DAVID SOLWAY: WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY @Arts & Opinion

WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY

by
DAVID SOLWAY

______________________________

David Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks) and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity and Hear, O Israel! (Mantua Books). His editorials appear regularly in frontpagemag.com and PJ Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials of an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012. His debut album, Blood Guitar, is now available.

As we survey the contemporary international scene, we remark a multitude of forces arrayed against the historical and cultural integrity of Western civilization, of which Islam is one of the most potent and longstanding, dating back a millennium and a half. There are other antagonistic powers, of course, emanating from both without and within the Western liberal ethos, whether the autocratic impulse associated with the Sino-Russian political matrix or the flirtations with social anarchism and political collectivism that form part of the Western intellectual tradition.

But the greatest enemy the West now faces is itself. As the eminent philosopher Pogo famously noted: “We have met the enemy and he is us,” certainly far truer today than it was sixty years ago. He was not referring to some disparate aspect or specific movement within the context of Western political evolution but to the big picture, the whole Okefenokee we find ourselves inhabiting. The evidence is now all around us of a civilization at war with itself, bent on corrupting and surrendering a magnificent heritage — even if too often honored in the breach — of rational thought, judicial impartiality, electoral franchise, separation of church and state, the right of assembly and freedom of expression. Each one of these hard-won and precious goods is now being eroded under the auspices of cultural relativism, “the tawdry mother philosophy of political correctness,” in Roger Simon’s apt phrase, and the source of multicultural “tolerance,” cultural self-loathing and the infantile liability to subscribe to fairy-tales and myths rather than face the salutary unpleasantness of hard facts.

With few exceptions, one cannot open a newspaper or watch a television newscast or talk show or go to a Hollywood movie or attend a university humanities class without coming across instances of pure apocrypha. Whether we are informed that jihadist attacks have nothing to do with jihad; that Islam with its historic toll of 270 million deaths is a religion of peace; that university campuses across North America are crawling with student rapists; that marital violence is always initiated by men; that all cultures enjoy equivalent status despite their human rights records; that truth is no defense against charges of “hate speech”; that criminals have every right to sue their resistant victims; that citizens can be legitimately hauled into court for defending themselves; that the earth is heating up; that costly, draconian measures are necessary to reduce our “carbon footprint”; that exorbitant and ineffectual green energy installations are preferable to cheap and plentiful standard sources; that rejecting ID requirements, that is, what every sensible person knows is an attempt to facilitate electoral fraud, is really a way of ensuring minority voting rights; that Third World peoples are invariably the casualties of Western depredations and are themselves innocent of wrongdoing; or that Western democracies are morally obliged to make reparations to the rest of the world—in every case we are being indoctrinated to embrace manifest lies, evasions and grotesqueries that render us prey to a destructive ideology of guilt, fear, and self-contempt. We are denizens of a postmodern era in which the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, noble and ignoble has been generally annulled—or selectively manipulated, chiefly by the left, in the interests of an ideological program.

To put it bluntly, we in the West are now living in a cognitive pseudo-world of contrafactual beliefs and specious assertions of Orwellian dimensions, prompted by ignorance, the denaturing of language and the marasmus of mind — a world in which everyone is regarded as equal but some are 'less equal than others.' Truth-tellers are less equal than professional liars, white people are less equal than colored people, men are less equal than women, Christians and Jews are less equal than Muslims, capitalists are less equal than socialists, nationals are less equal than immigrants, in particular Muslim immigrants — the list goes on. What is happening is truly astonishing and almost impossible to believe, for what we are experiencing is a cultural pathology on a global scale, a spreading and apparently unstoppable plague of sociopolitical ebola willingly contracted.

It is indeed a disheartening spectacle: a great civilization, centered in Europe and ramifying into North America, rapidly imploding, opening the gates to those who will destroy it while eating itself up from inside, with no assurance that this process of self-immolation can be reversed. Europe may already be lost, subject to failing socialist economies, sub-replacement fertility rates, a top-down unelected transnational governing body that has arrogated autocratic powers to itself, the re-emergence of a vicious anti-Semitism, and exploding Islamic demographics. It is a continent busy jettisoning its Judeo-Hellenic-Christian inheritance, millennia in the making, a mere century or even decades in the dismantling. Failing the rise of strong conservative parties, citizen retrenchment and the political courage and insight exemplified by figures like Geert Wilders, it is only a matter of time before the Islamization and nannification of Europe, working in tandem, bring down the curtain. Sad to say, but there is, barring a miracle, probably no turning back for a continent betrayed by its leaders and populated by ruminants. “Europe,” laments Caroline Glick in a devastating indictment of the continent’s “downward spiral” and intellectual truancy, “is abandoning the ideals of the Enlightenment, and embracing authoritarianism and irrationality.”

As for North America, its situation is not appreciably better. Mexico has always been a basket case, mired in poverty and lawlessness and alien to the ecumenical and democratic tradition of the West. My own country, Canada, is a multicultural circus, boasting the highest rate of per-capita immigration in the world, consisting chiefly of aggressive and expanding Muslim enclaves exploiting an increasingly burdensome, welfare-oriented tax system that bids fair to shrink the economy-sustaining middle class into a rump constituency. The Great White North is no longer very great or white, only north.

At the same time, we are destabilized by the pestilence of political correctness. Two recent terrorist attacks illustrate the extent of our timidity. When a Muslim convert, following the urgings of ISIS, drove his car into two Canadian soldiers, killing one, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) called it a “hit and run” (shades of “workplace violence”). When two days later another Muslim killed an honour guard on Parliament Hill before storming the parliament building, the word “Islam” was studiously avoided in the following reports, even in our prime minister’s subsequent speech. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau went one step further, proceeding to ingratiate himself with potential Muslim voters with the fatuous Islamophilia that has become his trademark: “To our friends and fellow citizens in the Muslim community, Canadians know acts such as these committed in the name of Islam are an aberration of your faith.” Trudeau has obviously never read the Koran or the aHadith. To add to the lethal absurdity of the situation, Police Services in Ottawa and Toronto have dispatched comforting messages to various Islamic centers and mosques, vowing to protect their premises, though the only people in danger are non-Islamic Canadian citizens and military personnel. Indeed, as commentator Ezra Levant pointed out on SUN TV, these attacks were merely the latest in a nearly weekly series of such attempts, largely unreported in the media. There seems to be no end to the ongoing farce.

But the lynchpin of our civilizational patrimony, now starting to break apart, is the United States, on whose vitality, basic conservative values and prosperity the so-called “free world” depends, or has depended. Foundering in sidereal levels of debt, ravaged by a parasitical entitlement cohort and crushing numbers of real unemployment, together amounting, according to some estimates, to 47% of the census which does not pay taxes (according to Forbes, 70% of American families receive more in net government transfers, refunds and benefits than they pay into the system), crippled by a left-leaning governing party, a complicit media establishment, and an academic fifth column, the U.S. has also been infiltrated by Muslim Brotherhood operatives and riddled by subversive Islamic organizations that may be ultimately sufficient in themselves to turn the American dream into an American nightmare. As Thomas Sowell writes, “Why are Americans — and the Western world in general — falling all over ourselves stifling our own self-expression to appease people who chose to immigrate here, and are now demanding the suppression of anything they don’t like, such as public expressions of Christianity or displays of the American flag?”

But what is perhaps most disturbing and mind-numbing, something that almost defeats credibility, is that the U.S. has chosen to elect, not once but twice, a palpably anti-American president, profoundly influenced by avowed enemies of the state (Frank Marshall Davis, Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers and others), and now finds itself saddled by a commander-in-chief whose foreign and domestic agendas are disastrously changing the political, social, economic, military and constitutional face of the nation. What America is undergoing is not a presidential interregnum but a ruling affliction of catastrophic proportions from which it may not recover. Michael Savage was on the mark when he told a Jewish congregation at a Yom Kippur service: “America has put this man in there, and the world is falling apart as a result.” No sentient observer can deny that America is at its weakest point within living memory and reneging on its world-historical mission to the detriment of an always precarious world stability. For as it goes with America, so it goes with the rest of us.

“Is this really America?” asks David Horowitz incredulously in a circulating email. “Have we completely lost our moorings, not to mention, our minds?” All that remains for us on our side of the Atlantic — for Europe is likely a dead letter — is another form of “hope and change”: hope that we can somehow mobilize against the spurious hope we were promised, and change that can be brought about by ordinary citizens and grass-roots patriots, that is, by the fabled if vestigial resilience of republican sentiment. And if a popular response were supplemented by the platoon of enlightened and unsuborned statesmen and the power of honest discourse wielded by the better class of intellectual warriors, perhaps a sea change might be effected and Kei Miller’s cartographer might eventually map a way to Zion — though I suspect it will take nothing less than a fiscal or major terrorist calamity to sound the alarm. America’s hour of peril, as Dick Morris and Eileen McGann have abundantly demonstrated in their recent book Power Grab, is really an eleventh hour.

The central battleground is plainly the United States of America, but the front is expanding to the Commonwealth nations as well. Or to put it another way, the West in its refusal to exercise its residual mental abilities is being systematically beheaded. Countering cultural dereliction is an uphill fight, considering our growing susceptibility to the rhetorical ectoplasms of the left, our eagerness to divest ourselves of the labor of critical thought and submit to the shamanistic placebos of the political echelon, the media witch doctors and the academic charlatans, and the tendency to accept the radical inversions of perverted and incantatory language. “We need to rid ourselves of superstition,” argues Richard Fernandez. “There’s a reason why people stopped believing in Gaia, Xenu and Coatlicue. The modern return of witchcraft has brought with it the ancient diseases and human savagery. It’s time to return to the 21st century. We’ve been absent too long.”

Quite possibly, it is too late to halt the collapse of the temple of reason, but we are embroiled in a struggle that must be waged to the end. In Morris’s words, we must “wage a new kind of political guerilla war . . . house-to-house, hand-to-hand . . . to protect our cherished democracy.” And the struggle must be pursued not only in America but throughout what persists of a diminished free world so that, at the very least, we can say: we have met the enemy and he is not us.