The Big Lie
By David Solway
The following is an excerpt from author David Solway’s recently released book, The Big Lie: on Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity. A onetime member of the anti-American Left, Solway came to see in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, that the United States represents the best hope to defend Western civilization and combat Islamic terrorism. The book charts his intellectual odyssey.
The culture of liberal values we affect to cherish may need to be defended on several fronts. There is always the danger, in Europe especially with its long history of submission to totalitarian movements, that should we awaken too late from our post-Kantian dogmatic slumber, it will be only to face the growing strength of a far-Right racist ideology that will turn our multicultural clichés completely on their head, harrying or driving out the strangers in our midst rather than subsidizing them.
We can no longer afford to live in a multicultural rhapsody with its formulaic notion of the sacred equivalence of all cultural values—except, of course, our own—if we are to prevent the double danger of the resurgence of the reactionary Right with its blood-hatred of our non-Western guests, and the invasion of so-called radical Islam with its blood-hatred of its Western host. There is only one way to defeat the fascist Right as it rises to its own version of the defence of the West, and that is to disarm the common enemy and, by so doing, deprive a nascent fascism of its populist fuel.
Which is another way of saying we will have to become less Left in order not to become too Right, that is, less tolerant of the Other that refuses to recognize our values if we are to avoid the political pendulum swing toward a vicious intolerance of all perceived outsiders. Even as we assent to the multicultural expansion of what we like to call “civil liberties—which is to say, legislation that works to the advantage of special interest groups—the presence of a clamorous and growing Muslim minority will have the paradoxical effect of forcing us to become less liberal and tolerant in our attitudes. Religious symbols will be progressively banned (as in France), the veil or niqab will come to be regarded as “a mark of difference and separation” (as in England and Italy), “suspicious” individuals will be hounded off airplanes by nervous passengers and acquiescent pilots (as in the United States and elsewhere), and popular resentment will increase at such a rate as to outstrip the tentative proscriptions of a timorous and often incoherent political elite. In the absence of common sense and the consequent protection of core liberties, excessive tolerance has a way of ushering in the specter of social repression.
Our authorities now have the duty to discard the policy convenience of institutionalized woolly-mindedness, to learn the apparently demanding art of calling a spade a spade, and to act decisively and comprehensively if they are to forestall the upsurge of an extremist populist movement. It is the cherubs of political correctness, the discourse-apologists quailing before unpalatable facts, who present the greatest danger to our wellbeing, for in recoiling from plain speech and effective action they supply the means for both the jihadis and the populists to pursue their respective agendas. In the words of Albert Camus, “Mal nommer les choses ajoute au malheur du monde.” (Misnaming things adds to the misery of the world.) We will, in short, have to rethink the premises of that species of demagogic preferentialism we call multiculturalism and its attendant language of obfuscation that is threatening to undo us all.
It is a grave error to conceive of a nation as a sort of gigantic Noah’s Ark in which every creature without exception is welcomed and given sanctuary, even those engaged in boring holes in the timber, throwing their bunkmates overboard, and blowing up the wheelhouse. This is the multicultural model currently in vogue and in the long run it doesn’t work. Admission must be strict and those who may pose a significant threat, whether individually or communally, must be carefully screened and, if necessary, refused their boarding cards. A viable society does not resemble the interplanetary tavern in Star Wars serving all the weird and wonderful but also rowdy and uncontrollable denizens hailing from every quadrant of the known universe.
We need not retreat behind the mountains of a Swiss-like protectionism, but we will certainly have to become more responsible and less maudlin in determining what array of behaviours qualifies as good citizenship and how to prevent the self-ghettoizing of immigrant communities. But all this, of course, presumes that it is not already too late, for, in the present environment, even if Islamic terror should be countered, the Islamic baby carriage is hard at work and the issue that must be joined may likely have been decided, at least for Western Europe.
It is never easy to cease indulging in anodynes and mirages. Intellectuals in particular seem compulsively prone to kiting aerial scenarios, often described as “a third way” or “a responsible alternative” to the frictions and antinomies of the practical world. For in the dominion of ideas, reality is not necessarily an issue. “This is why,” Norman Podhoretz explains in Ex-Friends, “intellectuals are so often drawn to ‘the third way’ or ‘the third force’—that is, some currently non-existent or utopian future alternative to the choices that are actually on offer in the here and now.”
But the world does not go away. Nor did we ask to be forced to perceive the world through a reductive, Manichaean lens; the “Other” has demonized itself and given us little room as well as little time for options. There should be no doubt about this. Islam as currently practised is a faith that will neither accommodate nor allow itself to be merely accommodated, and those of our leaders and politicians who, whether for reasons of state, electoral expedience, or, in some cases, misplaced ethical conviction, have up to now refused to make the proper distinctions and to face up to the storm bearing down upon us, are only facilitating the debacle. Generally speaking, they are so caught up with the idea of power they have forgotten the power of ideas—of both the ideas they must combat and the ideas they must defend. Opportunism, appeasement, and willful short-sightedness are, to put it mildly, irresponsible acts, as is callow moral sentiment. To quote from Edmund Burke’s Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), but applied to our contemporary political actors, these are “men engaged in desperate designs with feeble minds. They are not honest; they are only ineffectual….”
In this way our political and intellectual classes as well as the judiciary have failed us: years of blind-eye legislation, professional incompetence, the sway of personal interests, and unreflected tolerance have bred a network of efficient and clandestine terrorist covens on our own soil that are being activated in country after country even as I write. Europe primarily (but also endomorphic countries like Canada and many jurisdictions in the United States) would be far better off deporting its imams without legalistic hesitation and taking out the propaganda and incitement pillboxes before there is dramatically more to regret than there is at present.
At the same time, the influence of the leftist establishment which controls the media, the universities, and significant strata of the legal system will have to be decisively challenged. Eventually the authorities will need to act, though when they do, now that a generation of subversives is already in place, it will be lamentably after the fact.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Pr ... p?ID=28561
Excellent essay. I especially like his exploration of the idea that too much liberty and tolerance can end by turning back upon itself and creating precisely what it seeks to avoid--repression and intolerance.