To be sure, there are still those who are beyond the pale. Indeed, in a culture of boundless tolerance, there are all kinds of things we won’t tolerate. Hating Jews, for example, is strictly verboten. Well, it’s verboten if you’re an elderly white male of German extraction, like Reni Sentana-Ries (formerly Reinhard Gustav Mueller) of Edmonton. Herr Sentana-Ries was sentenced to 16 months in jail by the Court of Queen’s Bench for anti-Semitic screeds on his widely unread website in which he referred to Jews as “subhuman” “debauched” “demons”.
On the other hand, if you’re not an elderly white male of German extraction, if you’re a large crowd of persons of, ahem, non-German extraction and you march through downtown Calgary with placards reading “DEATH TO THE JEWS” (a timeless rallying cry but hitherto relatively unsung on the Canadian prairies), nobody prosecutes you. The President of Iran, like the hapless Herr Sentana-Ries, is also a Holocaust denier and one with rather more advanced plans for assuring it all goes more efficiently next time. But he gets photo ops with the UN Secretary-General and EU officials.
In other words, Jew-hating isn’t the problem, only certain types of Jew-haters. Even white men can get away with Jew-hating these days – not the old-school neo-Nazi white-supremacist jackboots-a-go-go Jew-hating, but certainly the new school of Jews-are-today’s-Nazis disproportionate ambulance-targeting neo-apartheid Jew-hating.
The Fuhrer isn’t coming out of retirement and, even if he does, there aren’t enough Jews left in Europe to man a decent genocide. And it seems oddly apposite that the more we fetishize an extinct enemy the more Jews in Britain and Australia and even Montreal are targeted by the new Jew-haters. The question is: What other than Hitler is our society prepared to make a moral judgment over? Bernard Lewis, the west’s pre-eminent scholar of Islam, worked for British Intelligence through the grimmest hours of the Second World War. “In 1940, we knew who we were, we knew who the enemy was, we knew the dangers and the issues,” he told The Wall Street Journal a few months ago. “It is different today. We don’t know who we are, we don’t know the issues, and we still do not understand the nature of the enemy.”
That first is the most important: it’s not just that “we don’t know who we are” but that cultural relativism strips the question of its basic legitimacy. In Britain, they used to say that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, the sort of line it’s easy to mock as a lot of Victorian hooey. But it contains an important truth. This present conflict will be won (if at all) in the kindergarten classes of America’s grade schools, and Canada’s, and Britain’s and Europe’s. Because the resolve necessary to win a war can’t be put on and taken off like a suit of armour. It has to be bred in the bone, and sustained by the broader institutions of society. And the typical western education, even when it’s not telling you that your country’s principal contribution to the world is racism and oppression, teaches history in a vacuum – random facts, a few approved figures, but no overarching heroic narrative. And, if the past isn’t worth defending, why should the future be?
Which brings me back to where we came in: are we gonna win or lose? I’d say right now the best bet for much of the world is a slow ongoing incremental defeat, the kind most folks don’t notice until it’s too late. That’s to say, in 20 years’ time many relatively pleasant parts of the planet are going to be a lot less pleasant. That doesn’t mean “Islamofascism” or “radical Islam” or even just plain “Islam” is going to win. But they, like the bigshot analysts in Moscow, Beijing and elsewhere, have concluded that, even in an apparently “unipolar” world, a civilization’s overwhelming military dominance, economic dominance and technological dominance count for naught if it’s ideologically insecure. The issue is self-defence. If you’re a genuine cultural relativist – if you really believe our society is no better or worse than any other – you’re about to get the opportunity not just to talk the talk but to walk the walk. Good luck.
THE ILLIBERAL WEST
Time to ban the Bible
IF YOU LIVE pretty much anywhere in the western world these days, you’ll notice a certain kind of news item cropping up with quiet regularity. The Irish Times had one last week. As Liam Reid reported, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties has warned Catholic bishops that distributing the Vatican’s latest statement on homosexuality could lead to prosecution under the 1989 Incitement to Hatred Act, and a six-month jail term.
“The document itself may not violate the Act, but if you were to use the document to say that gays are evil, it is likely to give rise to hatred, which is against the Act,” says Aisling Reidy, director of the ICCL. “The wording is very strong and certainly goes against the spirit of the legislation.” No Irish bishop has actually called gays evil yet. But best to be on the safe side and shut down all debate.
From Dublin, let us zip 6,000 miles to Quesnel, a small paper-mill town in British Columbia. Chris Kempling is a high-school teacher and a Christian conservative and he likes writing letters to his local newspaper. In one of them, he said that “homosexuality is not something to be applauded”. The regulatory body for his profession, the British Columbia College of Teachers, suspended him for a month without pay for “conduct unbecoming a member of the college”.
No student, parent or fellow teacher at Correlieu Secondary School has ever complained about Mr Kempling: he was punished by the BCCT for expressing an opinion in the paper. The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association supported the suspension, not because of anything he’s done but because of what he might do in the future. He might discriminate against gay and lesbian students in the future. He hasn’t done so yet, but, if we don’t pre-emptively punish him now, he might well commit a hate crime somewhere down the road.
He didn’t say gays are evil. But he did say homosexuality wasn’t something to be “applauded”. And, if we start letting people decide who they are and aren’t going to applaud, there’s no telling where it will end. As in Dublin, best to be on the safe side and shut down all debate.
In Sweden, meanwhile, they’ve passed a constitutional amendment making criticism of homosexuality a crime, punishable by up to four years in jail. Expressing a moral objection to homosexuality is illegal, even on religious grounds, even in church. Those preachers may not be talking about how gays are evil this Sunday. But they might do next week, or next month. As in Ireland and British Columbia, best to be on the safe side and shut down all debate.
Anyone sense a trend here? Even in America, where the First Amendment (on freedom of expression) still just about trumps “hate crimes” law, you can see where things are headed. Thus, in Hollywood, they’re famously opposed to censorship, and blacklisting, and leaning on studio executives to end someone’s career because of his or her views, and making people answer questions such as: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”