Mark Steyn - After America

So, in the fall of 2001, the Jetsons toppled the Flintstones. And the Flintstones bided their time, and quickly figured out that the Jetsons didn’t have the stomach to do what it takes, and their space-age occupation of Bedrock would rapidly dwindle down into a thankless semi-colonial policing operation for which the citizenry back on the home front in Orbit City would have no appetite. Jetson-wise, the West was all jets and no sons. The sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn pointed out that 1,000 German men had 480 sons, while 1,000 Afghan men had 4,000 sons. 69To lose your only son in a distant war is devastating. For your third, fourth, and fifth sons, what else is there for them to do?

The Pentagon was post-human before post-human was cool. Having pioneered unmanned drones to zap the natives from the skies, it developed more sophisticated models—drones that flew in the exosphere, and were even more invisible to the goatherds far below. When you’re dependent on technology in an age of globalized computerization, it’s hard to make everything “secure,” and certainly not as secure as a group of inbred jihadists sitting around a camp fire. The unceasing Chinese cyber-probing grew more and more probing, and daring. Drones would suddenly drop from the skies for no apparent reason. Nobody minded: if it was a casualty of war, it was not one to be memorialized or exploited for political gain. Eventually the cost of replacing them became prohibitive. The land of the unmanned drone gradually abandoned the drone, while remaining unmanned.

Recall H.G. Wells’ Time-Traveler. When he makes his first foray into the Morlocks’ subterranean lair, he is impressed to find that, unlike the effete Eloi, they are not vegetarian. On the other hand, he is not clear exactly what large animal it is that they’re roasting on the spit.

And then the penny drops.

“Even now man is far less discriminating and exclusive in his food than he was—far less than any monkey,” he reflects. “His prejudice against human flesh is no deep-seated instinct. And so these inhuman sons of men—!”

He calms himself and tries to look at it in a scientific spirit. “After all, they were less human and more remote than our cannibal ancestors of three or four thousand years ago.”

I gather that, for TV comics and newspaper cartoonists of your time—the mid-twentieth century—there were few more reliable laughs than putting a white man wearing a pith helmet in a big pot surrounded by dancing natives. Yet, oddly enough, there was virtually no empirical basis for such a persistent stereotype. “The rest of the world had always believed that there was cannibalism in Africa,” wrote Charles Onyango-Obbo in The East African in 2003, “but there wasn’t much hard evidence for it.” 70

Yet by the early days of the twenty-first century, when the PC enforcers would clobber you for even the mildest evocation of the old cooking-pot gag, cannibalism was flourishing. Mr Onyango-Obbo had been reporting that the Congolese Liberation Movement was slaughtering huge numbers of people and feeding the body parts to their relatives. In North Kivu, a group called les Effaceurs (the Erasers) had wanted to open up the province’s mineral resources to commercial exploitation and to that end had engaged in ethnic cleansing by cannibalism. The Congo Civil War raged for most of the first decade of this century uncovered by CNN and the New York Times for want of any way to blame it on George W. Bush. Among the estimated six million dead, many were eaten. The two parties to the conflict agreed on very little except that pygmies make an excellent entrée. Both sides hunted them down as if they were the drive-thru fast-food of big game.

While regarding them as sub-human, they believed that if you roasted their flesh and ate it you would gain magical powers. In return, the pygmies asked the UN Security Council to recognize cannibalism as a crime against humanity, for all the good that did. 71

After all, a society that will resume cannibalism is unlikely to observe any UN resolutions. As Mr. Onyango-Obbo saw it, the resurgence of the two-legged menu option was a function of Africa’s reprimitivization. “Cannibalism,” he wrote, “happens commonly where there is little science, and people don’t see themselves as creatures of a much higher order than other animals around them. When you have gone to the moon, you consider yourself and other humans to be very different from the chimp at the zoo.”

But in the twilight of the West, Americans no longer went to the moon, and environmental activists loudly proclaimed that man was no different from the chimps (who by the way shouldn’t be in the zoo).

The state of nature made huge advances in the early years of the century.

Why did we never wonder what might happen when such forces went nuclear? Ah, well. The transnational jet set had other filet o’ fish to fry. They had convinced themselves that economic and technological factors shape the world all but exclusively, and that the sexy buzz words—“globalization,” “networking”—could cure all ills. The famous Golden Arches Thesis of Thomas Friedman posited that countries with McDonald’s franchises don’t go to war with each other. Shortly thereafter, Bill Clinton bombed Belgrade, a city richly endowed with western fast-food outlets. A few years earlier, when the Iron Curtain had fallen, Yugoslavia had been, economically, the best-positioned of the recovering Communist states. But, given the choice between expanding the already booming vacation resorts of the Dalmatian coast for their eager Anglo-German tourist clientele or reducing Croatia and Bosnia and Kosovo to rubble over ethno-linguistic differences no outsider can even discern (“Serbo-Croat”?), Yugoslavia opted for the latter.

They didn’t eat their enemies’ private parts, but they certainly sliced off plenty of breasts and genitals.

Another thinker, Thomas P. M. Barnett, the widely admired author of The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century and Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating , liked to divide the world into a functioning “Core” and a “Non-Integrating Gap.” 72He favored using a “SysAdmin” force—a “pistol-packin’ Peace Corps”—to transform the “Gap” countries and bring them within the “Core.” Like many chaps who swan about dispensing high-end advice to international A-listers, he viewed the world’s problems as something to be sorted out by more effective elites—better armed forces, international agencies, that sort of thing. The common herd was noticeable by its absence from his pages. If he had given them any thought, he might have realized that his vision of a “SysAdmin” force—European allies that would go into countries after American hard power has liberated them—was simply deluded. Whatever the defects of the Continent’s elites, the real problem was not the lack of leaders but the lack of followers.

It soon became clear that Professor Barnett was holding his thesis upside down. Rather than Europe’s leadership class helping move countries from the Non-Integrating Gap to the Core, it would have its work cut out preventing large parts of the Core doing a Bosnia and moving to the Non-Integrating Gap. For all the economic growth since World War II, much of the world had gone backwards—almost the whole of West Africa, and Central Africa, and Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, Bosnia. Yet none of the elite asked themselves a simple question: What’s to stop that spreading? In a world after America, the reprimitivization of the map would accelerate: the new Jew-hating Sweden… the French banlieues where the state’s writ ceased to run… Clapton, East London, where Shayna Bharuchi cut out her four-year-old daughter’s heart while listening to an MP3 of the Koran…