Citizenship and nationhood
Steyn opines:
Pan-Islamism is the profound challenge to conventional ideas of citizenship and nationhood. Of course, if you say that at the average Ivy League college, you’ll get a big shrug: Modern multicultural man disdains to be bound by the nation state, too; he prides himself on being un citoyen du monde. The difference is that, for Western do-gooders, it’s mostly a pose: They may occasionally swing by some Third World basket-case and condescend to the natives, but for the most part the multiculti set have no wish to live anywhere but an advanced Western democracy. It’s a quintessential piece of leftie humbug. They may think globally, but they don’t act on it.
The pan-Islamists do act. When they hold hands and sing “We Are The World,” they mean it. And we’re being very complacent if we think they only take over the husks of “failed states” like Afghanistan, Somalia and Lebanon. The Islamists are very good at using the principal features of the modern multicultural democracy — legalisms, victimology — to their own advantage. The United Kingdom is, relatively speaking, a non-failed state, but at a certain level Her Majesty’s government shares the same problem as their opposite numbers in Beirut: They don’t quite dare to move against the pan-Islamists and they have no idea what possible strategy would enable them to do so.
So instead they tackle the symptoms. Excellent investigative work by MI-5 and Scotland Yard foiled this plot, and may foil the next one, and the one after that, and the 10 after that, and the 100 after those. And in the meantime, a thousand incremental inconveniences fall upon the citizen. If you had told an Englishman on Sept. 10, 2001, that within five years all hand luggage would be banned on flights from Britain, he’d have thought you were a kook. If you’d told an Englishwoman that all liquids would be banned except milk for newborn babies that could only be taken on board if the adult accompanying the child drinks from the bottle in front of a security guard, she’d have scoffed and said no one would ever put up with such a ludicrous imposition. But now it’s here. What other changes will the Islamists have wrought in another five years?
Absent a determination to throttle the ideology, we’re about to witness the unraveling of the world.
August 13th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
And, as Steyn also knows, throttling transnational progressivism is part of the same task, and more difficult because transnational progressivism is simply an extreme interpretation of the notion of the rule of law which can easily go undetected. Why do leftists fixate on capturing or killing Bin Laden as the defining purpose of the War on Terror? Why did Eric Alterman, a very representative voice on the liberal left, just write a post excoriating American Jews for asserting that Israel’s war is ours because, after all, Hizbollah is not right now sending missiles our way–and, for that matter, Iran is not our enemy either, presumably because they are not lobbing missiles at the American mainland right now. There are only two justifiable wars: one, licensed by the most legalistic interpretation of self-defense, a direct, immediate response against those attacking you right here and now (until they stop attacking you, even if it’s only because your attack has been effective), just like a home owner can defend himself against burglar but can’t chase the burglar down the street to kill him; two, a war fought (or “fought”) under the aegis of the UN, in accord with the most advanced form of international law elaborated by globe trotting law professors–i.e., a war that is, ultimately, a police action, aimed at addressing some transgression of that same international law.
If you track the subversive attacks on our war making capacity and will by transnational progressives (the Democratic Party and anti-war left, the Europeans, the UN) I believe you will find an invariant pattern: everything they object to moves us out of the realm of one or another police action, regulated by judicial oversight, the proper acquisition of warrants, application of Constitutional rights to suspects, etc., and into the realm of war, with its strategy, geo-politics, and ideological and/or moral struggle between irreconciliables.
The idea here, adhered to now by many people who have no idea there is an idea here, is that the nation state is to be abolished as an international actor, to be replaced by the panoply of transnational actors–the UN, human rights groups, NGOs, etc. I believe that a careful analysis of the media, which by now sees itself as transnational, unfettered by national loyalties, would show that it represents events in accord with this model. Crime in a big city is essentially another governmental responsibility, like garbage pick up and education–and high crime rates do, in fact, often correlate with failures in these other areas as well. So all of these responsibilities can be addressed in terms of “keeping the public safe.” Similarly, war, whether in Iraq or Lebanon, is treated as a break down in safety conditions, with whoever happens to be in power seen as the local government. The media can simply publish the number of civilian deaths in Iraq since the American occupation without itemizing the various causes of these deaths, because it’s all equivalent to, say, a government that failed to distribute vaccines quickly enough to meet an outbreak of some infectious disease.
It is with the complicity of transnational progressivism that transnational Islam emerges, picks its spots, finds its “voice.” And we, of course, are familiar with transnational progressivism under the name “White Guilt”–transnational progressivism is the political project of White Guilt, meant to ensure that we privileged unmarked of the first world will no longer harm others through the mere obstreperousness of our presence because even when we do things, we will no longer be acting, since we will merely be implementing rules and regulations that nobody ever really made or decided upon, but are simply a product of our ongoing self-effacement and self-abasement. Western civilization needs to be treated like a rogue cop, in other words. That this is also a transparent power grab for American liberals and leftists in particular who, as Steyn likes to say in other contexts, can now “punch above their weight,” goes without saying–and yet that by itself wouldn’t explain why it works, to the extent that it does.