Americans and other Westerners who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society should understand that the life we’ve led since 1945 in the Western world is very rare in human history. Our children are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid, and may well spend their adult years in an ugly and savage world unless we decide that who and what we are is worth defending. To a five-year-old boy watching Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession on the Mall in 1897, it would have been inconceivable that by the time of his eightieth birthday the greatest empire the world had ever known would have sunk to an economically moribund strike-bound slough of despond whose tax rates drove its best talents abroad, and whose most glittering colonial possessions now valued ties to Communist Russia over those to the mother country. It’s difficult to focus on long-term trends because human life is itself short-term. So think short-term: huge changes are under way right now.
The threat to U.S. power comes not principally from Chinese innovation or Indian engineering graduates but from America’s own cultural indolence, just as the sack of Rome was a symptom of the fall of the empire rather than the cause. The governing class found themselves, to quote Cole Porter, “fighting vainly the old ennui”—and that’s harder to do than fighting off an invading army. Bernard Lewis, the West’s preeminent scholar of Islam, worked for British intelligence through the grimmest hours of World War Two. “In 1940, we knew who we were, we knew who the enemy was, we knew the dangers and the issues,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “In our island, we knew we would prevail, that the Americans would be drawn into the fight. It is different today. We don’t know who we are, we don’t know the issues, and we still do not understand the nature of the enemy.”
The advantage for the United States and, to a lesser extent, other parts of the English-speaking world is that Europe is ahead in the line, and its fate may wake up even the most blinkered on this side of the Atlantic. Islamism is militarily weak but ideologically confident. The West is militarily strong but ideologically insecure. The suicide bomber is a symbol of weakness, of a culture so comprehensively failed that what ought to be its greatest resource—its people—is instead as disposable as a firecracker. But in our self-doubt the enemy’s weakness becomes his strength. We simply can’t comprehend someone like Raed Abdel Mask, pictured in the papers in 2004 with a big smile, a checkered shirt and two cute little cherubs, a boy and a girl, in his arms. His wife was five months pregnant with their third child. So he kissed her goodbye and then big, smiling Raed strapped an eleven-pound bomb packed with nails and shrapnel to his chest and boarded the number 2 bus in Jerusalem.
We heard a lot about “root causes” in the weeks after September 11—mostly the usual ones: “poverty breeds despair,” etc. But the September 11 murderers were middle class and educated, which is one reason why they were so skilled at their job that day. It was carefully plotted. They hijacked long-haul flights with the most fuel at the time of day when airport security would be even more careless than usual. It was brilliantly planned, superbly executed. The perpetrators trained to become jet pilots—a profession that would guarantee a good life anywhere around the world. They could be pulling down six-figure salaries instead of Manhattan skyscrapers. But they went to pilot school and trained in a highly disciplined fashion so they could make one flight, one time, one way: into a tall building.
We cannot fathom men such as Mohammed Atta and Raed Abdel Mask. But, if you were the late Messrs. Mask and Atta following events in North America and Europe, wouldn’t we strike them as a little odd too? When we hear about some guy in a cave dreaming of the new caliphate, we think he’s nuts. But if you were in the cave watching a CNN bulletin in which legal analysts explain why the U.S. Supreme Court decided to confer Geneva Convention rights on unlawful combatants under an unprecedented reading of Common Article 3 or watching New York Times executives explain proudly how important it was for them to reveal fatally damaging details of a national security terror-tracking program for no good reason whatsoever, wouldn’t you conclude that we’re the ones who are nuts? If you’d been in the cave and had your radio tuned to National Public Radio for the following exchange, wouldn’t you have been splitting your sides (and not because your suicide-bomber belt went off early)? This was an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition with the mayor of Toronto, after the arrest of seventeen alleged terrorist plotters. I was laughing so much I drove off the road. There ought to be a health warning before these cockamamie public broadcasting gagfests. Hizzoner David Miller warmed up with a bit of boilerplate Islamoschmoozing: “You know, in Islam, if you kill one person, you kill everybody. It’s a very peaceful religion. And they’re as shocked as Torontonians are. And—”
Renee Montagne, the NPR anchorette, instantly spotted the ghastly breach of PC etiquette and leapt in: “Well, they sort of are Torontonians,” she pointed out.
“Sorry,” gulped the mayor, hastily re-smothering Muslims within the great diversity quilt. “They’re shocked as every Torontonian is.”
Ms. Montagne then expressed bafflement that these allegedly alleged fellows would have wanted to commit a terrorist atrocity in what was, compared to the Great Satan next door, “a very open society, very liberal immigration policy, very good social services.”
Mayor Miller agreed. “More than half of the people who live in Toronto, including myself, were not born in Canada. And I think that’s why Canada works.”
“Although it didn’t work in this case,” Ms. Montagne noted, somewhat maliciously.
“Well, we don’t expect these kinds of occurrences, exactly because of our public services, because of diversity,” blah, blah, blah. Insofar as there’s any relation between jihadists and “good social services,” the latter seem to attract the former—at least in the sense that the millennium bomber, the shoe-bomber, the Tube bombers, etc., were all products of the Euro-Canadian welfare system. But go ahead, pretend that these guys were upset about insufficient “social services,” that they wanted to behead the prime minister to highlight the fact that wait times for the beheaded at the Toronto General are now up to eighteen months, and they don’t always reattach the right head. It’s easy to scoff that a chap who can be bothered to blow up the Canadian Parliament must be insane, but if you were a jihadist sitting in the cave back in the Hindu Kush listening to Renee Montagne and David Miller compete to abase themselves before the most irrelevant PC platitudes, wouldn’t you conclude that they’re way more suicidal than you and Ahmed?
A suicide bomber may be a weak weapon, but not against a suicide culture.
THE SICK BED
Shortly after September 11, I reread an old potboiler I vaguely remembered from my childhood: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, had a sick wife and in 1895 they went to Egypt, hoping the climate would alleviate her tuberculosis. No writer likes to waste local color, so in 1898 Conan Doyle published The Tragedy of the Korosko, the story of a party of Anglo-American-French tourists on a trip up the Nile who wind up getting kidnapped by the al Qaeda of the day—the followers of the Mahdi. What’s striking is how familiar it all is. The sudden intrusion of an unbending savagery upon modern man:
When, but a year before, he had wandered under the elms of Cambridge, surely the last fate upon this earth which he could have predicted for himself would be that he should be slain by the bullet of a fanatical Mohammedan in the wilds of the Libyan Desert.
Even the techniques are much the same:
“What do you suppose that they will do with us, Cochrane?” he asked, after a pause.
“They may cut our throats, or they may take us as slaves to Khartoum. I don’t know that there is much to choose.”
Then as now, the Islamists believe the infidels are looking at things back to front, that the advanced scientific mind is, in fact, an effete arrogant weakness in the face of unquestioning faith:
“As to the learning of which you speak, my lamb,” said the mullah, in answer to some argument of Fardet’s, “I have my
self studied at the University of Alazhar at Cairo, and I know that to which you allude. But the learning of the faithful is not as the learning of the unbeliever, and it is not fitting that we pry too deeply into the ways of Allah. Some stars have tails, oh my sweet lamb, and some have not; but what does it profit us to know which are which? For God made them all, and they are very safe in His hands. Therefore, my friend, be not puffed up by the foolish learning of the West, and understand that there is only one wisdom, which consists in following the will of Allah as His chosen Prophet has laid it down for us in this book. And now, my lambs, I see that you are ready to come into Islam.”
And in the face of such clarity there are among the tourists those who take refuge in conspiracy theories. Just as many Westerners believe Bush cooked up the whole war-on-terror scam as a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, so at the beginning of Conan Doyle’s adventure a character believes the Mahdists have been concocted by the British government to provide a pretext for intervention:
“I repeat that there are no dervishes. They were an invention of Lord Cromer in the year 1885.”
“You don’t say!” cried Headingly.
“It is well known in Paris, and has been exposed in La Patrie and other of our so well-informed papers.”
And when the conspiracy theorist is kidnapped and learns that there are, indeed, dervishes, his initial reaction—like those of the misnamed “Christian Peacemaker Teams” seized in Iraq—is to emphasize how much he agrees with their point of view:
The Frenchman waved his unwounded hand as he walked. “Vive le Khalifa! Vive le Mahdi!” he shouted, until a blow from behind with the butt-end of a Remington beat him into silence.
For, as did the kidnappers of those Iraqi “Peacemakers,” the dervishes see even a supportive infidel only as an infidel.
So what is different between a late Victorian “shocker” and our time? Conan Doyle’s Britons and Americans and Europeans were men and women of the modern world even then:
None of them, except perhaps Miss Adams and Mrs. Belmont, had any deep religious convictions. All of them were children of this world, and some of them disagreed with everything which that symbol upon the earth represented.
Yet in the end the English, Irish, and Americans among the party have an instinctive civilizational confidence. They respect their foe, in part because they understand that’s what he is. It was an odd sensation rereading The Tragedy of the Korosko after September 11. As innumerable Western academics lined up across the TV studios and public prints to insist that “poverty breeds desperation,” I came across this passage:
“It isn’t safe to reckon upon a dervish’s fears,” remarked Brown. “We must always bear in mind that they are not amenable to the same motives as other people. Many of them are anxious to meet death, and all of them are absolute, uncompromising believers in destiny. They exist as a reductio ad absurdum of all bigotry—a proof of how surely it leads towards blank barbarism.”
It is absurd: how can the most advanced society in human history fall to a bunch of ignorant death cultists? Well, who do you think advanced societies do fall to? Something worse, something barbarous, something that’s prepared to fight when you’re not. One hundred and eight years later, there was a latterday Cook’s Tour atrocity in Egypt—a terrorist bombing at the popular Western holiday destination of Dahab. Egyptians were polled as to who was responsible: 4 percent thought it was al Qaeda; 21 percent thought it was internal terrorist groups; 49 percent thought it was the Mossad. Denial really is a river in Egypt.
How many Egyptians or Arabs or Muslims living in, say, Brussels or London or Dearborn, Michigan, feel the same?
The key difference between the Anglo-American hostages in The Tragedy of the Korosko and their successors today is that they accepted their obligations. It’s never easy, and certainly not for Conan Doyle’s dramatis personae in 1898, when the “white man’s burden” seemed especially burdensome:
“It’s my opinion that we have been the policemen of the world long enough. We policed the seas for pirates and slavers. Now we police the land for dervishes and brigands and every sort of danger to civilization. There is never a mad priest or a witch doctor, or a firebrand of any sort on this planet, who does not report his appearance by sniping the nearest British officer. One tires of it at last. If a Kurd breaks loose in Asia Minor, the world wants to know why Great Britain does not keep him in order. If there is a military mutiny in Egypt, or a jihad in the Sudan, it is still Great Britain who has to set it right. And all to an accompaniment of curses such as the policeman gets when he seizes a ruffian among his pals. We get hard knocks and no thanks, and why should we do it? Let Europe do its own dirty work.”
“Well,” said Colonel Cochrane, crossing his legs and leaning forward with the decision of a man who has definite opinions, “I don’t at all agree with you, Brown, and I think that to advocate such a course is to take a very limited view of our national duties. I think that behind national interests and diplomacy and all that there lies a great guiding force—a Providence, in fact—which is forever getting the best out of each nation and using it for the good of the whole. When a nation ceases to respond, it is time that she went into hospital for a few centuries, like Spain or Greece—the virtue has gone out of her. A man or a nation is not placed upon this earth to do merely what is pleasant and what is profitable. It is often called upon to carry out what is both unpleasant and unprofitable, but if it is obviously right it is mere shirking not to undertake it.”
We have been shirking too long, and that’s unworthy of a great civilization. To see off the new Dark Ages will be tough and demanding. The alternative will be worse.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Harry Crocker and his colleagues at Regnery for their support and wise counsel. I am indebted as always to my assistants Tiffany Cole and Chantal Benoît for their excellent research and brilliantly compressed summations of reams of statistics and numbers. Above all, I am grateful to readers in America, Canada, Britain, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere for many useful insights and anecdotes into our fast-changing world.
Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It
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