The Undocumented Mark Steyn

by Mark Steyn

  But the BBC poll goes further than mere multiculti isolationism, featuring as it does not just songs which appeal to very narrow ethnic groups but songs which are positively offensive to large numbers of other ethnic groups. Don’t open with “A Nation Once Again” in an East Belfast pub, or with “Dil Dil Pakistan” in India, or with “Pooyum Nadakkuthu Pinchum Nadakkuthu” if you’ve got a big Sinhalese crowd in the house tonight. You’ll be lucky to get out alive.

  The BBC World Service, founded to bind the Empire and promote Britannic values, these days cruises mushily under the slogan “Many Voices, One World.” But many of these voices cheerily reject the multicultural, multilateral, multinational pieties of one world in favor of a fierce musical jingoism: Tamils vote Tamil, Irish Catholics vote Irish Catholic. The only listeners who made any effort to live up to the virtues of the multicultural utopia were the Americans, who voted for “The Girl from Ipanema” by Brazilian bossa maestro Antonio Carlos Jobim. Typical. The only evidence in the BBC’s “one world” that any of us are open to any “voices” other than our own is the much-mocked cocktail-hour staple of every suburban hi-fi in the mid-Sixties.

  I can’t help feeling that in this strange poll there are some profound lessons about the illusions of the age. Those of us skeptical of multiculturalism will be heartened by the dizzying variety of local prejudices on display in these unlovely songs. Today, we are not provinces of empire but of the slyer, suppler transnational elites. For that reason, in its stirring cry of nationalist pride, the Wolfe Tones’ rebel yell, now sanctified as the world’s favorite song, is truly a song for the world:

  And then I prayed I yet might see our fetters rent in twain,

  And Ireland, long a province, be a nation once again!

  We Are the World. Not.

  THE PARLIAMENT OF EURO-MAN

  Maclean’s, June 22, 2009

  TO PROMOTE A greater sense of Euro-harmony, the European Parliament—actually, make that the European “Parliament”—is organized into ideological blocs, ensuring that French liberals sit with Slovene liberals, and Belgian greens sit with Latvian greens, rather than hunkering down in their ethnic ghettoes. The largest bloc is the “center-right,” the second-largest are the socialists, and the third is now the “non-inscrits,” the bloc for people who don’t want to belong to blocs. As a result of this month’s election, this Groucho Marxist grouping of “Others” tripled in size to just under a hundred seats. So, if they’re not liberals, socialists, greens, “European democrats,” or the “Nordic Green Left,” what the hell are they?

  Okay, here goes. The members of the non-bloc bloc include: one member of the “True Finns” party; one member of the Slovak National Party; two members of the British National Party; two members of the Austrian Freedom Party; two members of the Vlaams Belang, the “Flemish Interest” party; two members of the Civic Union, which sounds like a gay marriage in Vermont but is in fact an offshoot of the Latvian nationalist For Fatherland and Freedom Party; three members of France’s National Front; three members of Jobbik, the Hungarian nationalist party; three members of the Greater Romania Party. . . .

  Well, you get the picture. The European Parliament isn’t exactly working out as Lord Tennyson foresaw:

  . . . the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d

  In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

  There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe

  And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

  A Federation of Euro-harmony filled by ultra-nationalist xenophobes is almost too droll a jest. My favorite of these new national parties is Ataka, which is a Bulgarian word meaning—oh, go on, take a wild guess. That’s right: “Attack.” What a splendidly butch name. The Attack party was formed from last year’s merger of the Bulgarian National Patriotic Party, the Union of Patriotic Forces, and the National Movement for the Salvation of the Fatherland, and in nothing flat managed to get 13 percent of the vote.

  Like Attack, many of these lively additions to the political scene favor party emblems that slyly evoke swastikas while bending the prongs in different directions just enough to maintain deniability. Other than that, they don’t have a lot in common with their colleagues in the no-bloc bloc.

  I don’t just mean in the sense that the leader of the Slovak National Party said a couple of years back, “Let’s all get in tanks and go and flatten Budapest,” which presumably is not a policy position the Hungarian nationalists in Jobbik would endorse. But there are broader differences, too. The SNP is antipathetic to homosexuals, whereas Krisztina Morvai, the attractive blonde Jobbik member just elected to the Euro-parliament, is a former winner of the Freddie Mercury Prize for raising AIDS awareness. I can’t be the only political analyst who wishes that, instead of a victory speech last Sunday, Doktor Morvai had stood on the table in black tights and bellowed out “We Are the Champions.”

  Like our chums at Canada’s “human rights” commissions, Doktor Morvai is a “human rights” activist—and, indeed, a former delegate to the UN Women’s Rights Committee. One thing a woman has a right to is an uncircumcised penis. In the course of her successful election campaign, the good doctor told Hungarian Jews to “go back to playing with their tiny little circumcised tails.” I don’t know what Krisztina has against circumcised penises, but presumably it’s not her pelvis.

  It’s unclear whether any member of the Austrian Freedom Party has won the Freddie Mercury Prize, but its late leader, Jörg Haider, wound up pushing up edelweiss eight months ago when he flipped his Volkswagen limo after leaving a gay bar in Klagenfurt somewhat the worse for wear. “He never helped his family man image by turning up at rallies and local events with an entourage of young blond men,” reported The Daily Mail. “Newspapers in his homeland said they were reluctant to publish ‘full details’ of his homosexuality fearing an outburst of hate toward the gay community would overtake hatred towards foreigners.”

  Er, if you say so. So hard to know who to hate first, isn’t it? And you’ve gotta be able to prioritize.

  In Austria’s Euro-election, two explicitly anti-immigrant parties won 18 percent of the vote. In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, the new nationalist vote was divided between the British National Party and the UK Independence Party, which supports British withdrawal from the European Union and managed to elect thirteen members to the European Parliament, winning 17 percent of the vote and pushing Gordon Brown’s Labour Party into third place. The two seats won by the BNP represent the first victory in a national election by any British Fascist party, however squishily one cares to define that term. Seventy years ago, under Sir Oswald Mosley, a far more charismatic leader than the BNP’s Nick Griffin, the British Union of Fascists never managed to elect a single local councilor. So the electors of the United Kingdom crossed a dark Rubicon this month.

  For forty years, London’s Europhile politico-media elites have attempted to impose a “European identity” on the masses, condescendingly assuring the British people that they are, indeed, European, they’re just too parochial and ill-informed to realize it. Thus the paradox: in its rejection of Europe, the British electorate has never been more European. The Brits have finally got with the program: just like the Continentals, they’re voting for fascists.

  Woody Guthrie used to have a label on his guitar: “This Machine Kills Fascists.” Not true, of course. Just the usual self-flattery to which singing Commies are prone. But, in the room where they cook up European conventional wisdom, they could easily pin a sign on the door saying: “This Political Machine Creates Fascists.” One can forgive Bulgaria its wackier demagogues: they are, after all, only two decades removed from one-party totalitarianism. But, in the western half of Continental Europe, politics evolved to the point where almost any issue worth talking about was ruled beyond the bounds of polite society. In good times, it doesn’t matter so much. But in bad times, if the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raisin
g certain issues, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones. Europe has taken a worse hit than North America in the first crisis of economic globalization: unemployment in Spain, for example, is over 17 percent. To the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, this “crisis of capitalism” is the biggest event since the fall of the Soviet Union. But, if it’s a “crisis of capitalism,” why did the mainstream Euro-left take the electoral hit rather than the mainstream Euro-right? Instead of turning to socialist parties promising more state booty, voters boosted the fortunes of the neo-nationalists. Many of these groups are economically protectionist (and in some cases more “left wing” than, say, the British Labour Party), but they’re also culturally protectionist in a way the polytechnic left most certainly isn’t. They raise the subjects you’re not meant to. You want to talk about immigration?

  Whoa, racist!

  Crime?

  Racist!

  Welfare?

  Racist!

  Islam?

  Racistracistdoubleracist!!! Nya-nya, can’t hear you with my two anti-racist thumbs in my ears!

  Already, the European political class is congratulating itself at holding the tide of neo-nationalism to the low double-digits. I’d say some of these results are pretty remarkable given that these parties are all but excluded from the public discourse and that even a relatively mild dissenter from the consensus such as the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders has been banned from setting foot in Britain and is undergoing prosecution for his views in the Netherlands. What makes the Labour Party “mainstream” with 15 percent of the vote and UKIP the “fringe” with 17 percent? Nothing, other than the blinkers of the politico-media class.

  But if you want to drive the electorate toward the wilder shores in ever greater numbers, keep crying “Racist!” at every opportunity.

  Things are not going to get any prettier in the next European electoral cycle.1 Aside from professions of “horror” at the success of the neo-nationalists, there is now talk of shutting down these parties by using the legal system (as was done in Belgium) or by denying them the public funding to which their share of the vote entitles them. Subverting democracy to suppress neo-nationalism doesn’t seem a smart move. But then if the political class were that smart it wouldn’t be in this situation.

  The problem in Europe is not a lunatic fringe but a lunatic mainstream ever more estranged from its voters.

  1In the 2014 Euro election, the anti-EU UKIP won the vote in the United Kingdom, the anti-EU Front National won the vote in France, and the Finns Party doubled its seats to two.

  CHANGING HIS TUNE

  Pete Seeger lived long—long enough to play at the Obama inauguration, long enough to enjoy extensive public celebrations of his ninetieth birthday, long enough to go down and join the Occupy Wall Street protesters: I believe he serenaded them with “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” although with that crowd “Where Have All the Showers Gone?” might have been more appropriate. The old banjo-picker lived longer than the penniless African he fleeced in his copyright heist of “Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)”; and twice or thrice as long as the average “dissenting artist” made it to under the regimes he admired over the years. He died in 2014 at the age of ninety-four. And cutting it mighty fine in that four-score-and-ten-and-then-some he had a re-think:

  National Review, September 24, 2007

  IN THE NEW YORK SUN the other day, Ron Radosh had a notable scoop: Hold the front page! Stop the presses! Grizzled Leftie Icon Repudiates. . . .

  Who? Castro? Chávez? Al-Qaeda?

  Whoa, let’s not rush to judgment. No, the big story was: Grizzled Leftie Icon Repudiates. . . Stalin.

  A couple of months ago, there was some documentary or other “celebrating” the “spirit” of Pete Seeger, the folkie colossus, with contributions from the usual suspects—Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, one or more Dixie Chicks, two-thirds of Peter, Paul, and Mary, etc. Mr. Radosh had also been interviewed but his remarks about Seeger’s lifelong support of Stalinism had not made the final cut. No surprise there. In such circumstances, the rule is to hail someone for his “activism” and “commitment” and “passion” without getting hung up on the specifics of what exactly he’s actively and passionately committing to.

  Giving him a Kennedy Center Honor a decade or so back, President Clinton hailed ol’ Pete as “an inconvenient artist who dared to sing things as he saw them,” which is one way of putting it. You can’t help noticing, though, that it’s all the documentaries and honors ceremonies and lifetime-achievement tributes to Mr. Seeger that seem to find certain things “inconvenient.” The Washington Post’s Style section, with its usual sly élan, hailed him as America’s “best-loved Commie”—which I think translates as “Okay, so the genial old coot spent a lifetime shilling for totalitarian murderers, but only uptight Republican squares would be boorish enough to dwell on it.”

  Anyway, in The Sun, Mr. Radosh, a former banjo pupil of the great man, did dwell on it, and a few weeks later got a letter in response. “I think you’re right,” wrote Pete. “I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in [the] USSR.” And he enclosed a new song he’d composed:

  I’m singing about old Joe, cruel Joe

  He ruled with an iron hand

  He put an end to the dreams

  Of so many in every land

  He had a chance to make

  A brand new start for the human race

  Instead he set it back

  Right in the same nasty place

  I got the Big Joe Blues

  (Keep your mouth shut or you will die fast)

  I got the Big Joe Blues

  (Do this job, no questions asked)

  I got the Big Joe Blues . . .

  It’s heartening to see that age (he’s now eighty-eight) hasn’t withered Seeger’s unerring instinct for bum rhymes (“fast/asked”). Still, Ron Radosh was thrilled that, just fifty-four years after the old brute’s death, a mere three-quarters of a century after the purges and show trials, the old protest singer had finally got around to protesting Stalin, albeit somewhat evasively: He put the human race “right in the same nasty place”? Sorry, not good enough. Stalin created whole new degrees of nastiness.

  But, given that Seeger got the two great conflicts of the twentieth century wrong (in 1940, he was anti-war and singing “Wendell Willkie and Franklin D / Both agree on killing me”), it’s a start. I can’t wait for his anti-Osama LP circa 2078.

  Mr. Seeger has a song called “Treblinka,” because he thinks it’s important that we “never forget.” But wouldn’t it be better if we were hip to it before it snowballed into one of those things we had to remember not to forget? Would it kill the icons of the left just for once to be on the right side at the time? America has no “best-loved Nazi” or “best-loved Fascist” or even “best-loved Republican,” but its best-loved Stalinist stooge is hailed in his dotage as a secular saint who’s spent his life “singing for peace.”

  He sang for “peace” when he opposed the fascistic arms-lobby stooge Roosevelt and imperialist Britain, and he sang for “peace” when he attacked the Cold War paranoiac Truman, and he kept on singing for “peace” no matter how many millions died and millions more had to live in bondage, and, while that may seem agreeably peaceful when you’re singing “If I Had a Hammer” in Ann Arbor, it’s not if you’re on the sharp end of the deal thousands of miles away.

  Explaining how Stalin had “put an end to the dreams” of a Communist utopia, Seeger told Ron Radosh that he’d underestimated “how the majority of the human race has faith in violence.” But that isn’t true, is it? Very few of us are violent. Those who order the killings are few in number, and those who carry them out aren’t significantly numerous. But those willing to string along and those too fainthearted to object and those who just want to keep their heads down and wait for things to blow over are numbered in the millions. And so are those many miles away in the plump prosperous western democracies who don’t see why this or that dictator
is their problem. One can perhaps understand the great shrug of indifference to distant monsters. It’s harder, though, to forgive the contemporary urge to celebrate it as a form of “idealism.”

  James Lileks, the bard of Minnesota, once offered this trenchant analysis of Pete Seeger: “‘If I Had a Hammer’? Well, what’s stopping you? Go to the hardware store; they’re about a buck-ninety, tops.”

  Very true. For the cost of a restricted-view seat at a Peter, Paul, and Mary revival, you could buy half a dozen top-of-the-line hammers and have a lot more fun, even if you used them on yourself. Yet in a sense Lileks is missing the point: Yes, they’re dopey nursery-school jingles, but that’s why they’re so insidious. The numbing simplicity allows them to be passed off as uncontentious unexceptionable all-purpose anthems of goodwill. Which is why you hear “This Land Is Your Land” in American grade schools, but not “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

  The invention of the faux-childlike faux–folk song was one of the greatest forces in the infantilization of American culture. Seeger’s hymn to the “senselessness” of all war, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” combined passivity with condescension—“When will they ever learn?”—and established the default mode of contemporary artistic “dissent.” Mr. Seeger’s ongoing veneration is indestructible. But at least we now know the answer to the question “When will he ever learn?”

  At least half a century too late.

  CHANGING HIS WORDS

  The National Post, January 4, 2001

  UNDOUBTEDLY, THE HIGHLIGHT of New Year’s Eve was the first performance of the new Russian national anthem, which is the old Soviet anthem but with new words. What impressed me most about the new lyrics was the author, Sergei Mikhalkov. The same guy who wrote the old lyrics! And the lyrics for the version before that!