Hmm. Do you think he means Grits and Dippers and Péquistes and whatnot? Hey, at least they don’t wind up at Gitmo:
Almost as quickly they found themselves in various well-guarded logging and mining camps in the cold, cold lands of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories…
Oh, well, could be worse. Don’t ask me how. The lurid and loving description of the fall of the peaceable kingdom comes from Mr Kratman’s new novel. No, it’s not about Canada. Although the author specializes in military science fiction, a US invasion of the friendly neighbour to the north doesn’t require a lot of imagination – unless, that is, the Canucks win, and the beaten demoralized Yanks wind up retreating across the 49th parallel vowing never again to be so foolish as to take on the genetically augmented warriors of big government: “All those stories about more MRI machines in Philadelphia than in the whole of Canada,” sighed President Chelsea Clinton Obama. “Why didn’t we figure out, if they’re not spending the budget on MRI machines, they must be doing something else with it. To think we swallowed that hooey about the ‘Toronto General’ and the ‘Royal Victoria’ being just hospitals…” She was about to fire the CIA director but at that point Field Marshal Khadr of the Ontario Human Rights Commission Mounted Division entered the Oval Office on a SARS-breathing winged moose…
Alas, no. Mr Kratman’s novel is called Caliphate, and is set more or less a century hence in a Muslim Europe at war with an imperial America. The fall of Canada is little more than a bit of backstory to explain how things got that way. On the press release, the publisher includes a recommendation from the technothriller writer John Ringo describing Caliphate as “Mark Steyn’s America Alone with a body count.”
Gulp. That’s not the kind of quote that’s terribly helpful right now. Insofar as I understand the complaints against Maclean’s before the various “human rights” commissions, it’s that my hate speech could lead to body counts all over Canada, and now here comes Tom Kratman to pretty much prove the point. The thesis of my book is that the western world is becoming more Muslim, and that this will change the nature of our societies – might be for the better, might be for the worse; we’ll find out in the fullness of time. But an emerging sub-genre of Islamotopian fiction is beginning to delineate some of the options. Robert Ferrigno has just published Sins Of The Assassins, the second novel in his trilogy set circa 2040 in the Islamic Republic of America. He recently took time out from his hectic schedule of book promotion south of the border to profess bewilderment at finding himself part of a “human rights” case up north. As evidence of my “flagrant Islamophobia”, the Canadian Islamic Congress claims I “asserted” the following:
1. American will be an Islamic Republic by the year 2040 – there will be a Muslim / Islamist takeover
2. As a result of the Muslim takeover, there will be a break for prayers during the Super Bowl, the stadium will have a stereotypical Muslim name, and the fans will be forced to watch the game in a Muslim prayer posture
4. As a result of the Muslim takeover there will an oppressive religious police enforcing Islamic/Muslim norms on the population, important US icons [such as the USS Ronald Reagan] will be renamed after Osama bin Laden, no females will be allowed to be cheerleaders, and popular American radio and television talk show hosts will have been replaced by Muslim imams…
In fact, I didn’t “assert” that any of the above will happen. Robert Ferrigno did – in the plot of the splendid first novel of his trilogy, Prayers For The Assassin. As Mr Ferrigno put it, “It’s as if that hall monitor saw the two of us walking to class and decided that it was Steyn with the squeaky shoes. Sorry pal, c’est moi.” The author was as perplexed as any citizen of any free nation should be at the idea that the plot points of a work of fiction – an act of imagination – apparently constitute a hate crime in Canada. But he took particular umbrage at being described by the Canadian Islamic Congress plaintiffs as a “recognized Islamophobe”. “For the record,” he says, “I am neither Islamophobic nor recognized.”
He’s right. The hero of his trilogy – and, as the Islamist enforcers at the CIC apparently aren’t on top of this whole fiction-type deal, I should explain that the “hero” is the chap that you the reader is meant to identify with – is a Muslim: Rakkim Epps, a veteran of the Fedayeen, “a small, elite force of genetically enhanced holy warriors”. He’s a cynical fellow – Joel Schwartz in The Weekly Standard recently described him as a kind of Muslim Bogart, which is the right general territory; he’s Philip Marlowe crossed with certain cabinet ministers I’ve met from Islamic countries – decent fellows under no illusions about the societies they serve. Ferrigno’s second novel puts Rakkim undercover in the part of the old United States that didn’t go Muslim – the south-eastern “Bible Belt”, a wild raucous land of rough liquor and cartoon religiosity in which the biggest tourist attraction is the daily reenactment of the Waco siege. Mr Ferrigno’s Belt sometimes feels like a televangelist theme-park writ large. So, if Christian groups were as litigious as their Muslim equivalents and willing to bandy around accusations of Christophobia, they’d have as much to work with as the Canadian Islamic Congress does. And, to one degree or another, both inheritors of the old United States – the Islamic Republic and the Belt – are societies in decline, living off the accumulated capital of a lost past.
If you’re minded to spot Islamophobia in everything, Tom Kratman’s Caliphate may offer easier pickings. His Islamic Europe is in serious decay – a land of rutted tracks and crumbling ruins. His protagonist is a post-CIA undercover operative in Germany who hooks up with a Catholic cutie sold into slavery and then into an elite brothel. Ferrigno is stronger on character and motivation, but Kratman’s dystopia is a brisk page-turner full of startling twists and bad sex. I don’t just mean the pneumatic bouts of hooker sex; even the good sex comes off as bad. Whether or not Mr Kratman is an expert in this field, I cannot say. But he’s a professional military man who retired as Lieutenant-Colonel and was Director, Rule of War at the US Army War College, so he’s certainly up to speed on the military and geopolitical conceits of the book. What I found most intriguing was not so much the 22nd century thriller but the short 21st century interludes between chapters, featuring the great-grandparents of Petra, the child prostitute at the heart of the novel. Robert Ferrigno inaugurates his dystopia with a big bang – simultaneous nuclear detonations that precipitate America’s embrace of Islam. Tom Kratman also has bombs, but his 21st century episodes attempt, in an impressionistic way, to capture a subtler societal transition. These scenes are set in the Germany of the here and now, beginning with an Iraq war demonstration and the aftermath of the London Tube bombings. And then slowly and subtly the recent past turns into Kratman’s imagined future, as the remorseless Islamization of Europe accelerates.
Nuremberg, Federal Republic of Germany,
1 DECEMBER, 2011
Tax in Germany was becoming a problem, even in German terms, and they’d grown used to being nearly as heavily taxed as the French. The country was graying fast. Worse, because there were places where young people could earn more and keep more, places like America, Canada, Australia… young Germans were leaving. This left more tax to be paid by fewer workers, which drove even more to think about leaving…