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Make babies, not war
The Red State blogosphere is in full swoon today over Mark Steyn's 6,000-word Opinion Journal piece prophetically titled The Century Ahead. Steyn, a theatre-critic and columnist, pushes the Stormfront.org envelope when he writes that The War Against Terror is all about demographics - brown people make babies faster than white people. In Steyn's dark vision, in 100 years our great-granddaughters will be dressed like beekeepers and living under sharia law.
Steyn does make some valid points. He wonders why liberals, and those he sneeringly calls "progressives", aren't more concerned about radical Islam's hostility to gays, reproductive rights, and Britney Spears. I wonder the same thing. But Steyn's solution to Islamist encroachment on Europe and elsewhere is to banish "secondary impulses" such as government funded health care, so society can get back to basics, or what Steyn calls the "primary impulses" of family, faith, and national defense. I guess people who depend on universal for health care are too busy seeing their government funded podiatrist to have babies.
Steyn also has nasty things to say about gays, and abortion rights activists, and multi-culturalists, but he keeps circling back to his main point, that the west has grown too soft, too dependent on government, and too busy to make babies. Meanwhile, those randy Muslims, with their peek-a-boo abayas and push-up suicide belts, are screwing like bunnies.
The real threat to Western civilization is not terrorism, since al Qaeda lacks the military power to defeat even our weak, government funded military, says Steyn. He quotes Arnold Toynbee's chestnut that "civilizations die from suicide, not murder", and says the real suicide bombers threatening the west are progressives (said with a sneer) and their "lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, (and) multiculturalism." He particularly has it in for multiculturalism, which Steyn defines as "feeling good about other cultures."
Steyn's solution to the coming demographic jidad is a return to Christian values, where men are men and women are receptacles. In other words, it takes a paternalistic, theocratic state to defeat a paternalistic, theocratic enemy. In order to come to this astonishing conclusion, Steyn first has to ignore any number of facts. Here's four for starters:
1. Any race can be any religion. We're not at war with Islam. I have a Syrian friend, a devout Muslim, who lives in the Milwaukee suburbs and has three children. Is he now my demographic enemy?
2) Cultures change, especially robust, liberal democracies like ours. Maintaining our current culture is about as smart as maintaining our current technology.
3) Steyn presumes that all Muslims are the same, and that all Christians are the same. But most Muslims are liberal, and yearn for freedom. I think George Bush said that.
4) The Islamic uprising throughout Europe has more to do with poverty and lack of opportunity than Wahabiism. If anything, Europeans need to be more multicultural, not less, to curb Islamic violence.
America and the West will prevail in the current War on Terror because of our western values of tolerance, justice, and equality, not despite them. Right wing ideologues like Steyn are the political equivalents of war profiteers, trying to sell their reactionary vision to a public that is too distracted by the sound of distant cannons to properly inspect the merchandise.
4.1.06 22:37
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(5.1.06 02:56) What's #3? Beyond that, great post. The last paragraph states your point beautifully. |