MARK STEYN: Loving thine enemy (Part Two)

In this excerpt from Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it, we learn how weakness from Muslim extremists' enemies is used to target the weak minded and feeble left amongst us.

Fighting a war against terror is hard. Israel is a victim of this at present. They cannot fight justifiably against attack on their land because it isn't seen as "right" to kill an insane enemy because, well, they really are just the same as you and me and deserve the same sort of respect.

They don't.

The more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily around the room

After September 11, the first reaction of just about every prominent Western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush did, so did the Prince of Wales, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, the prime minister of Canada and many more. And, when the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died away, you couldn't help feeling that this would strike almost any previous society as, well, bizarre. Pearl Harbor's been attacked? Quick, order some sushi and get me into a matinee of Madam Butterfly!

Seeking to reassure the co-religionists of those who attack you that you do not regard them all as the enemy is a worthy aim but a curious first priority. And, given that more than a few of the imams in those mosque photo-ops turned out to be at best equivocal on the matter of Islamic terrorism and at worst somewhat enthusiastic supporters of it, it involved way too much self-deception on our part. But it set the tone for all that followed, to the point where with each bomb or plot -- from September 11 to London to Toronto -- the protestations of Islam's good faith grew ever more fulsome.

Consider the name given to the current conflict: "war on terror." Wait a minute. Aren't wars usually waged against named enemies? Yes, but, to the progressive mind, the very concept of "the enemy" is obsolescent: There are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated. In part, it's societal forgetfulness. In an electronic age, a present-tense culture, we assume that social progress is like technological progress: It can't be reversed. Just as you can't disinvent the internal combustion engine, so you can't disinvent women's rights. Just as the horse and buggy yielded to the steam train and the Ford Model T and the passenger jet, so the advanced social-democratic society will march onward to state day care and 30-hour work weeks and gay marriage and ever greater ethnic diversity -- and nothing can turn it back, certainly not a lot of seventh-century weirdbeards. Many of us figure the Islamist plan to re-establish the caliphate is the equivalent of that moment in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie when Plankton roars, "I'm going to rule the world!" Towering over him, SpongeBob says, "Good luck with that."

But you never know: It might be that we're the plankton. "Our enemies are small worms," Adolf Hitler told his generals in August 1939. "I saw them at Munich." In Europe today, as in the thirties, the political class prostrates itself before an insatiable force that barely acknowledges the latest surrender before moving on to the next invented grievance.

Indeed, a formal enemy is all but superfluous to requirements. Bomb us, and we agonize over the "root causes." Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that "Islam is a religion of peace." Issue bloodcurdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels, and we fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims. Behead sodomites and mutilate female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups can't wait to march alongside you denouncing Bush and Blair. Murder a schoolful of children, and our scholars explain that to the "vast majority" of Muslims "jihad" is a harmless concept meaning "healthy-lifestyle low-fat granola bar." Thus the lopsided valse macabre of our times: the more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room.

As French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel wrote, "Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself." During the Danish cartoon jihad, The New York Times gave a routinely pompous explanation of why it would not be showing us the representations of the Prophet: Sensitive news organizations, the editors explained, had the duty to "refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols." The very next day, the Times illustrated a story on the Danish controversy with a piece of New York "art" from a couple of seasons earlier showing the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung. Multiculturalism seems to operate on the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke in which the American tells the Soviet guy that "in my country everyone is free to criticize the president," and the Soviet guy replies, "Same here. In my country everyone is free to criticize your president." Under the rules as understood by The New York Times, the West is free to mock and belittle its Judeo-Christian inheritance, and, likewise, the Muslim world is free to mock and belittle the West's Judeo-Christian inheritance. If one has to choose, on balance Islam's loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than the Western elites' loathing of their own.

Insurgencies, whether explicitly terrorist or more subtle, persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets. The IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: They want it, and they've calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off.

From America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it, by Mark Steyn. 
Published by Regnery Publishing, Inc. Copyright (Copyright) 2006 by Mark Steyn.

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MARK STEYN: America Alone: The End of the World as We know it (part one)

The first in a series of excerpts from Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it.

Essential reading if you want to understand the "Muslim problem" that underlines the last 7 years since 9/11 and the current Muslim created problems in Gaza. 

Part One

John O’Sullivan, a former editor of National Review, once observed that postwar Canadian history is summed up by an old Monty Python song. I’m a Lumberjack and I’m Okay begins as a robust paean to the manly virtues of a rugged life in the north woods but ends with the lumberjack having gradually morphed into some sort of transvestite pick-up who sings that he likes to “wear high heels, suspenders and a bra” and “dress in women’s clothing and hang around in bars.” 

I know what he means. In 2005, I chanced to see a selection of images from the Miss She-male World celebrations outside Toronto’s City Hall. And what struck me was not that “she-males” should want to have a big ol’ parade showing off their outsized implants.

No, what seemed more pertinent was that the local government should think Miss She-male World is an event that requires municipal approval. Of course, if they hadn’t approved, they would have been guilty of being “non-inclusive.”

John O’Sullivan isn’t saying Canadian men are literally cross-dressers, but nonetheless a once manly nation has undergone a remarkable psychological makeover. In 1945, the Royal Canadian Navy had the third-largest surface fleet in the world; Canadian troops got the toughest beach on D-Day. But in the space of two generations, a bunch of tough hombres were transformed into a thoroughly feminized culture that prioritizes the secondary impulses of society — rights and entitlements from cradle to grave — over all the primary ones.

In that, Canada’s not alone. If the O’Sullivan thesis is flawed, it’s only because the Lumberjack Song could also stand as the postwar history of almost the entire developed world. To understand why the West seems so weak in the face of a laughably primitive enemy, it’s necessary to examine the wholesale transformation undergone by almost every advanced nation since World War Two. Today, in your typical election campaign, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much every party in the rest of the West are all but exclusively about those secondary impulses: government health care, government day care, government paternity leave. We’ve elevated the secondary impulses over the primary ones: national defense, self-reliance and reproductive activity. If you don’t “go forth and multiply” you can’t afford all those secondary-impulse programs whose costs are multiplying a lot faster than you are. Most of the secondary-impulse stuff falls under the broad category of self-gratification issues: We want the state to take our elderly relatives off our hands not because it’s better for them but because otherwise the old coots would cut into our own time. Fair enough. But once you decide you can do without grandparents, it’s not a stretch to decide you can do without grandchildren.

I’ve always loved Lincoln’s allusion to the “mystic chords of memory” because it conveys beautifully the layers of a healthy society: The top notes are the present, but the underlying harmony is critical, too; it places the present in the context of history and eternal truths, and thereby binds us not just to the past but commits us to the future, too. Yet since 1945, throughout the West, a variety of government interventions has so ruptured traditional patterns of inter-generational solidarity that Continentals now exist almost entirely in a present-tense culture of complete self-absorption. In the end, the primal impulses are the ones that count. Robert Kagan’s observation that Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus doesn’t quite cover it. The Lumberjack Song and the She-male World get closer: We’re Martians who think we can cross-dress as Venusians and everything will be all right. And like some of the hotter-looking transsexuals on display at Toronto’s City Hall, the modern Western democracy is perfectly feminized in every respect except its ability to reproduce.

Americans don’t always appreciate how far gone down this path the rest of the developed world is: In Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is now somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way to important jobs like the health department. I don’t think Donald Rumsfeld would have regarded it as a promotion to be moved to Health and Human Services. Yet the secondary impulses are so advanced that most of America’s allies no longer share the same understanding of basic words like “power.” In 2002 Finnish prime minister Paavo Lipponen gave a speech in London saying that “the EU must not develop into a military superpower but must become a great power that will not take up arms at any occasion in order to defend its own interests.”

No doubt it sounds better in Finnish. Nonetheless, he means it: For many Europeans, the old rules no longer apply. Yet in the long run this redefinition of the state is killing them. As Gerald Ford used to say when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” And that’s true. But there’s an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back.

That’s the position European governments find themselves in. Their citizens have become hooked on unaffordable levels of social programs which will put those countries out of business.

This is the paradox of “social democracy.” When you demand lower taxes and less government, you’re damned by the Left as “selfish.” And in my case that’s true. I’m glad to find a town road at the bottom of my driveway in the morning, and I’m happy to pay for the Army, but, other than that, I’d like to keep everything I earn and spend it on my priorities.

The Left offers an appeal to moral virtue: It’s better to pay more in taxes and to share the burdens as a community. It’s kinder, gentler, more equitable. Unfortunately, as recent European election results demonstrate, nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: Once a fellow’s enjoying the fruits of government health care and the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and if it’s going to bankrupt the state a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks coming till he’s dead, it’s fine by him. “Social democracy” is, it turns out, explicitly anti-social. To modify Polybius, it’s “avarice” dressed up with “pretentiousness.” And it leads to societal “indolence.”

Somewhere along the way these countries redefined the relationship between government and citizen into something closer to pusher and addict. And once you’ve done that, it’s hard to persuade the addict to cut back his habit. Thus, the general acceptance everywhere but America is that the state should run your health care. A citizen of an advanced democracy expects to be able to choose from dozens of cereals at the supermarket, hundreds of movies at the video store and millions of porno sites on the Internet, but when it comes to life-or-death decisions about his own body he’s happy to have the choice taken out of his hands and given to the government.

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From America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it, by Mark Steyn.
Published by Regnery Publishing, Inc. Copyright © 2006 by Mark Steyn. 

Aunty Helen partly right

So Helen Clark told the Herald last night that national was taking a "laissez-faire attitude" to the current financial crisis.

I would have to agree with her to a certain extent.

Am I getting soft now that she isnt terrorising New Zealanders anymore in her capacity as Prime Minister?

Not really, but you have to come out and call it how you see it.

I like to think that I do.

Anyway, moving right along. 

Having said that I agreed somewhat with the former Prime Minister this is where our agreement ends. Careful planning of any "economic stimulus" on the Government's part must be done.

The American 700 billion plus bailout hastily slapped together before Christmas hasn't and will not work and at least half the money has disappeared down a black hole-par for the course for most Governments im afraid.

While everyone is entitled to a Christmas holiday, especially John Key and his National Party, after a hard fought and won nasty election campaign on Labour's part, the current financial crises does need some considerable and reasonably swift care.

Lets not forget who got us into this position in the first place. Labour and its profligate spending on social interfering and empire building. 

We shouldn't also forget that as this was unfolding during the recession that started in late 2007, and continues to this day, Labour's answer was to buy a run down train set for 5 times its worth, promise to give more money to students and beneficiaries post the 2008 election, increase the cost of doing business, introduce a crippling tax via carbon trading laws and spending taxpayer money and valuable time on digging baseless dirt on John Key when they should have been concerned about an economy in recession.

Michael Cullen was a the centre of this economic mis-management.

I am hoping John Key has used his summer break to put his brilliant economic mind to the question at hand and we will be waiting to see how his Government will put together a package that isn't a socialistic handout but a real economic stimulus where it is needed.

The tax breaks coming up latter this year are going to help and more taxpayer wealth back in taxpayer hands is going to to the business.

We want and need economic stimulus not more of the same welfare mentality that got us in this dire economic position in the first place.

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Capital raising set to become popular in 2009

As a shareholder are you feeling generous towards the companies you have in your portfolio?

Whether you are or not you may have to make a choice to chase what could be good money after bad in 2009.

The dearth of cash and credit available from normal sources-like banks-to keep businesses running, especially during the current recession, is undoubtedly going to lead to some New Zealand listed companies putting out their caps to shareholders to enable them to keep trading over the difficult times to come.

There will be some capital raising through; debt raising via bond issues, rights/cash issues and or private placements with big institutions.

Usually the domain of start up companies and especially popular during the tech bubble of the late 1990s, the terms for rights issues and other forms of capital raising was relaxed by the NZX on November 26 2008 as an answer to the credit crunch.

Both rights issues and private placements dilute existing shareholders shareholdings and of course extra debt laden onto company balance sheets through alternative methods of capital raising will impact somewhere down the line.

I would favour a rights issue or private placement myself.

I could speculate here and name a few names that might be ready to pass the begging bowl around-I am not going to-but we can be fairly sure that any company with high to medium borrowings set to mature soon and without sufficient sales and or assets to allow themselves the ability to borrow off a bank is going to have to go to shareholders with the bowl.

Of course the length of time the recession plays out will mean more companies will need to avail themselves of shareholder cash or other methods of capital raising.

There is no guarantee of course that shareholders would be willing, or able, to take a further risk by contributing their hard-earned cash and this shareholder will certainly be wanting the bargain of the century before he plunks down further cash towards any company in the Share Investor Portfolio.

The million dollar question remains though and is a more than likely scenario. What happens if the cash isn't forthcoming?

Short of a mysterious benefactor, one of those struggling investment banks or an angel investor ready to take a big slice of the company, the answer is of course bankruptcy.

Time to get out the checkbook?


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