09/12/2012
Larry Auster records a meeting of Pamela Geller’s "Stop Islamization of Nations" organization. (Which seems not to have a website, unless having a Facebook page counts, which in my opinion is not the case.)
Fine folk, says Larry, sturdily defending freedom of opinion; but with barely a mention of immigration!
This is really astonishing. Permitting mass settlement of Muslims in Western societies is a simply terrible idea. Apparently this cannot be said aloud in the meetings of an organization named "Stop Islamization of Nations."
Apparently these people believe that prohibiting such mass settlement would be wrong. But why would it be wrong? Who would have been wronged?
A supporter of such prohibition does not even have to dislike Islam. (I don’t.) He only has to believe that Western nations find it difficult to assimilate Muslims in quantity.
I don’t dislike grass, and in fact keep nice lawns front and back of my house. I don’t eat grass, though, because I know I would not be able to digest it. Everything in its place.
There are 57 nations in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Any Muslim who wants to leave his country of domicile to live elsewhere is spoiled for choice. No non-Islamic nation is under any moral obligation to accommodate him.
"Liberalism," wrote James Burnham 48 years ago, "is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide."
Malcolm Muggeridge picked up the thought a dozen years later and made a fine essay out of it, title: "The Great Liberal Death Wish." From which:
Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursion of barbarian hordes; ours has dreamed up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elite. Not Bolshevism, which Stalin liquidated along with the old Bolsheviks; not Nazism, which perished with Hitler in his Berlin bunker; not Fascism, which was left hanging upside down from a lamppost along with Mussolini and his mistress ? none of these, history will record, was responsible for bringing down the darkness on our civilization, but Liberalism: a solvent rather than a precipitate, a sedative rather than a stimulant, a slough rather than a precipice; blurring the edges of truth, the definition of virtue, the shape of beauty; a cracked bell, a mist, a death wish.
Thinking of Liberalism’s peculiar silence on topics of the greatest moment, its plain preference for sedatives over stimulants, it’s hard to disagree with these gents; though optimists may take comfort in the fact that half a century after Burnham’s remarks, and a third of a century after Mugg’s, we're still here.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.