Mark Steyn - Lights Out

“Multiculturalism” is a unicultural phenomenon. It exists only as a western fetish, and we don’t believe in it, not really. Most people, given the choice, want to live in an advanced western society. That’s why even impeccably PC lefties refer carelessly to other cultures as “developing nations”: the phrase assumes they’re “developing” into something closer to ours, because that’s the direction of progress. Even hardcore multiculturalists want to live in a western society. For one thing, that’s the only place you can make a living as a multiculturalist. The general thinking was summed up in an email I got the other day from a reader arguing that there was no point getting irked by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s call for the introduction of sharia in the United Kingdom. We are, said my correspondent, “rich enough to afford to be stupid.”

I wonder if it’s quite that simple. We are encouraging of certain forms of assertiveness: I am woman, hear me roar! Say it loud, I’m black and proud! We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it! But the one identity we’re enjoined not to trumpet is the one that enables us to trumpet all the others: our identity as citizens of a very specific kind of society with a very particular inheritance, built on the rule of law, property rights, and freedom of speech. Heaven forbid we should assert any of that: I am western, hear me apologize! Say it loud, I’m Dutch and cowed! We’re Brits, we’re shits, awf’lly sorry about that!

If you no longer know what you stand for, how can you know what you stand against? That’s why Swedish cabinet ministers say we should be nice to Muslims now so that when they’re in the majority they’ll be nice to us, and Dutch cabinet ministers say they’d have no objection to sharia as long as a majority of Dutch electors voted for it, and Canadian Prime Ministers say things like: “I believe that once you are a Canadian citizen, you have the right to your own views and to disagree.”

That was Paul Martin, and he was reacting to the news that the youngest Khadr boy and his mum had landed at Pearson to renew their OHIP cards. Junior had been paralyzed in the shootout with Pakistani forces that killed his dad, the highest-ranking Canuck in al-Qaeda (at least until Osama’s Canadian passport turns up in the back of the cave). And, not fancying a prison hospital in Peshawar, the kid and his mum flew “home” to enjoy the benefits of Ontario health care. Would it have killed Mr Martin to express mild distaste at the idea of your tax dollars paying for the treatment of a man whose Canadian citizenship is no more than a flag of convenience but unfortunately that’s the law, blah blah blah? Apparently so. Instead, his reflex instinct was to proclaim this as a wholehearted demonstration of the virtues of a multicultural state so boundlessly tolerant it even lets you choose what side of the Afghan war you’re on: When the draft card arrives, just check “home team” or “enemy” according to taste. We’ll still be congratulating ourselves on our boundless tolerance even as the forces of intolerance consume us.

Which is more likely? That the Ontario “Human Rights” Commission will investigate Naeem Muhammad Khan for his explicit incitement to murder? Or that it will rebuke Maclean’s for being so “racist” and “Islamophobic” as to quote such chaps? Well, they’ve already done the latter. So have Her Majesty’s constabulary in England. After Channel 4 broadcast an undercover report showing imams in British mosques urging the murder of gays and apostates and whatnot, the West Midlands Police launched an investigation …into the TV network for its insensitive “Islamophobia”. As Bruce Bawer, a gay American who lives in Scandinavia, writes in the current City Journal :

Those who, if given the power, would subjugate infidels, oppress women, and execute apostates and homosexuals are ‘moderate’ (a moderate, these days, apparently being anybody who doesn’t have explosives strapped to his body), while those who dare to call a spade a spade are ‘Islamophobes’.

“Islam is a fighting creed,” wrote John Buchan, Canada’s former Governor-General (incredible as that seems), “and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other.” That’s from his novel Greenmantle , which the BBC had commissioned a new dramatization of, only to cancel it in the wake of the London Tube bombings. And just because the novels of the man who gave us the Governor-General’s Literary Awards are beyond the pale in these sensitive times doesn’t mean Buchan’s wrong: Islam is a fighting creed, but it doesn’t need to be, not when it’s up against a culture so turned on by self-flagellation.

To cite Bruce Bawer again on what he calls “the anatomy of surrender”:

The key question for westerners is: Do we love our freedoms as much as they hate them? Many free people, alas, have become so accustomed to freedom, and to the comfortable position of not having to stand up for it, that they’re incapable of defending it when it’s imperiled – or even, in many cases, of recognizing that it is imperiled.

Indeed. The bird that needs to fly the coop is the one that’s been chirruping away with the Song of Civilizational Self-Loathing for two generations now. To quote another landmark of ornithological versifying:

Spread your tiny wings and fly away.

ON THE TOMB of the great architect Sir Christopher Wren at St Paul’s Cathedral is a famous inscription: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice . If you seek my monument, look around. Conversely, if you’re seeking the tomb of western civilization, look around at the monuments. Not the old ones to generals and potentates, but the new ones.

A year ago, London’s Mayor “Red Ken” Livingstone unveiled a new statue on the famous “empty plinth” in Trafalgar Square. Sharing the heart of the capital with King George IV, General Sir Charles Napier and Major General Sir Henry Havelock these days is Alison Lapper, an armless woman heavily pregnant. At the unveiling, Miss Lapper said the new statue would force Britons to “confront their prejudices” about disability. As my old editor, Charles Moore, pointed out, Trafalgar Square already has a monument to persons who’ve overcome disability: the one-eyed one-armed Admiral Lord Nelson standing on his column and no doubt bemused by the modish posturing below. Red Ken became weirdly obsessed, as is his wont, by the dead white males clogging up the square and was anxious to even up the score. He professed never to have heard of General Napier or General Havelock, which is a sad comment – not that he should be so ignorant, but that he should be so boastful of his ignorance. ( National Review readers who wish to bring themselves up to speed on Sir Charles Napier will find him on page 193 of my new book.) So the point of the fourth plinth was to send a message that warmongering white males no longer had the square to themselves: the statue of Miss Lapper is a monument not to disability so much as to the psychological self-crippling to which so many Britons are prone.

Another monument: the Arizona 9/11 Memorial. It is a remarkable sight. Five years after the slaughter of thousands of Americans, one had long ago given up all hope that the nation might rouse itself to erect, as James Lileks put it at National Review Online, “a classical memorial in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve, and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles”. But, even so, the Arizona memorial is an almost parodic exercise in civilizational self-loathing, festooned in slogans that read like a brainstorming session for a Daily Kos publicity campaign: “You don’t win battles of terrorism with more battles.” “Foreign-born Americans afraid.” “Erroneous US airstrike kills 46 Uruzgan civilians.” And this is the official state memorial. Governor Napolitano called it “great” and “honorable”. It isn’t. It’s small and contemptible. Assuming it survives, future generations will stand before it and marvel – either that the United States is still around or that such an obviously deranged country even needed an enemy to lose to.