Rescuing Western civilization
An interview with Mark Steyn
By Robert Nathan Eberhart
From the April 2007 Print Edition
Mark Steyn is a conservative political journalist and best-selling author. Born in Canada and educated in England, Steyn dropped out of school at 16 to persue pursue his fortunes more productively. After falling somewhat reluctantly into journalism, he developed a very successful career as an arts critic for the then–newly established The Independent in London in 1986. During the ’90’s, Steyn made a move fromform arts criticism to political punditry, writing for publications including the National Review, Chicago Sun Times, the Globe & Mail, Western Standard, and the Orange County Register, among numerous others.
His first book, on Broadway musicals debuted in 1997 followed by his first pPolitical book, Face of the Tiger in 2002, Mark Steyn from Head to Toe:; An anatomical Anthology, and his most recent New York Times bestseller, America Alone: The End of the World as We Kknow Iit. He maintains a collection of his prolific writings at his popular website www.SteynOnline.com.
He was recently in Berkeley as the 23rd in a series of distinguished scholars invited to give the Nimitz Lecture Series sponsored by the Naval ROTC detachment here at UC Berkeley. Steyn kindly took some time out of his schedule to satit down with the California Patriot and discussed the issues of the day.
California Patriot: Given the Democrat’s’ control of Congress, how do we proceed with a successful prosecution of the war in Iraq?
Mark Steyn: The Democrats seem to be trying to find a form of slow-motion defeat that is clear enough of a defeat that the Republicans will get the blame for it, but where the Democrats will be absolved of any responsibility. I think that’s contemptible behavior in a time of war and a great problem. The reality is that it won’t be seen as a Republican defeat, but as an American defeat, so I think responsible Ddemocrats may understand what’s at stake there is basically about American will.
If you live in Basra or Ramadi or Falloujah, the war is about Iraq. But if you live in any other part of the world, it’s about American purpose and American will. The war isn’t really even about al Qaeda, it’s about demonstrating to all of your other enemies, whether it’s Kim Jong Ill, or the Mmullahs in Tehran, that the American hyper-power has the confidence to maintain the American moment — because, if it doesn’t, if it can’t focus sufficiently on Iraq to win, that then the American moment is over. There’s no reason for China or the Mullahs or anyone else to take us seriously ever again.
You can look at Iraq the way the Dems often do, “O. there’s Shiite here, Kurds, Sunni... its all too complicated… let’s give up” or you could say thatch if we were setting Iraq up today may be we wouldn’t want to do it this or that way. But the fact is that it is what it is. Can the hyper-power change the facts on the ground?
Looking at the early signs of the surge, I think its clear that when American makes decisions it changes the facts on the ground. So then the matter is whether America can change the facts on the ground in a sufficient enough way to achieve victory. That’s the end game. The end game is that however the Iraqis end up living, this must not be perceived by the world as yet another defeat by the United States. I use that term with some sadness because I think it’s been a long time since the United States has unambiguously won a war.
CP: What do you see as the causes of the current problems in U.S.-European relations and our radically divergent foreign-policy objectives?
MS: I think that this alliance, largely of convince convenience since 1945, is coming to an end. [French President Jacques] Chirac has cities in France with 40 percent% youth unemployment. The last thing he’s going to do is send troops going off to fight along side the Ggreat Satan. You wouldn’t do that either if you were in his shoes. Its that last the coming here needs and iIf you look at the electoralte consequences of a few chadps in Palm Beach Ccountry in 2000 and then look at Chirac faced with a 10 percent Muslim bloc, officially, in key cities and there is simply nothing for you in going into war alongside the Great Satan, it makes no sense. And I think we have to understand that Europe is undergoing a mass transformation and it will never again reliably be a great ally.
Even in things they claim to support —– a kind of post-modern alliance , in Afghanistan, the so-called “‘good war”’ that the Europeans support —–, look at the rules of engagement. These soldiers won’t go out at night, in the snow;, they are regulated under very narrow rules of engagement. It basically means they are high-priced security guards in better uniforms. If you look at who the fighting that’s begin being done there and who is actually going out and doing the killing, it’s the Americans, it’s the British, the Canadians, and it’s the Australians and the Dutch who are the sort of honorary members of the Anglo-Sphere as it were.
They speak better English than most of them. But basically the idea that it is a NATO mission is rubbish. Most of the member countries are not making serious contributions. Remember that NATO meeting a couple of years ago that everybody touted as a great success because NATO added some troops to the conflict, I think it worked out at about 26 soldiers per member state. If you look at the diplomatic effort getting them to cough up the 26 troops per member, it would be much better spent increasing the size of the Vermont National Guard. I mean, this is not a productive use. To have a military alliance, you have got to have allies who have militaries and most Continental countries do not, and that’s by choice. CP: How do you see the demographic trends that you discuss in your latest book affecting the future of Europe and its relationship with the U.S? MS: Demography is at the heart of most things. When people talk about most things, usually at the heart of it is a demographic issue. If you take the so-called “Social Security crisis” here in the U.S., the problem is that there are more old people, and fewer younger people to support them. In Europe, it is exponentially worse than that and it poses all kinds of problems. There is no reason why one 18--year-old burger flipper is going to want to support entire gated communities of seniors simply because he happens to be the only young guy in town and everybody else is retired and expects to be able to enjoy those benefits.
You see towns here where the mills close down, and you go into the diner and you notice that it’s very friendly and very affable but that everybody is kind of getting on a bit. And that all these young people have skedaddled out of town because they want to go somewhere where there are more young people and nobody want s to spend theiry life working and working and working to support an elderly community which is the situation that some of these young guys are going toot be in if they stay in Europe.
I mean, all counties have that to one degree or another. Look at Japan,: Japan is the oldest country in the world. In Russia, where basically two-thirds2/3 of pregnancies are aborted, they’ve got a real, serious problem. But what is complicating it in Europe is that, essentially, they imported a large Muslim population to be the children they couldn’t be bothered having. And in defiance of traditional immigration patterns, those Muslims are becoming more and more alienated with each generation. It’s interesting, we often think about the War on Terror because Osama bBin Laden is holed up in some cave in the Pakistani tribal lands, supposedly. We think of the War on Terror and we think it’s between us and some Paushtun goat herders living in a cave, and but it’s not. If you look at the ones who attacked on September the 11th, that they wereas a Hamburg cell of very Westernized Muslims.When you look at the millennium bomber, he was an Algerian Muslim who had been living in Quebec on welfare. When you look at the shoe bomber, he was a British subject who had been converted to Islam while in prison. In other words, we have a problem less with the Paushtun goat herders than with the Western Muslims — young Western Muslims who in many cases are far more anti-Western, anti-American than either their parents or grandparents were.
These fellows who were arrested recently involved in this plot in Toronto to behead the prime minister, the girl involved in that plot was militantly Jihadist. Her father is a Muslim immigrant who is the pharmacist of the Princess Patricia’s military base in Edmonton, Alberta. He supports the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, he is a loyal Canadian Muslim, his daughter is a raving Jihadist, and that’s the sort of de-assimilation that is going on from generation to generation.
So what we’re seeing in Europe I think is going to be a situation where essentially people who share broadly the same goals as the Jihad, that is, they want to live in Islamic societies, are going to be in a position to create those societies, initially at the municipal level and then beyond that, but are not part of Europe.
CP: Does the election of Angela Merkel in Germany and the rise of Nicolas Sarkozy in France invest in you any hope that members of the European political class will take this issue seriously?
MS: What you have to realize is that, in Europe, Chirac is conservative. So when you talk about Angela Merkel, who was touted as Germany’s Thatcher, and Sarkozy, who was touted as France’s Reagan, that’s all well and good, except that the French and German peoples aren’t where the American and British people were in 1979 and , 1980. In 1979 in Britain and in 1980 in the United States, the electorate here knew that the old way was kaput and that something had to change — and, God bless them, they voted for change. I think, as the German elections have confirmed and the French one will be too, the French and the Germans are simply not there yet.
The French are tired and, on the whole, they would like it if there were fewer Muslims in their country,ies but they are not willing to abandon the social entitlements that have made that mass immigration and its attendant problems necessary. Since they’re in a sort of humbug state, they are looking for a politician that who says, “Yyou can keep these unaffordable entitlements, but we’ll cut down on crime, we’ll get rid of all of the Muslims.”. That’s not going to work.
CP: Do the vast majority of Muslims, who are law-abiding, non-violent citizens, incur a positive obligation to more vocally oppose the actions of terrorists and act as agents of the U.S. government, helping to find and dismantle terrorist networks within their communities?
MS: Well, I tend to agree with the Australian Cabinet minister who said, “Look, there’s no need beating around the bush; , this is Islam’s problem, so in a sense it is up to Islam to solve it.” At some level, we cannot keep speaking for Islam. There is something rather silly about the way you will have these discussions on talk shows here where we will all be trying to recommend greater things that the Muslim populationng should be doing. But there really ought to be Muslim spokesmean out there, a Muslim coalition, Muslim TV pundits who are expressing the view of the Muslim community. The fact of the matter is that it is very difficult in those communities to have any kind of institutional support.
What America does well is assimilate immigrants better than Europe does. It’s positively disgraceful when you look at the dehumanization of the Muslim housing projects in France. It’s disgraceful. There is nothing equivalent in the United States. There is an American dDream., I don’t even know what the Belgianum dream is; , it’s a bizarre concept to me, but there’s nothing that these guys can tap into. I think historically Islam is moderated according to what it is kind of pushing against. SoO if you take Central Asia, when those countries were pushing against the Soviet Union, Muslims were very moderate. They drank a local form of fire juice, they weren’t strictly non- alcoholic. It was a very moderate form of Islam under the Soviet Union. But when T theH Soviets collapsed;, the Iranians spent a ton of money to radicalize this population.Indonesia was under the dictatorship, where Barack Obama went to grade school, and all of those questions were raised about that. The explanation was that, ‘well this was Indonesia under the dictatorship where the radical Islam similar to the Madrassas in Pakistan was not tolerated.” And of course they are right. And what that should tell you is that it is possible to moderate Islam under different forms of the presiding regime.
Now of course those are not attractive alternatives — , just examples to American. It was the same in British India; Islam was successfully moderated by the British Raj. SoO what America has to do, it has to be very clear that radical Islam fills the vacuum of the broader lack of societal confidence. If your society is a nullity — as the modern multicultural state often is, and certainly is in, say, Britain — radical Islam will pour into the vacuum and will radicalize enough members of the Muslim community, enough people in prisons, just enough goofy figures looking for some kind of cool thing to belong to, to cause you a whole heap of trouble. SoO you’ve got to be very clear, you’ve got to have a strong enough central core culture. that the pull of it, like a powerful magnet. Even if you don’t want to assimilate with it, you are assimilating with it. That’s the advantage America has and it’s what Britain and Europe don’t.
CP: Are you generally optimistic or pessimistic about the future of America and Western Civilization in general?
MS: I think the West as an idea has historically had two segments. That is to say there is a cultural West which includes most of Europe and that gave us tremendous music, great art, and certainly we in the English speaking countries can’t match. There is no American Mozart. But, those great cultures were nevertheless not able to have sustained peaceful political evolution. Its not justjuts that the United States Cconstitution is older than the Spanish, the Portuguese and French constitutions, but it’s older than all of these constitutions put together. SoSO the idea of the political West is a much narrower grouping and that’s primarily the English speaking countries which have been the only ones that have had continuous constitutional evolution, and have been the last line of defense against the great threats of the 20th century which is the German militarism in the 1st World War and the Japanese and the Nazis and Russian communism. It’s been the English speaking democracies in a sense that rose to the challenge when the French and other’s did not.
What’s happened I think is that those countries are now in a very decayed state. I think thy have been hollowed out from within. Canada is sort of a semi-detached participant in these affairs, New Zealand sold off its air force. So basically in a practical sense America has lost many of the pillars of that great English speaking alliance, with the exception of Australia. And so I think that does mean that when you talk about Western civilization, you’ve lost 2/3s of it. You’ve lost the continental segment, you’ve lost significant chunks of the Anglo-sphere, and you’re really down now to its core which is the United States and Australia and whoever else decides to correct course in time. And that means that no reasonable person can look at this and wonder whether we’re nt at one of those greatta historical tipping points, where we’re about to see a huge, major shift in the global order.
You know if you look historically at the last century, Andrew Roberts, who has a book out at the moment, on the history of the English speaking peoples since 1900, Andrew Roberts , he makes the point, which I agree with, that in the fullness of time you will step back and see the period of the British Imperial dominance and the domination of the United States as one continuous thread. In other words, it wasn’t a disruptive change or order. Somewhere duringin the 2nd World War the baton was passed peacefully. But most changes of global order were not like that. They tend to be convulsive and violent. And I tend to think that were much closer to a global tipping point than we think.
CP: Being here in Berkeley, considered by many to be the epicenter of left-wing radicalism, what message would you like to give to embattled conservatives and their liberal counterparts who might perchance be reading this in the Patriot?
MS: My message to liberals is always the same. You’re not my enemy and I’m not yours. People waste a lot of time bickering with each other. And I may strike the average Berkeley student as a kind of Neanderthal, homophobic, misogynist, or whatever. But believe me, I am a pussycat compared to the real problems that are out there in the world. And I’m always happy to sit down and talk with liberals about what the problem is and how we deal with it,in but I find it hard to believe that serious people can sit down and say that the only problem on the world scene is Bush and Cheney. It’s simply absurd. I think that’s basically a cult of ignorance.I have more respect in a way for the person who just picks up a supermarket tabloid and reads Anna Nicole Smith stories because at least that person has become an expert in something. They can tell you who Britney Spears’ current husband is or whatever, things that I can’t keep up with. WhereWhereas as the person who fancies themselves as a cut above the Anna Nicole stories, and thinks that Bush and Cheney are the problem in the world and that there are no profound questions facing Western Civilization is making a grave error.
So I am always talking to liberals but I think we should approach it understanding the terms. If they think that the worst, most oppressive form of government that you could have it is not Bush. There are things out there on the planet which that are much worse, million of people live under them. . And every time you use a word like “fascist” to mean Bush and Cheney, to mean a political system in whichwhich every two2 years you get to go to the ballot box and have your say,. A and aas political system in which the executive is very limited in powers and can do very little to you, every time you call that “fascist,” you are insulting millions and millions of people who have had their lives taken away form from them by having to live under totalitarian regimes. If you were born in East Germany in 1918 and lived your 3 score and 10 and died in 1988 you would have spent your entire life under oppressive regimes of one kind of another. You would have in fact been denied a life; you would have been denied an opportunity to explore your full potential. And so any time that someone cries these words like “Bush and Cheney, Fascist, Hitler” and all the rest of it, they are not insulting Bush and Cheney; they are insulting millions of people around the planet who know what it is like to live under a real dictatorship. I’m happy to talk to liberals but I’m not happy to collude in the distortion of language.
For embattled conservatives, my message ist really a simple one. A 50/50 nation cannot fight a war. It is spending so much time having its firepower siphoned off in other sorts of areas. And so I think that great challenge for a conservative is just look to your friends and try to win one person around to your line of thinking. And if you just do that every two or three months you’ve converted four or six people in a year and that mtakes a huge amount of difference. We need to be in contact, we need to be talking, we need to ttalk calmly, not waste time with a lot of stupid insults and things. Set yourself a target of sort of wooing one person at a time and you’ll make a difference.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider supporting the Patriot