A fine strategy but what is left of the west to carry it out?

Submitted by Homefront (Australia), Apr 14, 2008 at 01:29

Singha,

You speak logically and rationally my friend, and so of course you will be characterized as a hindu extremist and dismissed readily and out of hand by both westerner and Indian alike. I have come across many sensible young people from the subcontinent who still exist under the illusion that there is some way of better carving up the pie that will appease Islamists into becoming some kind of functional part of the society (by insuring that they have cars, mobile phones and playstations to distract them no doubt).

This consumerist utopian forecast is one of the key invisible factors driving the western liberal outlook. There is a belief that the material goods and media of the west will prove seductive enough to the youth of the expanding Mahgreb that over time the Muslims will abandon their backwards ways in favor of a more modern lifestyle. The opposite is occurring. Preferring their own media which they have ready access to Al Jazeera communicates the apocalyptic visions of Amedenijad and Osama Bin Laden to the hearts and minds of a receptive, fecund and motivated army.

The west should react in all the ways you have outlined. One would think that we would utilize our power in this manner to the betterment of the entire world. There is a lack of civilisational confidence needed to mobilize us that has been engendered not by any failures on the battlefield or single successful jihadist attack. Instead we are stuck in a vacuum that sees us bereft of pride and political imagination. The activist left having won most of its substantive battles in the west now turns to regulating the minutia of personal conduct persecuting bloggers and all the other scattered bands of ideological opponents to their grand multicultural scheme. "Your view is the problem," I have been told time and time again by those too young to hold a sensible opinion of their own and too indoctrinated to see through the haze of small "l" liberal lies and develop a worthwhile opinion.

Even though the left has won in the west taking over major educational institutions, the public service and the media they still are possessed of the visceral notion that something is radically wrong with the society they have created. They find the fault in all those scattered opponents – after all they being correct, right and true in all things could not be the source of the failure of multiculturalism to produce the utopia they imagine. Thus we enter a new age of McCarthyism and one that sees the Senator's views vindicated. Government tribunals instruct us all in the "right think" of multiculturalism.

This is all the end product of a University and schooling system that teaches the reactionary politics of the 1960s and 70s as orthodoxy. Edward Said's famous dismissal of cultural difference and hence the whole discipline of Anthropology is the foundation of these beliefs. Such an orthodoxy requires complete myopia when it comes to the phenomenon of Islamisation. And of course the students in question need to be locked in an endless struggle with a patriarchal elite who by and large no longer exist.

Like it or not this is the west. Democracy and freedom of speech as well of freedom of religion and the rule of law are all reduced to simple jingles which noone fully understands anymore. This means that they can be invoked even to protect the interests of those who are opposed to them as values. It is an ideological ghostworld that is so diffuse it is impossible to produce enough consensus to act even on self evidently existential issues such as the Islamic demographic tidal wave that threatens to wash away our cultures, values and selves.

As you have said a few fashionable and small gestures (like fitna) are not likely to amount to the Churchillian political transformation needed to save the ailing west from joining the mahgreb. All we can do is pray. But do so taking note of the fact that our enemies are praying at least twice as hard.

Homefront.

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