America Alone

In anticipation of getting my hands on a copy of Steyn's America Alone (currently #17 on amazon.com), here are a couple of reviews that have come out on the book. I know this post will be kind of long, but once you read through it, I think you'll agree that it's a vitally important topic and Steyn's America Alone is an important book.


From National Review:

No Time to Go Wobbly

STANLEY KURTZ

‘Live free or die; death is not the worst of evils.” That 1809 message, sent by General John Stark to his Revolutionary War comrades 32 years after the battle of Bennington, is now New Hampshire’s motto. Granite State resident Mark Steyn takes General Stark at his word. In contrast to the pampered charges of Europe’s bloated nanny-state, says Steyn, only free and self-supporting citizens, willing to stand up and fight, have a shot at winning the existential struggle with radical Islam . . .

Wait a second: “have a shot”? Mark Steyn believes that the United States of America has only a shot at winning the War on Terror? Come off it. Steyn can’t seriously believe the West might actually lose to the likes of Osama bin Laden and his pathetic suicide squadrons. Okay, maybe we’re looking at years of scattered terrorist attacks and international police actions. But lose?

That is exactly what Mark Steyn believes. The West is losing the War on Terror, Europe as we know it is fated to disappear, and a stranded America is going to be lucky to pull out a victory in the struggle for its cultural and physical existence. Yes, that Mark Steyn. The funny one. You want funny? Then by all means read Steyn’s book. The jokes are all there, along with Steyn’s dazzling trademark wordplay, and the usual switchblade putdowns. But when it comes to Mark Steyn, funny’s just another word for sad, smart, scary, and (unfortunately) largely true.

Europe defeated, neutralized, locked in an open and bloody civil war, and effectively enabling the world’s Islamists in their quest to destroy the United States: Think about that scenario for as long as it takes to get past the schadenfreude, and weep. Weep for us, and for them (because despite our spats, we are still Europeans). The collapse of the West’s own homeland is almost too horrible to contemplate. Yet it is happening before our eyes.

Europe’s ever-deepening surrender to radical Islam is a tribute to the emptiness of multicultural ideology, to the disabling effects of the welfare state, and, above all, to the power of demography — the last of which, Steyn cautiously notes, accounts for a good 90 percent of everything. European fertility rates have fallen to unprecedented levels. The population of the developed nations was once twice as large as the Muslim world (30 percent to 15 percent of global population). By 2000 we were even, at 20 percent apiece. And in 20 more years? Steyn points out that on current trends, by mid-century, tiny Yemen will have more people than a vast and empty Russia. Already, in France’s larger urban centers, up to 45 percent of the population under 20 is Muslim. Before risking death for freedom’s sake, you must first be born.

Steyn lays out the consequences of these fearsome demographic facts. Millions of now-teenage Muslims will shortly be entering Europe’s voting booths. So we’ll soon see the rise of Islamist political parties, which will share Osama’s Islamicizing goals, if not his tactics. A Europe where Muslims already exercise a virtual foreign-policy veto will be intimidated and broken by the duo of terrorist Islamist “bad cops” and peacefully political Islamist “good cops.” After all, terrorists have already toppled one European government (Spain). That, says Steyn, is the merest beginning.

Even now, sections of France where Muslims dominate have turned into “no go” zones for police and firemen. For their physical and psychological safety, Western women living in heavily Muslim urban centers are beginning to walk about covered. A few Westerners are even converting. And Steyn believes that as Europeans face the prospect of living as a frightened minority in Muslim-dominated cities, more Western converts will follow. Bereft of cultural confidence and lacking the will to fight, Europe is assimilating to its immigrants.

Impossible? Well, Steyn is never more persuasive than when he cites his nemesis, Euro-liberal Timothy Garton Ash. In Garton Ash’s scenario, by 2025, an aging Europe will be desperately in need of Muslim immigrants to support its pensioners. Speaking for Europe’s petrified (i.e., “multiculturalist”) leaders, Garton Ash says it would be a mistake even to try to bring these immigrants into a European cultural framework. On the contrary, he argues, Europe and the Muslim world will have to enter into a “great arc of partnership.” So in Europe, cultural appeasement is the order of the day.

The demographic disaster has only just begun, and already the English national flag (which features the “crusader” cross of St. George) has been banned in British prisons. Steyn reminds us that America’s colonists pledged to resist “the first unjust demands of an encroaching power,” lest a succession of “convenient” concessions prove “fatal to public liberty.” But that was General Stark’s old New Hampshire. In the new Hampshire, the new Brussels, and the new Paris, we’re seeing an endless train of small and “convenient” concessions. At this rate, says Steyn, Osama bin Laden won’t need to march in triumph down the Champs-Elysées. A decade or so down the road, he and his only somewhat less ornery fellow travelers will have Islamified Europe piecemeal. In Steyn’s words, “The last people around in any numbers will determine the kind of society we live in, and right now the last people around Europe will be Muslim.” With Mr. Ash running Europe’s assimilation project, time is not on our side.

As the world’s most advanced demographic basket case, Russia, already barely able to raise an army to defend its borders, is likely to lose large chunks of its territory to China on one hand, and to a succession of new Islamic states carved out of its decaying carcass on the other. Steyn reminds us that this means still more nukes floating around the Middle East. As far as the Islamists are concerned, Steyn informs us, it was they — and not the U.S. — who won the Cold War. American money and technology may have helped push the Soviets over the edge, but the Islamist fighting spirit in Afghanistan delivered the death blow. Absent a willingness to risk death for freedom, our money and technology will avail us nothing when our paid assassin wheels round from his Soviet victim and turns the knife on us. Russia’s but one example. Simply as a matter of fact, says Steyn, every year more of the world lives under Islamic law.

In short, jihad can win. Nor is Steyn shy about dating the apocalypse. Steyn expects an implosion of the welfare state, societal collapse, fascist revivalism, and bloody civil unrest in a semi-Islamic Europe within a generation, with much of the change emerging within the next ten to fifteen years, if not sooner. Add terrorist nuclear strikes to this scenario. And here’s a new one: Steyn predicts freelance nuclear attacks against Middle Eastern countries by independent actors in the West (should Western governments refuse to retaliate against Middle Eastern states for terrorist nukes).

All this makes Steyn the new anti-Fukuyama. America Alone is Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” cubed. Huntington envisioned relatively stable ongoing conflict between well-established civilizational zones. Steyn is talking about the collapse of the European heart of the West, and even its partial recruitment to the Islamist camp.

About a month after 9/11, Francis Fukuyama responded to claims that the terror attack had falsified his “end of history” thesis, and validated Huntington’s “clash” instead. Fukuyama dismissed Islamist terror as a futile rearguard action by traditionalists hoping to derail the unstoppable “freight train” of modernity. “I see no lack of a will to prevail in the United States today,” said Fukuyama. Democracy, Fukuyama noted, is spreading to more and more parts of the world. Immigrants flood the West and “eventually assimilate to Western values.” Above all, insisted Fukuyama, Islamism has “virtually no appeal in the contemporary world apart from those who are culturally Islamic to begin with.” Besides, Fukuyama assured us, modern Islamic societies simply aren’t viable.

In effect, America Alone provides an answer to each of Fukuyama’s post-9/11 claims. Half the West is already doomed, says Steyn, which will leave America isolated and vulnerable. Europe’s will is broken, while America’s fighting spirit is halfway out the window. Democracy may spread — and must spread — says Steyn, as our only shot at stopping a rapidly proliferating Islamism. Yet the West’s watery multiculturalism has proven incapable of inspiring loyalty among immigrants, who are assimilating Europe to Islam instead. Even if only Muslims are radicalized, their numbers are large enough to defeat us. And given those numbers, and the resulting cultural pressures, the small stream of Western converts could someday become a rushing river. On one point, Steyn would agree with Fukuyama. An Islamic Republic of France or an Islamic States of America would not be a viable society. Unfortunately, we know that “History” has proven all too eager to waste precious human lives and decades on dangerous and ultimately non-viable social experiments.

So have we left Fukuyama’s “End of History” for Mark Steyn’s “New Dark Age”? Unfortunately, we’re much too close to Steyn’s frightening vision for comfort. Yet therein, says Steyn, lies our hope. The horrors playing out in Europe may wake up what’s left of the West to the real alternatives, to wit: live free or die.

Mr. Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

And here is a review by the great Mona Charen:

Steyn at the Bridge
Read this book.

A review by Mona Charen

I’ve never read such an amusing book about such a grim subject. Mark Steyn’s America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It is in deadly earnest — our civilization is facing a crisis of confidence and demographic vigor just at the moment when a jihadi world movement stands poised to upend us. And yet Steyn’s inimitable wit enlivens every page. As NR readers already know, he is the Errol Flynn of commentators, finishing off opponents with a single flick of his rapier. Whether that rapier will finally be silenced by a scimitar is the story of this book.

Steyn is not the first to tackle the theme of Western pusillanimity in the face of Islamic barbarism — While Europe Slept, Londonistan, Eurabia, and others have plumbed similar themes — but he is undoubtedly the most stylish. Here is his rejoinder to an Episcopal priest who told his congregation after the London bombings “There are no Muslim terrorists. There are terrorists.”

“It’s not the perfect fatuousness of the assertion so much as the meta-message it conveys: we’re the defeatist wimps; bomb us and we’ll apologize to you.” Later, he warms to the subject: “Most mainline Protestant churches are, to one degree or another, post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbelieving to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left political clichés, on the grounds that if Jesus were alive today he’d most likely be a gay Anglican bishop in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally friendly car with an ‘Arms Are for Hugging’ sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams.”

Beyond the absurdity of this spectacle is the bleak reality that for whatever reason — and Steyn advances the view that it’s a combination of multiculturalism — welfare-state torpor, and prolonged adolescence, native Europeans are fast disappearing. He makes a powerful case that demography is the ball game.

“What’s the Muslim population of Rotterdam? Forty percent. What’s the most popular baby boy’s name in Belgium? Mohammed. In Amsterdam? Mohammed. In Malmo, Sweden? Mohammed. By 2005, it was the fifth most popular boy’s name in the United Kingdom.” By mid-century, Steyn observes, if Muslims continue to have large families and Europeans continue to have tiny ones, the nation of Yemen will exceed Russia in population. “In the fourteenth century, the Black Death wiped out a third of the Continent’s population; in the twenty-first, a larger proportion will disappear — in effect, by choice. We are living through a rare moment: the self-extinction of the civilization which, for good or ill, shaped the age we live in. One can cite examples of remote backward tribes who expire upon contact with the modern world, but for the modern world to expire in favor of the backward tribes is a turn of events future anthropologists will ponder, as we do the fall of Rome.”

Now to my favorite part:

This book isn’t an argument for more war, more bombing, or more killing, but for more will. In a culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of “suttee” — the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

India today is better off without suttee. If you don’t agree with that, if you think that’s just dead-white-male Eurocentrism, fine. But I don’t think you really believe that. Non-judgmental multiculturalism is an obvious fraud, and was subliminally accepted on that basis . . . . But if you think that suttee is just an example of the rich, vibrant tapestry of indigenous cultures, you ought to consider what your pleasant suburb would be like if 25, 30, 48 percent of the people around you really believed in it too. Multiculturalism was conceived by the Western elites not to celebrate all cultures but to deny their own: it is, thus, the real suicide bomb.

The lone exception to this downward spiral in the West is the United States. Our birthrate plus immigration means that our population is growing, not shrinking. (Actually, our growth is due to red state birth rates. If it were up to the blues, we’d be in Europe’s fix.) But most American liberals are as weak-minded as the Europeans when it comes to the matter of will. They do not feel the urge to preserve Western civilization as strongly as the desire to apologize for it — and that may be the death of us.

— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist and author who blogs on National Review Online’s “The Corner.”