After Me the deluge!

On 13 September this year, the Editor-at-large of The Australian, Paul Kelly, wrote something rare in Australian journalism. Addressing the problem of how the Iraq débâcle has provided Western opinionmakers with an excuse to deny the reality of Islamic terrorism, Kelly had this to say:

“The Western progressive mind is profoundly uncomfortable with the nature of the 9/11 attack. This is an event that invokes God, moral absolutes and cultural divides, a trinity of ideas totally anathema to Western progressives who know that God is dead, moral absolutes don’t exist and multicultural diversity is utopia.

“The progressive mind, supreme in our media, treats 9/11 as a human interest tragedy that inspires homilies on the meaning of life. This conceals the reality: 9/11… was a transforming political, cultural, and strategic event. This is what the progressive mind cannot accept.”

A few months earlier, another journalist, a Canadian, David Warren, gave the answer to the problem that Kelly has posed. Writing in February in the Calgary-based Western Standard, in an article entitled “How to fight militant Islam”, Warren concluded with a remarkable peroration.

“We face an unavoidable clash between two rival civilisations - one founded on Christianity, and one on Islam. And it is only when we look at the whole history of that rivalry that we may begin to discover our strengths.

“So here is my most unthinkable thought. You may know that I recently became a Catholic. This was not out of any enthusiasm for the contemporary church, but from a view of 20 centuries. I do believe the claims of Catholic Christianity are true ... But beyond this, I observe one shocking historical fact, which I invite my reader to test and consider. It is that no earthly institution except the Catholic Church has ever successfully stood against militant Islam. In the long view, I think the recovery of that lost centre of our Western enterprise may be our only salvation from defeat and despair.”

Both Paul Kelly and David Warren will be remembered for their words, if not for their names, long after the noise of current opinion has faded away. Statesmen, who have lost track of the sources, will echo and embellish their judgements; politicians will repeat them and claim them as their own; religious leaders will go to their graves with gnawing regret over not having said the same.

It is given to few to see the world as it is. Most of us live, to a greater or lesser degree, in a matrix of illusions; and, paradoxically, the greatest are harboured by professional traders in ideas and, especially, by genuine intellectuals. Modern Western civilisation has been consciously founded, in fact, upon the grandest of such illusions: that man can exclude God from the world. This is especially the case in old Europe which, since the Enlightenment, has given birth to no less than three families of atheistic political systems: Liberalism, Nationalism, and Communism. Of these, the most enduring and powerful has proved to be Liberalism.

The Liberal polities of the Western world do not have it as their aim to stamp out religion. The object is to neutralise it: by privatising, by personalising, and, finally, by marginalising it. In this work Protestantism has been an indispensable aid; indeed, without the Reformation the work of the Enlightenment could hardly have been undertaken. The process began with the “separation” of Church and State, and is now being finished – or so it had been devoutly believed – by multiculturalism.

"Diversity"

Multiculturalism should not be confused with the respect owed to other human beings simply for being human, or with the associated virtue of patience with difference. Multiculturalism is neither patient nor respectful, especially where religion and religious commitment are concerned. “Celebrating diversity” is code for official, public hostility toward religion and religiously sustained values in the public square. In reality multiculturalism is a public ritual – in which religious leaders play a pivotal rôle – through which a Liberal society liturgically enacts the impotence of religion and the irrelevance of its social influence. The real target, however, of multiculturalism is not religion as such. There is a specific religion in view, and that is the Christian faith: the religion without which the history of Western civilisation, for all the various influences at work in it, would have been impossible.

9/11 is the consequence of that denial. God cannot be shut out. He keeps breaking in, albeit indirectly, though no less shockingly. There is an ineluctable principle of human existence – for that matter, of the whole of the natural order – operating here. If we exclude God, then we spring the mechanism and other forces swing into motion: other religions, be they of the race, the state, the self, or as now, of the god who masquerades as God. Reject Him and religion-to-excess pours into the void. Reject His virtue, and virtue-to-excess bursts the confines of our empty vessels.

Après moi le déluge. Louis XV, if he said it, would have been astonished by the full, prophetic implications of his master insight. In the West we have done what we have done, and we now have Islam as the price – and not just Islam from without, but Islam from within. When the Liberal secularist leadership of Western societies fashioned multiculturalism, and immigration policies to match, they created a monster that will devour them. Let there be no mistake that this how the propagandists of Islam see the case. In a web posting of 15 May 2005 on KurdishMedia – and remember these are our allies in Iraq! – Aland Mizell describes how Islamic activists operate in Europe, and elsewhere, and to what end:

“Believing that the most effective tool to defeat the enemy is to shoot the enemy with his own weapon, Muslims see the enemy’s weapon as democracy, rule of law, and particularly freedom of expression. Technology and higher education are also to be appropriated to use against infidels. In their home countries, most Islamists cannot exercise freedom of expression, but in the West they seize the benefits of democracy to spread Islam. Ironically, the airplane hijackers lived in the United States under the rule of law as ordinary members of the community until they executed their plan to crash the planes into the buildings and kill so many occupants. … Academic freedom, freedom of assembly, sophisticated technology, as well as values of tolerance, equal access, and freedom of speech have permitted Islam to become the most rapidly growing religion in both the United States and Europe.”

Muslim missions

The same article indicates just how sophisticated and tactically innovative some Muslim organisations operating in the West have become. They run Christian-style missionary activities and engage in sceptical rationalist dialogue with Western intellectuals, in universities and the media, critiquing Islam while advancing “behind the guise of tolerance and ecumenism” the creation of an Islamic state in Europe.

There is very little doubt that the issue of Europe’s future will be determined in the midst of massive civil conflict, if not outright civil war. This is a something that the wise heads among the Muslims hope to delay for as long as possible: until the European infidels are too few, old and sclerotic to resist the youth and vigour of the Islamic masses.

This struggle for Europe is a conflict that the West cannot win, while its leadership (and that includes Church leadership) is asleep at the wheel, or lacks the intellectual equipment, and the intellectual honesty, to see things as they are, and to tell it how it is. It is a battle that cannot be won if rejection of God and the Church He founded is to provide the raison d’être of Western civilisation. There is no hope, unless we convert to God and do penance. Without them the struggle with Islam will fail.

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