America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It

by Mark Steyn

  But it’s a nuclear power.

  The danger we face is not a Chinese superpower or an Islamist superpower: if there’s a new boss, you learn the new rules and adjust as best you can. But the greater likelihood is of a world with no superpower at all, in which unipolar geopolitics gives way to non-polar geopolitics, a world without order in which pipsqueak thug states who can’t feed their own people globalize their psychoses.

  Take the subject of, say, decapitation—not something most of us had given a thought to since, oh, the French Revolution. But there’s a lot of it about. In 2006, a Taliban-like Islamist regime took control of Somalia, and, in the course of their seizure of Mogadishu, captured troops from the warlords’ side and beheaded them. The so-called emir of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, made beheading his signature act, cutting the throats of American hostage Nick Berg and British hostage Ken Bigley and then releasing the footage as boffo snuff videos over the Internet.

  And it’s not just guerrillas and insurgents who are hot for decapitation. The Saudis, who are famously “our friends,” behead folks on a daily basis. In 2005, the kingdom beheaded six Somalis. What for? Murder? Rape? Homosexuality? No, it was worse than that: auto theft. They’d been convicted and served five-year sentences but at the end thereof the Saudi courts decided to upgrade their crime to a capital offense. Some two-thirds of those beheaded in Saudi Arabia are foreign nationals, which would be an unlikely criminal profile in any civilized state and suggests that the justice “system” is driven by the Saudis’ contempt for non-Saudis as much as anything else.

  The decapitators are getting closer. In an Ontario courtroom in 2006, it was alleged that a terrorist cell planned to storm the Canadian parliament and behead the prime minister. On the face of it, that sounds ridiculous. As ridiculous as it must have seemed to Ken Bigley, a British contractor in Iraq with no illusions about the world. He’d spent most of his adult life grubbing around the seedier outposts of empire and thought he knew the way the native chappies did things. He never imagined the last sounds he’d ever hear were delirious cries of “Allahu Akhbar” and the man behind him reaching for the blade to saw his head off.

  And why would an act of such awesome symbolic power remain confined to Islamists? A week or two after the revelation of that Toronto plot, there was a flurry of beheadings on America’s southern border: the heads of three decapitated policemen were found in the Tijuana River; a fourth turned up in Acapulco a week later. It’s wishful thinking to assume hip depravity won’t migrate beyond the Islamist world. But no doubt Al Gore will carry on talking about global warming and Nancy Pelosi about college tuition costs and Hillary Clinton about prescription drug plans as the world sinks into economic decline, arbitrary bombings and kidnappings, the occasional nuking—and a million small concessions to Muslim sensitivities that will nudge Western society ever further down a bleaker path. Writing about the collapse of nations such as Somalia, the Atlantic Monthly’s Robert D. Kaplan referred to the “citizens” of such “states” as “re-primitivized man.” When lifelong Torontonians are hot for decapitation, when Yorkshiremen born and bred into fish n’ chips and cricket and lousy English pop music self-detonate on the London Tube, it would seem that the phenomenon of “re-primitivized man” is being successfully exported around the planet.

  In 1998, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times unveiled his Golden Arches theory—that no two countries with a McDonald’s franchise ever went to war. The ink was barely dry when America and NATO began bombing Serbia. So much for the civilizing effects of Big Macs in Belgrade. The Yugoslav meltdown of the nineties suggests the opposite of Friedman’s thesis. In the eighties, the federation was on its way to a comfortable, prosperous, post-Communist future: Croatia was a popular holiday destination with Britons, Germans, and other wealthy Westerners. But, invited to choose between a booming economy and ancient hatreds, the people of Yugoslavia preferred to reduce their country to rubble. How many other bits of the map, under pressure from predatory forces and with a leading power unable to lead, might opt for “re-primitivization”?

  A couple of weeks after September 11, Edward Said, the New York-based America disparager and author of the bestselling Orientalism, made some remarks about the “interconnectedness” of the West and Islam. The professor deplored the tendency of commentators to separate cultures into what he called “sealed-off entities,” when in reality Western Civilization and the Muslim world are so “intertwined” that it was impossible to “draw the line” between them.

  Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, wasn’t impressed by this notion. “The line seems pretty clear,” he said. “Developing mass commercial aviation and soaring skyscrapers was the West’s idea; slashing the throats of stewardesses and flying the planes into the skyscrapers was radical Islam’s idea.”

  True. But, as a form of cross-civilization intertwining, that’s not to be disdained, at least from one party’s point of view. Indeed, Mr. Lowry has identified the only “interconnectedness” a significant chunk of Islam is interested in. Islamism is a twenty-first-century political project driven by seventh-century ideology. That’s a potent combination of ancient and modern. In Europe and North America, incendiary imams—uneducated and knowing barely a word of the language spoken by the society in which they live—have nevertheless done a grand job at re-primitivizing second-and third-generation Western Muslims. Not all of them, of course, but how many does it have to be to become a problem?

  There are three strategies Islam deploys against a dying West: first, demography; second, conversion; and third, the murky “intertwining” of modern technology and ancient hatreds.

  For example, I hadn’t really followed Sudanese current events closely since, oh, General Kitchener’s victory at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, but in 2003 a story from that benighted land happened to catch my eye. In the fall of that year mass hysteria apparently swept the capital city, Khartoum, after reports that foreigners were shaking hands with Sudanese men and causing their penises to disappear. One victim, a fabric merchant, told his story to the London Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi: a man from West Africa came into the shop and “shook the store owner’s hand powerfully until the owner felt his penis melt into his body.”

  I know the feeling. The same thing happened to me after shaking hands with Senator Clinton. Anyway, as Al-Quds reported, “The store owner became hysterical, and was taken to the hospital.” The country’s chief criminal attorney general, Yasser Ahmad Muhammad, told the Sudanese daily Al-Rai Al-A’am that “the rumor broke out when one merchant went to another merchant to buy some Karkady [a Sudanese beverage]. Suddenly, the seller felt his penis shriveling.” The invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute, in its exhaustive coverage, noted that the penises of Khartoum were vulnerable not merely to handshaking: “Another victim, who refused to give his name, said that while he was at the market, a man approached him, gave him a comb, and asked him to comb his hair. When he did so, within seconds, he said, he felt a strange sensation and discovered that he had lost his penis.”

  Tales of the vanishing penises ran rampant through the city. Sudan’s attorney general, Salah Abu Zayed, declared that all complaints about missing dangly bits would be brought before a special investigative committee, though doctors had determined that the first plaintiff was “perfectly healthy.” The health minister, Ahmad Bilal Othman, said that the epidemic was “scientifically groundless,” and that it was “sorcery, magic, or an emotional problem.”

  Whatever it is, it’s the perfect tale of Islamic victimhood: the foreigners have made us impotent! It doesn’t matter that the foreigners didn’t do anything except shake hands. It doesn’t matter whether you are, in fact, impotent. You feel impotent, just as (so we’re told constantly) millions of Muslims from Algerian Islamists to the Bali bombers on the other side of the world feel “humiliated” by the Palestinian situation. Whether there is a rational basis for their sense of humiliation or impotence is irrelevant.

  B
ut here’s the telling detail: the vanishing-penis hysteria was spread by cell phones and text messaging.

  Think about that: you can own a cell phone, yet still believe that shaking hands with an infidel will cause you to lose your penis. That’s a state-of-the-art primitive.

  Aside from its doubts in its collective manhood, Sudan is no laughing matter. Two million people were slaughtered there in the nineties. That’s one-third of the victims of the Holocaust—and the world barely noticed. So much for “never again.” The Christian minority is vanishing a lot faster than that fabric merchant’s privates. Among the, er, non-Christian majority, Osama certainly found the country fertile ground for his ideology: Sudanese mujahideen have been captured as far afield as Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. Sudan is an economic basket case with a 27 percent literacy rate that nevertheless has managed to find enough spare cash to export revolutionary Islam to many other countries. And they’ve got half a billion dollars’ worth of top Chinese weaponry imported via Iran.

  What else might Sudan get from Tehran in the years ahead? In April 2006, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, announced that his government was ready to share its nuclear technology with other interested parties. “Iran’s nuclear capability is one example of various scientific capabilities in the country,” said the ayatollah. “The Islamic Republic of Iran is prepared to transfer the experience, knowledge, and technology of its scientists.”

  He made this offer at a meeting with the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir.

  A handshake-fearing guy with a cell phone is one thing; what happens when the handshake-fearers have cell phones and a suitcase nuke? It’s at the meeting of apparently indestructible ancient ignorance and cheap, widely available modern technology that the dark imponderables of the future lie.

  How far does that techno-primitive hybrid reach? In 2004, there was another story about cell phones in the paper. Not Khartoum this time. The Times of London reported that “mobile phones are being used by young Muslims living in Britain to watch videos of hostages being beheaded by militants in Iraq.” “This is the best use of this phone,” the paper was told by “an Algerian in his thirties who has lived in London for almost ten years” and has collected the entire set of snuff videos on his cell. “Most of the people in this country are using it to download pictures of naked women. For us the jihad is alive in our hands as we watch American infidels get their heads chopped off…. Within a few minutes of the Americans dying last week I was watching them on my phone. The Englishman should not have been there,” he added, referring to then hostage Ken Bigley. “He will be beheaded and I can tell you I will see it here on my phone.”

  He was and that Muslim Londoner undoubtedly did.

  In 1898, after Kitchener slaughtered the dervishes at Omdurman, Hilaire Belloc wrote a characteristically pithy summation of the British technological advantage:

  Whatever happens

  We have got

  The Maxim gun

  And they have not.

  But the dervishes have cell phones now, and there are plenty of people out there willing to help them get cheap knock-offs of the twenty-first century’s Maxim gun. And, Maxim guns aside, we’re bound by “maxims of prudence” (in Kant’s phrase), and they’re not. As Lee Harris wrote, “The liberal world system has collapsed internally.” We no longer know the limits of behavior. When the president of Iran threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map, we cannot reliably assure ourselves that this is just a bit of rhetorical red meat, a little playing to the gallery for the Saturday-night jihad crowd.

  Nonetheless, many foolish experts do. We persist in seeing Iran’s President Ahmadinejad as the equivalent of the Sudanese crazy raving about his vanished manhood, except that in this case he’s raving about having No Dong, which, like a nuclear K-Mart, Kim Jong-il is happily dispersing around the planet. (One could foresee certain problems if the president of Sudan goes on TV and announces, “I am proud to tell the people I have No Dong.” Oh no—the epidemic’s spread to the palace! Mass panic, etc.) Confronted by the minimal degrees of separation between the loonies and many of their leaders, we look away and pretend that President Ahmadinejad is no different from the Politburo of yore. The Reds could have nuked us but they had compelling reasons not to. They had the capability but we were able to make a rational assessment of their intent by considering what we would do in their situation. It’s the other way around with Iran. They have the intent and the only question mark is over their capability.

  President Ahmaddamatree is the globalized version of those Khartoum men who own cell phones and yet believe a handshake can make one’s manhood disappear. He owns nukes and he believes he can make the West’s manhood disappear. Indeed, his wish to obliterate Israel is one of his less nutty aspects. That can be seen as a slightly overheated version of politics-as-usual in the Middle East. What’s more significant is that he believes in the return of the Twelfth Imam—the so-called “hidden imam”—and quite possibly that he personally is the fellow’s designated deputy. The president, as mayor of Tehran, wanted the city’s boulevards widened so that the hidden imam wouldn’t be insulted by having to ride in triumph through narrow streets. He’s also claimed that when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in 2005 a mystical halo appeared and bathed him in its aura. (It wasn’t the “Exit” sign—or, if it was, it didn’t endow the prime minister of Canada with any similar beatific aura.) Shortly afterwards, he told Natwar Singh, the Indian foreign minister, that everything would be hunky-dory in two years’ time, which Mr. Singh took to mean when Iran’s nukes would be ready but which turned out to be the Twelfth Imam’s ETA. Human history has never wanted for millennial cultists of one form or another, but ours is the first age in which such men have the means to pull off the apocalypse. In medieval Europe, the apocalyptics had intent; President Ahmageddonouttahere is an apocalyptic with a delivery system. “The end is nigh” is an old slogan. Now the means are nigh.

  THE LOOK

  One of the most enduring vignettes of the Great War comes from its first Christmas: December 1914. The Germans and British, separated by a few yards of mud on the western front, put up banners to wish each other season’s greetings, sang “Silent Night” in the dark in both languages, and eventually scrambled up from their opposing trenches to play a Christmas Day football match in No Man’s Land and share some German beer and English plum jam. After this Yuletide interlude, they went back to killing each other.

  The many films, books, and plays inspired by that No Man’s Land truce all take for granted the story’s central truth: that our common humanity transcends the temporary hell of war. When the politicians and generals have done with us, those who are left will live in peace, playing footie (i.e., soccer), singing songs, as they did for a moment in the midst of carnage.

  Now cross to Israel, to Haifa on a Saturday night in 2003: nineteen diners were killed in a packed restaurant by a twenty-something female suicide bomber, her hair attractively tied in a Western-style ponytail, to judge from the detached head she left as her calling card. Try to find the common humanity between the participants in that war. Try to imagine the two sides ever kicking a ball around, swapping songs. The only place in the modern Middle East where Arabs and Jews coexist is in Israel, especially in Haifa. The restaurant young Hanadi Jaradat blew apart had been jointly owned by an Arab family and a Jewish family for forty years. It would be interesting to know whether it was targeted for that very reason, in the same way that, in Northern Ireland, the IRA took to killing the Catholic caterers and cleaners who worked at army bases. But the intifada is too primal for anything that thought out. It’s more likely that once Miss Jaradat had slipped into Israel proper—through a gap in the unfinished security fence the European Union and the State Department so deplore—she decided that any target would do. She was busting to blow.

  The Palestinian death cult negates all the assumptions of Western sentimental pacifism—not least that war is a board game playe
d by old men with young men as their chess pieces: if only the vengeful aged generals got out of the way, there’d be no conflict. But such common humanity as one can find on the West Bank resides, if only in their cynicism, in the leadership. Old Arafat may have showered glory and honor on his youthful martyrs but he was human enough to keep his own kid in Paris, well away from the suicide-bomber belts. It’s hard to picture Saeb Erekat or Hanan Ashrawi or any of the other veteran terror apologists who hog the airwaves at CNN and the BBC celebrating the deaths of their loved ones the way Miss Jaradat’s brother did. “We are receiving congratulations from people,” said Thaher Jaradat. “Why should we cry? It is like her wedding day, the happiest day for her.”

  The problem is not the security fence, but the psychological fence—a chasm really—that separates a sizable proportion of the Palestinian population from all Jews. For one side, there is no common humanity, even with people they know well, who provide them with jobs, and much else: Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, a twenty-one-year-old woman who has received kind and exemplary treatment at an Israeli hospital in Beersheba, packs herself with explosives and sets off to blow apart that hospital and the doctors and nurses who’ve treated her.

  Oh, well. If you’re pro-Palestinian, you shrug that their depravity is born of “desperation.” If you’ve had it with the Palestinians, you figure that after decades of UN coddling and EU funding and wily Arab manipulation they’re the most comprehensively wrecked people on the planet. In either case, it’s a very particular circumstance.