The events in Norway are on everybody's mind these days. A lone terrorist, a native Norwegian with an anti-Muslim political agenda, has killed 76 people, including children and teens attending a Labor Party camp. The media are in a feeding frenzy – editorialists and talking heads are busy pontificating about "Islamophobia," fascist hate-mongers and unhinged Western radicals and zealots, and Norwegians are in a state of collective shock. How could such a thing happen in a prosperous, peaceable and presumably enlightened socialist country like Norway? What is most surprising, however, is that people are surprised.
The dynamic at work is plain to see. It should be obvious that our cultural and political blindness must eventually lead to violent social upheaval. As Islam gathers strength with every passing day in Europe, determined to impose Shariah law through incremental steps and accommodating legislation, and as the European left mounts little significant resistance to these encroachments and even enacts policies abetting the Islamic incursion into the body social, the resentment animating large segments of the European public is bound to be exploited by extremist groups and individuals.
The consequence should have been entirely predictable. In failing to meet the threat of cultural subversion, the European left has facilitated the emergence of the illiberal and xenophobic branch of the far right. For as violence begins to move in from the car-burning and no-go Muslim enclaves in the margins toward the city center, as Shariah courts begin to pepper the landscape, as in the U.K., as Muslim immigrants continue to swell the welfare rolls, as rape statistics skyrocket and honor killings multiply, and as the authorities prove themselves increasingly helpless and vacillating – or even worse, as colluding – the reactionary and militant right will earn more and more legitimacy among the masses. The anemic lack of both fortitude and foresight among the political classes can only energize the factions of militant, far-right extremism.
The same applies to the Islamophilic and ever-compliant media, operating in tandem with a complacent political establishment. Their reluctance to honestly analyze the explosive matrix of a worsening situation, heaping the blame on straw men like the Christian right or conservative political figures rather than isolating the real cause of their distress, namely, the leftist collaboration with a clamorous Islamic demographic gradually infiltrating our democratic nations, will infallibly result in a growing army of Anders Behring Breiviks and in more Norways to come.
As I've written before, there is only one way to defeat the extreme right as it rises to its own depraved version of the defense of the West, and that is to disarm the common enemy and, by so doing, deprive a nascent fascism of its populist fuel. Multiculturalism has not led to harmonious diversity, as once naively assumed, but to acerbic polarization. The multicultural bromides and immigration policies currently in place will need to be rethought and rendered more appropriate to the nation's requirements. In other words, we will have to espouse the conservative tradition of the moderate right, based on the liberty of the individual, the rejection of violence, the duties of responsible citizenship, and a coherent pluralism that respects the customs of the majority culture rather than a fractious multiculturalism that corrodes them. And we will have to resist the disingenuous gambit of the left to lump the two rights together as a single political movement when they are clearly separate in both their theory and practice. Conservatism has nothing in common with racism.
Europeans, says Walter Laqueur in "The Last Days of Europe," intent on squandering their future while Islamic political organizations patiently wait, "once the time is ripe, to launch mass violence," are "quietly acquiescing in their own decline." But, as I have argued, a growing number of Europeans are not so ready to capitulate, and, unfortunately, the means that the most bitter and enraged and perhaps unstable among them will adopt to counter the menace will be brutal and, all too frequently, lethal. Nor does it help to invest in a political cuisine of red herrings to distract public attention from the genuine issues, for example, the attempt to incriminate Christian militias that are supposed to be wreaking havoc around the globe. As Bruce Thornton indicates, "the number of attacks attributable to self-professed Christian terrorists is miniscule compared to the toll of Islamic jihadists." Counting 9/11, we are speaking of more than 20,000 victims of Islamic terror in the last decade.
Most of us would surely agree that terror is not an acceptable answer to terror. The problem is that a soft response to an undeniable menace will often generate a hard response – and just as often an irrational one. As we have seen in Norway, vigilantism can take strange forms. The aggrieved are as likely to strike at their own countrymen whom they regard as traitors or dupes and who embrace a sedative political philosophy resulting in the loss of national identity and the steady advance of alien cultural norms and practices.
I believe that Thornton, for all his astuteness, is quite wrong when he writes that "[t]his is not to suggest that anything is responsible for the Oslo bombing other than the actions of the bomber." In today's politically correct world, such disclaimers are perhaps understandable to avoid charges of insensitivity or racism. Nonetheless, it needs to be said that the Norwegian authorities and a fellow-traveling electorate are profoundly complicit in creating a situation that must inevitably culminate in violence. If the political climate does not change to favor the ascension of the moderate right, the tragedy that unfolded in Norway will spread to other European countries in the course of time. The simple truth is that there can be no solution to the dilemma unless we first recognize that the responsibility for this deteriorating state of affairs lies chiefly with the intellectuals, journalists and governing elites of the multicultural left who have brought it to pass.
Â
David Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist.