The Boston bombings have set off a new round of security-tightening everywhere you look. When I went to the train station in Providence last week, I saw that passengers now have to present ID to well-armed police officers just to get to the platform; some had their bags searched. Sporting arenas are adding item after item to the list of things you can’t take to the game; soon, no doubt, there will be metal detectors and full-body scans. Cameras are everywhere.
In short, the level of public trust has sunk so low that we all feel ourselves to be under the continuous, wary scrutiny not only of those with whom we share the public square (“if you see something, say something!”), but also of of a vast, amorphous security apparatus that wields increasingly arbitrary power. We may grumble at the inconvenience, but that’s about as far as it goes; generally, it seems, we just comply, reminding ourselves that it’s all for our own good.
Less often do we reflect on the many uses to which such pervasive “security” arrangements can be put. In the name of safety and security we have been asked to disarm ourselves, to abandon various presumptions of privacy, and to grant the state worrisome discretionary powers. We yield, in little increments, our dignity and our personal sovereignty, while strengthening at every turn of the wheel the supervisory and coercive power of the State. This can’t end well.
Why is this happening? It is because we know we harbor among us malignant foreign bodies, who would do us harm — but, having crippled our organism’s ability to make vital discriminations, we are unable proactively to categorically identify or reject them. Instead, our only remaining defense is to suppress the free activity of every cell in the body.
We are in the grip of a lethal disease. In 2009 I described it thus:
Of all the maladies that can afflict a living organism, among the direst, for obvious reasons, are disorders of the immune system, and I don’t think it fatigues our metaphor to say that this is exactly what’s happening to us here in the West. There has arisen in our culture a memetic mutation, built upon previous philosophical evolution having to do with admirable principles of liberty and tolerance, that has led us to imagine not only that our culture is entirely invulnerable to pathogenic memetic infection in the form of alien cultural influences, but also that it is actually strengthened and enriched by them in all cases, without any regard to their cultural dissonance, infectious virulence, or even explicit malevolence. What makes this particular auto-immune disorder even more — indeed, far more — dangerous is that our society’s natural immune response has been not weakened, but re-directed: to attack precisely the very influences that might suppress the mutation and restore the health and safety of the organism. Criticism of multiculturalism, then, becomes “xenophobia”, and defensive wariness toward the possibly pernicious influence of excessive diversity, or of alien cultures, upon our own, becomes “racism”.
In other words, we’re dying of AIDS.
How do you die from diseases of the immune system? There are two ways. First, as noted above, a misdirected immune response can attack the body itself. Second, the suppression of the body’s natural defenses makes the organism easy prey for opportunistic invaders.
We are in the late stages of both. We stand in the presence of an organism — Islam — that has for 1,400 years presented a pathogenic threat to the West, and which in recent decades has, for whatever reason, taken on an acutely virulent and infectious form. To make matters much worse, we have at the same time infected ourselves with a very nasty bug indeed, leading to a severe case of acquired immunodeficiency.
Were our culture’s immune system functioning normally, we would consider the following, in the light of rational self-interest:
1) That Islam itself, as understood by hundreds of millions of its adherents, is inherently alien, antagonistic, and anathematic to the ideological foundations of modern Western civilization;
2) That the 1,400-year history of Islam has been a continuous struggle for supremacy over its neighbors, and for expansion of its sphere of control;
3) That the ideological structure of Islam itself is, by virtue of its history, the nature and content of its revelation, and its comparative freedom from internal contradiction, extremely durable and resistant to change, and has always exerted among its faithful a powerful gravitational pull toward its fundamentalist core;
4) That in any large enough population of Muslims, some percentage of them will inevitably gravitate toward that ideological center — which includes not only a detailed guide to nearly all aspects of the believer’s life, but also an urgent call to action regarding the conversion or subjugation of unbelievers;
5) That some percentage of these, in turn, will interpret this merely as a call to subvert and influence from within any non-Muslim nation they happen to be living in, while some smaller percentage will take it as a call to warlike action;
6) That, given 1)-5) above, mass immigration of Muslims to the West will necessarily result in an growing subpopulation of Muslims who are our ideological adversaries, and are prepared to act on that in various ways;
7) That, given 6), and given the difficulty of reversing demographic changes brought about by immigration, we owe it to ourselves — and more importantly, to those future generations for whom we hold our civilization in stewardship — to weigh very carefully any imagined benefits to the West of mass Muslim immigration against the certainty of creating within our own borders a growing population of unassimilable cultural and ideological enemies. (And as for those imagined benefits — can anyone seriously believe that the English, the Swedes, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Belgians, the French, the Dutch, are happier, or the life of their homelands more harmonious, since they allowed tens of millions of Muslims to settle among them?)
The late Lawrence Auster put this very starkly in a piece he wrote in August of 2006, recently cited at VDare:
This is the unchangeable reality I pointed to in my 2004 article, “How to Defeat Jihad in America.” We will have terrorist attacks and threats of terrorist attacks and inconvenient and humiliating security measures and the disruption of ordinary activities FOREVER, as long as Muslims are in the West in any significant numbers. The Muslim terrorists are part and parcel of the Muslim community. According to a survey reported in the Scotsman, 24 percent of Muslims in Britain (I never describe them as “British Muslims”) believe the July 2005 London bombings were justified. Imagine that. Not only do these Muslims in Britain support terrorism against Britain, they’re not afraid to say so openly to a pollster! The unchangeable fact is that wherever there is a sizable Muslim community there will be a very large number of terror supporters and therefore—inevitably—actual terrorists as well.
This is our future, FOREVER, unless we stop Muslim immigration and initiate a steady out-migration of Muslims from the West until their remaining numbers are a small fraction of what they are now and there are no true believers among the ones that remain. Travelers from Muslim countries must be tightly restricted as well. Muslims must be essentially locked up inside the Muslim lands, with only carefully screened individuals allowed into the non-Muslim world.
The enemy are among us, in America, in Britain, in the West, and will remain so until we remove them from the West and indeed from the entire non-Muslim world. As extreme as this sounds, it is a no-brainer. There is no other solution. All other responses to this problem add up to meaningless hand-wringing. The hand-wringing will go on FOREVER, along with the terrorist attacks and the threat of terrorist attacks, until we take the ONLY STEPS that can actually and permanently end the threat.
Was Auster wrong? Here we are, seven years later: wringing our hands, stubbornly refusing to name the threat, while the “inconvenient and humiliating security measures and the disruption of ordinary activities” grow steadily worse and worse.
Fortunately, at long last the ground seems to be shifting; after the latest atrocity it suddenly seems to be possible to express these ideas in the media, and various public figures are gingerly doing so, accompanied by suitable pieties and disclaimers. The idea of such discrimination is still generally regarded as a dangerous, soul-destroying heresy, but that anyone in politics or the media would dare to express such thoughts at all is a promising sign.
John Derbyshire commented on this in his most recent podcast:
The other day — Monday, to be exact — Laura Ingraham, on her radio show, said she has long believed the United States should shut down all immigration from central Asia and any nation with a majority Muslim population. Atta-girl!
Quote from Laura: “I would submit that people shouldn’t be coming here as tourists from Chechnya after 9/11. Dagestan, Chechnya, Kyrgystan, uh-uh. As George Bush would say, ‘None of them stans.’”
This is very heartening. Then, when I had just got over swooning about that, Democrat Bob Beckel — he was the campaign director for Walter Mondale’s presidential bid — told Rush Limbaugh that, quote:
I think we really have to consider, that given the fact that so many people hate us, that we’re gonna have to cut off Muslim students from coming to this country for some period of time so that we can at least absorb what we’ve got, look at what we’ve got and decide whether some of the people here should be sent back home or sent to prison.
So it’s bipartisan! We’ve got one bigfoot conservative commentator and one old Democrat warhorse both saying we should keep Muslims out.
To the lefties, of course, this is “hate.” I must “hate” Muslims, and so must Laura Ingraham and Bob Beckel.
How childish! You don’t have to “hate” people to want them to stay happily in their own countries and out of yours. It’s actually how most of the world feels. Chinese people don’t “hate” Indonesians, but they’re no way going to let ten million of them settle in China.
Western liberalism is strange, sick, abnormal, and anti-human. They are the haters. They hate their own countries, their own ancestors, their own culture, their own race. It’s a sickness, a pathology.
So it is; a pathology of the most dangerous sort. But people do sometimes recover from autoimmune diseases; perhaps there is still a chance that we as a nation and culture can do so as well.