by Mark Steyn
Poitiers was the high-water point of the Muslim tide in Western Europe. It was an opportunistic raid by the Moors, but if they’d won, they’d have found it hard to resist pushing on to Paris, to the Rhine and beyond. “Perhaps,” wrote Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.” There would be no Christian Europe. The Anglo-Celts who settled North America would have been Muslim. Poitiers, said Gibbon, was “an encounter which would change the history of the whole world.”
Battles are very straightforward: Side A wins, Side B loses. But Europe is way beyond anything so clarifying. Today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman. They’re in Brussels, where Belgian police officers are advised not to be seen drinking coffee in public during Ramadan, and in Malmö, where Swedish ambulance drivers will not go without police escort. It’s way too late to re-run the Battle of Poitiers. When Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille, daughter of former prime minister and EU bigwig Jacques Delors and likely presidential candidate in the post-Chirac era, held a meeting with an imam in Roubaix, the gentleman demanded that it take place on the edge of the neighborhood—in recognition that his turf was Muslim territory which she was bound not to enter. Mme. Aubry conceded the point, as more and more politicians will in the years ahead.
The peoples of Europe may not be willing to go as far down the appeasement path as their rulers, but Europe is a top-down construct, so the rulers will get quite a long way down before the masses start to drag them back. One observes, for example, that brave figures who draw attention to these trends—men and women such as Theo van Gogh, Bat Ye’or, and Oriana Fallaci—are either murdered, forced to live under armed guard, driven into exile overseas, or sued under specious hate-crimes laws. Dismissed by the European establishment, they’re banished to the fringe. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch parliamentarian, spoke out against the ill-treatment of Muslim women, a subject she knows about firsthand, and found herself under threat of death. Her neighbors, the justice system, and the Dutch government reacted to this by taking her to court, getting her evicted from her home, and announcing plans to revoke her citizenship. Boundlessly tolerant Europe, which finds it so hard to expel openly treasonous jihad-inciting imams, finally found one Muslim it’s willing to kick out.
Meanwhile, the complaceniks hold down prestigious chairs at European universities and think tanks and assure us there’s no problem. Timothy Garton Ash is an Oxford professor who directs its European Studies Center, the sort of chap National Public Radio calls in when they need an “expert” on the EU. Very reasonable fellow, so reasonable that in 2003 he was attacking yours truly in every leading European newspaper for promoting “anti-Europeanism in the United States.” Yet after scoffing at my Euro-predictions for many years, he seems to have accepted them. The only difference between us is that he thinks it’s a good thing:
The populations of Europe are aging fast, so more immigrants will be needed to support the pensioners, and these will largely be Muslim immigrants. For this increasingly Muslim Europe to define itself against Islam would be ridiculous and suicidal…. Let’s imagine, for a moment, Europe in 2025 at its possible best. A political, economic, and security community of some forty free countries and 650 million people, embracing all the lands in which the two world wars began, and producing, still, a large part of the wealth of the world. A further 650 million people, born in the most explosive parts of the early twenty-first-century globe, but now living in a great arc of partnership with this European Union, from Marrakesh, via Cairo, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Tbilisi, all the way to Vladivostok. That would not be nothing.
No, indeed. It would certainly be something, but quite what he declines to say. And that’s what Garton Ash sees as the Continent’s “possible best”—a giant Euro-Muslim “arc of partnership.” Faced with a choice between correcting course or drifting irrevocably into Eurabia, Garton Ash has chosen consciously to embrace the latter. He will not be the last.
And so those Continental demographic trends will accelerate, as they did during the decline of the Roman Empire, when the imperial capital’s population fell at one point as low as five hundred. Some French natives will figure they don’t have the stomach for the fight and opt for retirement elsewhere. The ones who don’t will increasingly be drawn down the old road to the neo-nationalist strongmen promising to solve the problem. That’s why I call it the Eurabian civil war. The de Villepin-Chiraquiste tendency will be to accommodate and capitulate, but an unreconstructed minority will not be so obliging and will eventually act. Meanwhile, it will be the Muslims who develop a pan-European identity, if only because many have no particular attachment to France or Belgium or Denmark, and they’ll quickly grasp that cross-border parties and lobby groups will further enhance their status. The European Union’s already the walking dead, but the Eurabian Union might well be a runner.
If Chirac, de Villepin, and Co. aren’t exactly Charles Martel, the rioters aren’t doing a bad impression of the Muslim armies of thirteen centuries ago. They’re seizing their opportunities, testing their foe, probing his weak spots. If burning the ’burbs gets you more “respect,” they’ll burn ’em again and again. In defiance of traditional immigration patterns, these young men are less assimilated than their grandparents. And why should they be? On present demographic trends, it will be for ethnic Europeans to assimilate with them. In City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple concluded a piece on British suicide bombers with this grim summation of the new Europe: “The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced by the nightmare of permanent conflict.”
Which sounds an awful lot like a new Dark Ages—or the future implicit in Cardinal Ratzinger’s choice of name for his papacy: Benedict XVI. Born in Umbria in 480, St. Benedict was the man who ensured during the Dark Ages that the critical elements of Roman and Greek civilization were preserved and that, by infusing them with Christianity, they would emerge in a new and stronger form: the basis for Europe and Western Civilization. Referring to his namesake, Pope Benedict XVI once quoted a Benedictine motto: “Succisa virescit.” Pruned, it grows again.
That may prove true for Christianity: it’s a growing faith in Africa and China, and could yet be so again in Europe. Whether there will be any Spaniards or Italians left to re-enlist is more questionable. In the course of the twenty-first century, Germany’s population will fall by over 50 percent to some thirty-eight million or lower—killed not by disease or war but by the Eutopia to which the German people are wedded. And every time they’re asked to vote on the issue they decide that, like that Frenchman, they can live with the stench of death as long as the state benefits keep coming. The trouble with the social-democratic state is that, when government does too much, nobody else does much of anything.
After September 11, I wondered rhetorically midway through a column what we in the West are prepared to die for, and got a convoluted e-mail back from a French professor explaining that the fact that Europeans weren’t prepared to die for anything was the best evidence of their superiority: they were building a post-historical utopia—a Europe it would not be necessary to die for.
But sometimes you die anyway.
Part III
The New Dark Ages
…AND HOW TO LIGHTEN UP
Chapter Seven
The State-of-the-Art Primitive
THE KNOWN UNKNOWNS VS. THE KNOWINGLY UNKNOWING
Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.
HILAIRE BELLOC, “THE PACIFIST” (1938)
Every so often, I find myself, for the umpteenth time, driving behind a Vermont granolamobile whose bumper not only proclaims the driver’s enduring post-2004 support for Kerry/Edwards but also bears the slogan “FREE TIBET.”
It must be great to be the guy with the p
rinting contract for the “FREE TIBET” stickers. Not so good to be the guy back in Tibet wondering when the freeing thereof will actually get under way. Are you in favor of a Free Tibet? It’s hard to find anyone who isn’t. Every college in America is. There’s the Indiana University Students for a Free Tibet, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison Students for a Free Tibet, and the Students for a Free Tibet University of Michigan chapter, and the University of Montana Students for a Free Tibet in Missoula, which is where they might as well relocate the last three Tibetans by the time it is freed.
Everyone’s for a free Tibet, but no one’s for freeing Tibet. So Tibet will stay unfree—as unfree now as it was when the first Free Tibet campaigner slapped the very first “FREE TIBET” sticker onto the back of his Edsel. Idealism as inertia is the hallmark of the movement. Well, not entirely inert: it must be a pain in the neck when you trade in the Volvo for a Subaru and have to bend down and paste on a new “FREE TIBET” sticker. For a while, my otherwise not terribly political wife got extremely irritated by the Free Tibet shtick, demanding to know at a pancake breakfast at the local church what precisely some harmless hippy-dippy old neighbor of ours meant by the sticker he’d been proudly displaying decade in, decade out: “But what exactly are you doing to free Tibet?” she insisted. “You’re not doing anything, are you?”
“Give the guy a break,” I said when we got back home. “He’s advertising his moral superiority, not calling for action. If Rumsfeld were to say, ‘Free Tibet? Jiminy, what a swell idea! The Third Infantry Division goes in on Thursday,’ the bumper-sticker crowd would be aghast. They’d have to bend down and peel off the ‘FREE TIBET’ stickers and replace them with ‘WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER.’”
But there’ll never be a Free Tibet—because, through all the decades Americans were driving around with the bumper stickers, the Chinese were moving populations, torturing Tibetans, imposing inter-marriage until Tibet was altered beyond recognition. By the time the guys with the Free Tibet stickers get around to freeing Tibet there’ll be no Tibet left to free.
That’s “stability.”
As President Reagan liked to say, “status quo” is Latin for “the mess we’re in.” When Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, warns (as he did before the Iraq war) that America is threatening “the whole stability of the Middle East,” it’s important to remember that “stability” is Arabic for “the mess we’re in.”
Yet just as the environmentalists believe in ongoing dramatic “climate change,” so the foreign policy establishment believes equally in ongoing, undramatic geopolitical non-change. And, just as there’s minimal evidence for “climate change,” so there’s minimal evidence for “stability.” The geopolitical scene is never stable; it’s always dynamic. If the Western world decides in 2005 that it can “contain” President Sy Kottik of Wackistan indefinitely, that doesn’t mean the relationship between the two parties is set in aspic. Wackistan has a higher birth rate than the West, so after forty years of “stability” there are a lot more Wackistanis and a lot fewer Frenchmen. And Wackistan has immense oil reserves, and President Kottik has used the wealth of those oil reserves to fund radical schools and mosques in hitherto moderate parts of the Muslim world. And large numbers of Wackistanis have emigrated to the European Union, obliging opportunist politicians in marginal constituencies to pitch for their vote. And cheap air travel and the Internet and bank machines that take every card on the planet and the freelancing of nuclear technology mean that Wackistan’s problems are no longer confined to Wackistan; for a few hundred bucks, they can be outside the Empire State Building within eight or nine hours.
“Stability” is a surface illusion, like a frozen river; underneath, the currents are moving, and to the casual observer the ice looks equally “stable” whether there’s a foot of it or just two inches. There is no status quo in world affairs. “Stability” is a fancy term to dignify inertia and complacency as sophistication. If America and its allies defer to their foreign policy stability fetishists in the years ahead and continue to place their faith in September 10 institutions like the UN, then in the long run we’ll all go the way of Tibet: there’ll be nothing left to free.
“Containment” is another overvalued commodity: it’s an expensive dictator-management program that, in the case of Iraq after the first Gulf War, required the United States Air Force and the RAF to bomb the country ineffectually every other week for twelve years, in return for which the Americans and British were blamed for UN sanctions and systematically starving to death a million Iraqi kids—or two million, according to which “humanitarian” agency you believe. Of course, the minute the war started and these genocidal sanctions came to an end, the Left decided this UN “containment” had after all been a marvelous and desirable thing. Even what’s regarded as a successful example of the strategy—the West’s decision to “contain” the Warsaw Pact—was in practice no such thing, not for those on the receiving end. Aside from the fact that telling the other fellow he has to spend fifty years under Communism is easy for you to say, the toll taken on those nations with every passing decade was grisly. On the hit parade of nations with the unhealthiest demographic profile, the top five are all former provinces of European Communism: Latvia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Russia, and Ukraine. Of the top ten, nine are ex-Commie (the exception is Spain). Of the top twenty, sixteen are. Communism was so loathed by its subjects they gave up even breeding. And every year we allowed the Warsaw Pact to remain in place we weakened further the viability of any post-Communist societies that might emerge from the rubble.
“Stability” and “containment” pose the opposite challenge in the Muslim world. Those countries are mostly in the upper reaches of the fertility hit parade. Whatever they loathe about their regimes, they don’t loathe Islam: in many cases, the mosques provide the only political space in those lands. So they breed with gusto, and thus every year we remain committed to “stability” increases the Islamists’ principal advantage: it strengthens the religion—the vehicle for their political project—and multiplies the raw material.
So another decade or two of “stability” and the world will be well on its way to a new Dark Ages. Now, as then, Europe has its do-nothing kings—les rois fainéants—though these days we call them European commissioners and chancellors and prime ministers. Now, as then, we have a Great Plague—the virus of Islamism—and the great migrations—the continent-wide version of “white flight” already under way in Holland, as the beleaguered Dutch leave their native land for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Now, as then, we must all bow before the “edict of toleration”—as laws and customs are rearranged to abase themselves before the gods of boundless multicultural tolerance.
But the central fact of a new Dark Ages is this: it would be not a world in which the American superpower is succeeded by other powers but a world with no dominant powers at all. Today, lots of experts crank out analyses positing China as the unstoppable hegemon of the twenty-first century. Yet the real threat is not the strengths of your enemies but their weaknesses. China is a weak power: its demographic and other structural defects are already hobbling its long-term ambitions. Russia is a weak power, a kind of greatest-hits medley of all the planet’s worst pathologies—disease-wise, nuke-wise, Islamist-wise. Europe is a weak power, a supposed Greater France remorselessly evolving month by month into Greater Bosnia.
Islam is a weak power: in the words of Dr. Mahathir bin Mohammed, the former prime minister of Malaysia, one of the least worst Muslim nations in the world, “We produce practically nothing on our own, we can do almost nothing for ourselves, we cannot even manage our wealth.” Yet in Iran they’re working full-speed on nukes that will be able to hit every European city.
North Korea is the weakest power of all. But on the Fourth of July 2006 its dictator gamely got in the spirit and held a fireworks display. Impressive stuff: the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air—though, as sometimes happens with your highest-price firecracker, it was
over sooner than expected. Kim Jong-il has No Dong. Please, no giggling. It’s not a side effect of that counterfeit Viagra that North Korea manufactures (seriously). No Dong is the name of his missile system. “Dong” is Korean for “dong,” and “no” is Korean for “big swinging,” and that’s how Kim Jong-il sees himself on the freelance nuke scene. Anyway, on the Glorious Fourth, he decided to test the latest version of his No Dong. That’s a “test” in the sense that I test my new shotgun by firing it through your kitchen window and seeing if it penetrates to the living room. Kim’s Dong went up and came straight down again forty seconds later. From the trajectory, experts calculated that it was headed to Hawaii. Instead, it fell in the Sea of Japan.
And everyone had a big laugh. What a loser, what a bozo. Mister Nukes R Us talks the talk but he can’t nuke the nuke. Ha ha, what a joke.
But no, that’s the point. That’s why he’s dangerous. He’s not the United States, not the Soviet Union, not India, he’s not even France. He’s an incompetent but he’s got nuclear weapons. In 2006, he aimed for Hawaii and just about cleared his perimeter fence. Next time, he might aim for Hawaii and hit San Diego. Or Oakland. Or Calgary, or Presque-Isle, Maine. Or Beijing, Addis Ababa, Salzburg, or Dublin. He’s a self-taught nuclear madman and he hasn’t quite gotten the hang of it. If you’re on the New Jersey Turnpike and there’s a confused ninety-three-year-old granny behind the wheel of a Toyota Corolla, that’s mostly a problem for her. If she’s in an eighteen-wheeler and coming across the median, that’s a problem for you. North Korea has millions of starving people; it has one of the lowest GDPs per capita on the planet, lower than Ghana, lower than Zimbabwe, lower than Mongolia.