Barrel Strength

We grew up in the shadow of nuclear war, and it nearly makes me erase that sentence it sounds so dramatic, false, and trivial. The Soviet Union, a militantly hostile state, whose goal was the overthrow of the capitalist system, and which held Eastern Europe in its prison-like embrace, and which subsidized revolution the world, lasted until 1989. The communists did not lack for mouthpieces within western liberal societies, at every level, and we spent a good deal of time in university having to take Karl Marx in large doses. Marxists seized microphones at the Student Union and, with their spokesmen telling us there was no free speech in a capitalist university, their thugs prevented any further discussion. Such were the late sixties and early seventies.

President Jimmy Carter was colossally inept, and seemed to agree with our enemies that the United States was in inevitable decline. It was a very bad time for freedom, capitalism, and for liberal-democratic society. It took the election of Reagan and Thatcher, together with the Polish Pope, to reject the assumptions of decline and defeat. It was a crisis and we overcame it. The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union between 1987 and 1989 proved, more decisively than we could have imagined, that everything we had been saying about that place was true. Indeed, we had not had enough faith that the whole system of communism was built on lies at every level. I had thought that communism would decline for centuries, like the Ottoman Empire. I had heard of a Hungarian taxi-driver, when asked by a visitor about the political situation in 1985, simply say: “It’s over”, but we had no way of knowing that Communism would collapse so catastrophically. It reminded me of the fall of Sauron’s Tower, the Baradûr, in the final battle in Lord of the Rings. Everything built with the power of the One Ring (”one ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them”) turned to dust.

We learned who won the Second World War in 1990, when Russia signed the Peace of Paris and rejoined the international comity of nations, which it had left in 1917. This was admirably set out in The Shield of Achilles, Philip Bobbitt’s excellent review of the role of states and war in European history.

So what about today? What struggles are going on whose outcome we do not foresee?

A1. The Islamic thing. We have no idea whether we shall all be Muslim in a few centuries, whether Islam will collapse under its own contradictions, or whether some stable modus vivendi might be achieved. In the meantime, we will be exposed to the traditional forms of warfare waged by Islamic warriors against the non-muslim. There is nothing new here, but it is shocking how quickly the Islamic thing - I do not have a more accurate name for it - has replaced the Communist threat.

A2. The decline of Christianity as a binding force in most western societies seems to continue without abatement. Coupled with the Islamic thing, above, dhimmitude - the legal submission of non-Muslims to Muslim standards of dress, comportment, and sexual relations, may not be that far off. We have no clue how this is going to end either. The prosecution of Ezra Levant for “offending” the Saudi imam who lives in Edmonton is but an instance of Western leftist censorship, because it is an organ of the secular state of Alberta prosecuting a Jewish writer for offending Islamic standards in Alberta.

A3. Abortion, birthrate, self-replacement, versus massive immigration, particularly Islamic immigration. What more can you say than has been said by Mark Steyn in America Alone? Some places now considered parts of Europe will not be there in thirty years. They will be Islamic no-go zones. No European government seems to be able to address the relationship between birthrates, immigration, and what society will look like as the ineluctable facts of birth and death make Europe Islamic.

We were called all sorts of names for opposing Communism during the apogee of the Communist idea, and I expect we will be called all sorts of names for talking plainly about Islam in this one. We do not know the outcome of the struggle between modernity and Islam. They could prevail, and the black and green flag could fly over the Houses of Parliament, and political discussion could be restricted to how best to impose Sharia law. Maybe no, maybe yes.

The point I would make to my children is that most of life’s real difficulties will have to be faced in the faith that one’s own perceptions and beliefs, though they may be wrong, are the best guide to finding the truth. Orwell said that “they” would always want to make you doubt your own perceptions of events, that the essence of the tyranny is to make you feel isolated, that no one but you feels that way, and if you do feel that way, you are some sort of crank. The great benefit of the Internet is that you are no longer isolated. But you will still need courage to think differently than the Human Rights Commissions, and the liberal bien pensants, want you to.