Mark Steyn - After America

So Jews are to blame for lesbians? Do the prancing sapphists in that Philly supermarket know they’re just tools of the International Jewish Conspiracy?

Fortunately for them, they’re taking their courageous stand for Palestinian “social justice” in Pennsylvania. Not everyone keeps such a discreet distance. In 2008, the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca set off to hitch-hike from Milan to the Palestinian Territories to promote “world peace.”

She was dressed as a bride, and the purpose of her trip was to show that if only you put your trust in our common humanity then all will be well.

A month later, her naked body was found in the bushes near Gebze in Turkey. She had been gang-raped and then killed. Like Timothy Treadwell’s, her illusions met reality. 109

Most of us as individuals retain enough of a survival instinct that, if we find ourselves on a rough city block in a foreign land late at night, we moth-ball the PC pieties until we get back to the lobby of the Grand Hyatt. But what happens when Pippa Bacca’s illusions become the dominant political discourse of a free society? And how many Timothy Treadwells crooning to their killers does a society have to have before it loses even the very idea of a survival instinct?

Eloi passivity offers a template not only to a resurgent Islam. In Europe, we can already see what happens when the ruling class is obliged to tell a citizenry mired in dependence that there’s no more money. In France, the government announced the retirement age would be raised from 60 to 62 by 2018, and there were protests. In Britain, the government raised the cost of university education, and the elderly “students” rioted. En route to the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium, the heir to the throne, the Prince of Wales, and his consort the Duchess of Cornwall became separated from their police escort and had their Rolls besieged and battered by a mob chanting “Off with their heads!” That’s a portent of America’s future—except that for a failed and discredited elite there will be no pampered princes to serve as a focused target. After economic ruin, the Eloi will retreat from an unenforceable border and other areas of the country, not out of choice but from necessity. As the years go by, they will find it ever harder to insulate themselves from the pathologies they have fed. The collapse of the dollar as the global currency and the end of cheap imports will cause shortages in much of the land. But beyond that the abandonment of America’s animating ideas will leave a large porous continent with insufficient social glue to make it governable. And then, as H.G. Wells’ Eloi discovered, the Morlocks will take their opportunity, and in their “feeble prettiness” the elites will no longer even know how to rouse themselves.

An America that abandons the American idea will be a turbulent society. The present de facto segregation—in Maywood, California, and elsewhere—will decay into tribalism, both cultural and economic. The United States will quietly retreat from the southern borderlands and other redoubts of the Undocumented, in the way that the Government of France has retreated from those banlieues that Muslims regard as part of the Dar al-Islam. Other neighborhoods will opt for de facto secession, and still functioning states will opt for de jure secession, anxious to escape being buried by federal debt. Balkanization will cease to be a pejorative and become the least worst hope: united we’re done for, but divided a few corners of the map might stand a chance. The Eloi elites who did this to America will hunker down within protected enclaves while outside life grows increasingly savage and violent. But eventually they will come for the elite communities, too—as the cougar came for Frances Frost, and the bear for Timothy Treadwell.

In this chapter, Steyn talks about the problem of illegal immigration.

How do you think we should handle illegal immigrants?

Click here to tweet us (@Regnery, #AfterAmerica)

Click here to post your answer on our Facebook wall ( Facebook.com/RegneryBooks)

In 2009 Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, took to the podium of the UN General Assembly and observed that he was speaking just a few days after the president of Iran had claimed that the Holocaust was a lie. Mr. Netanyahu then explained that he’d recently visited a villa in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, and been shown the minutes of a meeting held there on January 20, 1942, at which senior German officials formulated precisely their plan for the extermination of the Jews. “Here is a copy of those minutes,” the Prime Minister told the UN. “Is this a lie?” 1

The day before, he’d been given another photocopy—this time of the original construction plans, signed by Heinrich Himmler, for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, wherein one million Jews would be killed.

“Here is a copy of the plans,” Mr. Netanyahu said to the assembled ranks of world leaders. “Is this too a lie?”

And so at the dawn of the twenty-first century, one head of government holds up the documents for the “Final Solution” to “the Jewish problem” because another head of government insists, repeatedly, that no such event ever took place. This is the state to which the United Nations has fallen after six decades posing as Lord Tennyson’s Parliament of Man: a sane man is obliged to prove to lunatics that the Holocaust actually happened.

One sympathizes with the Israeli Prime Minister, reduced, seventy years after Neville Chamberlain, to standing before the world waving pieces of paper from Herr Hitler. But he’s missing the point. Ahmadinejad & Company aren’t Holocaust deniers because of the dearth of historical documentation. They deny it because they can, and because it suits their own interests to do so, and because, in the regimes they represent, the state lies to its people as a matter of course and to such a degree that there is no longer an objective reality, only a self-constructed one.

And once you’re in the business of constructing your own reality, even internal logic is not required. In Iran, many of the same people who deny the first Holocaust are planning the second one. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, I’ve run into folks who simultaneously believe (a) that there was no Muslim involvement in the attacks of September 11, and (b) it was a tremendous victory for the Muslim people. Incidentally, by “the Muslim world,” I don’t just mean the Middle East: according to one poll, only 17 percent of British Muslims believe there was any Arab involvement in 9/11, and a majority of British Muslims—56 percent—believe there was no Arab involvement. 2And yet many British Muslims have marched in the streets under posters hailing the “Magnificent Nineteen” who carried out the attacks.

So we already live in a world in which there is insufficient agreed reality.

After America, there will be even less. To be sure, whatever the president of Iran might believe, there are plenty of fellows, even at the UN General Assembly, who understand that, yes, Auschwitz was built and, yes, many Jews died there. EU prime ministers ostentatiously participating in the annual Holocaust Memorial Day observances are certainly aware. Yet even they felt it was not, in diplomatic-speak, helpful for Mr. Netanyahu to belabor the point with President Ahmadinejad. The New York Times offered an online analysis in its dull blog, the Lede: dredging up the Holocaust business was a bit of artful misdirection from the hardline Netanyahu. 3As Robert Mackey explained, “his decision to engage so passionately with Iran’s president… helped to change the subject from a conversation that presents difficulties for Israel’s leader—how to make peace with Palestinians without alienating his supporters.”