is very possible, and to many it will still seem ridiculous
even as it happens; like John Kerry during the 2004 campaign, we’ll be
spluttering that we can’t believe we’re losing to these idiots. But we can
lose…and … we might lose more easily than even the gloomiest of us
thought.

And I’m a little unnerved at the number of readers who seem to think the
rest of the world can go hang but America will endure as a lonely candle of
liberty in the new Dark Ages. Think that one through: a totalitarian China, a
crumbling Russia, an insane Middle East, a disease-ridden Africa, a civil
war-torn Eurabia—and a country that can’t even enforce its borders against
two relatively benign states will somehow be able to hold the entire planet at
bay? Dream on, “realists.”

As for option two, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Even if you regard Islam
as essentially incompatible with free societies, the slaughter required to end
it as a force in the world would change America beyond recognition.

That leaves option three: reform Islam—which is not ours to do. Ultimately,
only Muslims can reform Islam. All the free world can do is create
conditions that increase the likelihood of Muslim reform, or at any rate do
not actively impede it.
 1. Support Women’s rights—real rights, not feminist pieties—in the
Muslim world. This is the biggest vulnerability in Islam. Not every
Muslim female wants to be Gloria Steinem or Paris Hilton. But nor
do they want a life that starts with genital mutilation and ends with an
honor killing at the hands of your brothers. The overwhelming
majority of females in Continental battered women’s shelters are
Muslim—which gives you some sense of what women in the Middle
East might do if they had any women’s shelters to go to. When half
the population of these societies is a potential source of dissent, we
need to use it.
2. Roll back Wahhabi, Iranian, and other ideological exports that have
radicalized Muslims on every continent. We have an ideological
enemy and we need to wage ideological war.
3. Support economic and political liberty in the Muslim world…
4. Ensure the Islamic states that persecute non-Muslims are denied
international legitimacy and excluded and marginalized in
international bodies.
5. Throttle the funding of mosques, madrassas, think tanks and other
activities in America and elsewhere by Saudi Arabia, Iran and others.
6. Develop a strategy for countering Islamism on the ideological front.
Create a civil corps to match America’s warrior corps and use it to
promote alternative institutions, structures, and values through a post-
imperial equivalent to Britain’s Colonial Office…
7. Marginalize and euthanize the UN, NATO, the International Atomic
Agency, and other September 10 transnational organizations and
devote the energy wasted on them to results-oriented multilateralism.
We need real allies now.
8. Cease bankrolling unreformable oil dictatorships by a long-overdue
transformation of the energy industry.
9. End the Iranian regime.
10.Strike militarily when the opportunity presents itself.

Americans and other Westerners who want their families to enjoy the
blessings of life in a free society should understand that the life we’ve led
since 1945 in the Western world is very rare in human history. Our children
are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid, and may well spend their adult
years in an ugly and savage world unless we decide that who and what we
are is worth defending. To a five-year-old boy watching Queen Victoria’s
Diamond Jubilee procession on the Mall in 1897, it would have been
inconceivable that by the time of his eightieth birthday the greatest empire
the world had ever known would have sunk to an economically moribund
strike-bound slough of despond whose tax rates drove its best talents abroad,
and whose most glittering colonial possessions now valued ties to
Communist Russia over those to the mother country. It’s difficult to focus
on long-term trends because human life is itself short-term.

The threat to America comes principally not from …[outside] … but from
America’s own indolence, just as the sack of Rome was a symptom of the
fall of the empire rather than the cause.

PWR 2011