Mark Steyn’s greatest hits – with love from his reader of the day David Steven
April 21, 2009 | More on Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, North America | 6 comments
I’m honoured to be Mark Steyn’s reader of the day, chosen for pointing out that he “delights in weaving a sick fantasy for his audience”!
Steyn is author of the jaunty and thuggish rant, America Alone, a book that George Bush loved and to which Michael Gove, Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, gave a gushing review:
No writer I can think of manages to combine utter bleakness about mankind’s prospects with a genius for one-liners like Steyn… Steyn has done us all a service… ensuring that questions some would prefer to pass over are posed in a way it is impossible to ignore.
So what does Steyn tell his eager audience to expect from its European allies in 2030? A whole lot of trouble. The continent will be in flames, he believes, overrun by ‘darker forces’, with ‘Native Europeans’ beset by a Muslim youth that has fused Western licentiousness with European fanaticism.
Non-Muslims will face three choices: fight, surrender or flee:
Well, my view of Europe in 20 years’ time is that you’ll be switching on the TV, you’ll be looking at scenes of burning and conflagration and riots in the street. You will have a couple of countries that are maybe in civil war, at least on the brink of it.
You will have neofascists’ resurgence in some countries and you’ll have other countries that have just been painlessly euthanized in which a Muslim political class has effectively got its way without a shot being fired — and large numbers of people, particularly young people, have left those countries and have moved on to whoever will take them.
You know, the Dutch are going to Australia, Canada, and New Zealand and some of them, no doubt, would have liked to have gone to the U.S., but the U.S. doesn’t really have a legal immigration program. So, if you need to get out in a hurry, it’s no good going to the U.S. embassy.
If that’s not enough of a sick fantasy for you, here’s a selection of some of the other ‘genius’ one-liners that so enthused Gove:
Islam and Muslims
On 9/11 – “You couldn’t get a taxi in certain towns in northern England, because the Muslim taxi drivers were all partying that night.” “On the night of September 11 Muslim youths in northern Rngland rampaged through the streets cheering Islam’s glorious victory against the Great Satan.”
On British Muslims: “You can be in a northern English town after 9 o’clock at night on a Saturday night and these tattooed gangs of Pakistani skinheads came rolling through town. You think, what the hell is this? It’s like some futuristic dystopian thing cooked up by some mad lab scientist in which he’s taken the worst pathologies of the western world and the worst pathologies of the Muslim world and fused them together.”
On Muslim ‘rape gangs’: “You have this grotesque license…merge with the sort of basic misogyny of the Muslim community and it produces something quite terrifying in these rape gangs they’ve now got in Scandinavia and France and Belgium and places.” “The Muslim gang-rapists in France with their preferred rite of passage, the tournante or ‘take your turn’.”
On the name ‘Mohammed’: What’s the most popular boy’s name in Belgium? Mohammed. In Amsterdam? Mohammed. In Malmö, Sweden? Mohammed. By 2005, it was the fifth most popular baby boy’s name in the United Kingdom.” [Can't speak for the other countries, but in the UK, Mohammed actually came 23rd]
“Mohammed is (a) the most popular baby boy’s name in much of the Western world; (b) the most common name for terrorists and murders; (c) the name of the revered Prophet of the West’s fastest-growing religion.”
On Islamic history: “When admirers talk up Islam and the great innovations and rich culture of its heyday, they forget that even at its height Muslims were never more than a minority in the Muslim world, and they were living in large part off the energy of others. That’s still a useful rule of thumb: if you take the least worst Muslim societies, the reason for their dynamism often lies with whichever group they share the turf with.”
Europe and the EU
The Four Horseman of the Eupocalypse: “The Continent’s in for what looks awfully like the Four Horsemen of the Eupocalypse – although in tribute to Euro-perversity they’re showing up in reverse order: Death – the demise of European races to self-absorbed to breed; Famine – the end of the Lavishly funded statist good times; War – the decline into bloody civil unrest that these economic and demographic factors will bring; and Conquest – the recolonization of Europe by Islam.”
Europe’s extinction: “Unless it corrects course within the next five to ten years, Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: the grand building will still be standing but the people who built them will be gone. By the next century, German will be spoken only at Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goering’s Monday night poker game in Hell. And long before the Maldive Islands are submerged by ‘rising sea levels’ every Spaniard and Italian will be six feet under. But, sure, go ahead and worry about ‘climate change’.”
Its immediate fate: “Europe will be semi-Islamic in its politico-cultural character within a generation.”
On the choice facing ‘native’ Europeans: “As English and Belgian and Scandinavian cities Islamify, their inhabitants will face a choice between living as a minority and joining the majority.”
Where it all went wrong
On liberals: “In demographic terms, the salient features of much of the ‘progressive agenda’ – abortion, gay marriage, endlessly deferred adulthood – is that, whatever the charms of any individual item, cumulatively it’s a dead end…The Muslim critique of the West – that we’re decadent vulgar narcissist fornicating sodomites – is not without more than a grain of truth.”
On Western sissiness: “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.”
On the welfare state: “In Europe, the soft culture is so pervasive – state pensions, protected jobs, six weeks of paid vacation, lavish unemployment benefits if the thirty five hour week sounds too gruelling – that the citizen is little more than a junkie on the state narcotic.”
“I’m not saying every benefit recipient is a terrorist welfare queen, only that the best hope of reforming bloated European welfare systems is if America declares them a national security threat.”
Geopolitics
On a nuclear Iran: “‘The Muslim bomb’ is likely to accelerate the Islamification of Europe, because Islamification more or less brings you under the Persian nuclear umbrella and encourage Tehran and its client to turn their attentions elsewhere.”
On the lessons of Iraq: “Wars fought under absurd degrees of self-imposed etiquette are the most difficult to win…it’s easier to rebuild totalitarian states if they first been completely smashed.”
On the multilateral system: “Along the way [Washington would] find [it had] ‘reformed’ a corrupt dysfunctional sclerotic anti-American club [the United Nations] into a lean mean effectively functioning anti-American club. Which is, if they’re honest, what most reformers mean by ‘reform’”
“Marginalize and euthanize the UN, NATO, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and other September 10 transnational organizations and devote the energy wasted on them to results-oriented multilateralism.”
Black and white
On the ‘darker forces’ that are overwhelming us: “Sometimes the world can go backwards, too, and I think we’re in great danger of a lot of the map being re-primitivized by darker forces and America finding it a much lonelier place in the years ahead.”
On culling Muslims: “In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography – except through civil war. The Serbs figured out – as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy [Muslims], cull ‘em. The problem Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now model for the entire continent.”
On similarities between today and the Dark Ages: “Now, as then, we have a Great Plague – the virus of Islamism – and the great migrations – the continent-wide version of ‘white flight’ already under way in Holland, as the beleaguered Dutch leave their native land.”
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Cut and paste journalism. Context is everything. Man up and print a whole column unedited. Have faith in your readership and resist the spoon feeding.
Yeah, David – “man up”!
You can’t fault Steyn for finding a niche and milking it for everything it’s worth, but that doesn’t mean that anybody outside that market has to take him seriously. As with most of the paranoid style, there’s no point in commenting on his writing – people who follow it are unlikely to be open to reason, and people who don’t follow it just get confused by the mixture of fantasy and bile.
Thanks for reprinting Steyn – love reading him wherever he appears. But of course, I’m probably “unlikely to be open to reason” which is code for, “You and I disagree so you are racist, homophobic, a zealot, crazy, etc.etc.”. Tolerance and diversity for me but not for thee!
Whether the so-called Prophet’s name was the fifth or the 23rd most popular baby boy’s name in the United Kingdom in 2005 may depend on whether you combine all the different English spellings. According to this analysis of ONS figures by the Times — http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1890354.ece — by 2006 Mohammed and all its variants were jointly the second most common boy’s name in Britain. Perhaps a similar analysis for 2005 would show Mohammed and variants in fifth place?
So while Steyn was technically wrong (assuming you’ve quoted him correctly), his point is not so easily dismissed. The significance he places on it is another matter.
Yes, Nick’s right. And Kate made a similar point in the other thread. My mistake.
The reason that Mohammed is an extremely common name in the UK may be because Muslim communities tend to name all their male children Mohammed because it’s auspicious, and that in fact not many people actually go by the name Mohammed. If this is the case, then the fact that so many children are called Mohammed has virtually no significance whatsoever – except to act as a signal for those who already believe the Muslims are taking over, who can exchange meaningful glances with each other.
Mary K., I have no idea whether you are “racist, homophobic, a zealot, crazy” or anything else. Please stop having an argument with the imaginary Leftard in your head.