Mark Steyn
Canadian journalist, columnist, and film and theatre critic.
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A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history triumphalism, the "what do you leave behind" question is more urgent than most of us expected. The Western world, as a concept, is dead and the West, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.
"As one is always obliged to explain when tiptoeing around this territory, I am not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture - rule of law, universal suffrage - is preferable to Arab culture. That's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.
On protests against going to war with Iraq : "One woman bore a picture of some female genitalia – possibly hers, the provenance was obscure – over the caption 'This Bush Is For Peace.' Another waxed eloquent: 'Trim Bush.' Out in Marin County somewhere, other bushes for peace disrobed, lay down on a hillside, and formed the words 'No War.' I wonder if there are any conflicted nudists, with a bush for Iraq and a rack for Bush.
On Al Gore: "The Eco-Messiah sternly talks up the old Nazi comparisons: "what we're facing is an ecological Holocaust, and the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin." That 221,000 kilowatt-hours might suggest that, if this is the ecological Holocaust, Gore's pad is Auschwitz. But, as his spokesperson would no doubt argue, when you're faced with ecological Holocausts and ecological Kristallnachts, sometimes the only way to bring it to an end is with an ecological Hiroshima. The Gore electric bill is the eco-atom bomb: you have to light up the world in order to save it.
As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it, "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder", as can be seen throughout much of the Western world right now. The progressive agenda - lavish social welfare, abortion, agnosticism, multiculturalism - is collectively the real suicide bomb.
To London's Europhiles, Britain is obviously "part of" Europe. But, in the age of jet travel, cellphones, wire transfers and the internet, we are less bound by physical proximity than ever. Yet Britain for the first time in history has chosen to be imprisoned by geography and to disconnect itself from its own culture.
Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not all European countries.
In the multicultural West, our values are that we have no values: we accord all values equal value; the wittering English feminist concerned that her tolerance is implicitly intolerant or the Sudanese wife-beater and compulsory clitorectomy scheduler.
As I understand it, the benefits of multiculturalism are that the sterile white-bread cultures of Britain, Canada and Australia get some great ethnic restaurants and a Commonwealth Games opening ceremony that lasts until two in the morning. But in the case of those Muslim ghettoes - in Sydney, in Oslo, in Paris, Copenhagen and Manchester - multiculturalism means that the worst attributes of Muslim culture - the subjugation of women - combine with the worst attributes of Western culture - licence and self-gratification. Tattoed, pierced Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering down the streets of Northern England are as much a product of multiculturalism as the turban-wearing Sikh Mountie in the vice-regal escort at Rideau Hall. Yet even in the face of the crudest assaults on its most cherished causes - women's rights and gay rights - the political elite turns squeamishly away.
As for 'cultural genocide', if there's any going on these days, it's the genocide of the Britannic inheritance - in North America, in the Antipodes, in Blair's Britain.
Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb; the grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the race who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.
On David Cameron's Conservative Party: "The carbon emissions trading system imposed by Kyoto is absurd and entirely ineffectual, but in London, David Cameron wants to apply it to hamburgers. Cameron wants to impose some sort of Kyoto-esque calorie trading system on fast-food purveyors whereby McDonald's would have some trans-fat cap imposed to ensure they pick up the tab for what that $3 Big Mac really costs society. And David Cameron is the leader of the alleged Conservative Party. He's also living in a country whose major cities have been hollowed out by Islamist cells. Nevertheless, as England decays into Somalia with chip shops, taxing the chip shops is the Conservatives' priority.
Bisexuality is the proportional representation of sexuality in a world where most of us - straight or gay - operate a first-past-the-post system.
Mark is not a Jew, but he plays one on TV.
On John Edwards, U.S. Senator from North Carolina: "The stump speech of pretty-boy Senator John Edwards, which I've heard often enough to be able to mouth along with him, has room for everything, including vivid, wrenching portraits of despair: 'Tonight somewhere in America a ten-year-old little girl will go to bed hungry, hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm.' You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be doubled up in laughter at that line.
On the French view of international politics: "According to my dictionary, the word 'ally' comes from the Old French. Very Old French, I'd say. For the New French, the word has a largely postmodern definition of 'duplicitous charmer who undermines you at every opportunity.'
The great thing about multiculturalism is it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures - the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I think was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society.
The principle underpinning the EU is not "We, the people" but "We know better than the people" — not just on capital punishment and the single currency, but on pretty much anything that comes to mind. Not so long ago, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, France's Defence Minister at the time, insisted that the United States was dedicated to the "organized cretinization of our people." As a dismissal of American pop culture - MTV, Disney - this statement is not without its appeal, though it sounds better if you've never had the misfortune to sit through a weekend of continental television. But the reality is that nobody is as dedicated to the proposition that the people are cretins than M. Chevenement and the panjandrums of the new 'Europe.' The EU is organized on this assumption. If, like the Danes and now the Irish, they're impertinent enough to tick the wrong box in referenda on deeper European integration, we'll just keep asking and re-asking the question until they get it right.
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