America Alone by Mark Steyn

[Anna]

This is what I fear is ahead for all of us.  This is one of my favortie authors.  Has anyone read this book yet?  I am going to order it.  Other countries that once supported democracy and freedom for all are no longer to be counted on for help and in fact are very anti-American.

Steyn makes most topics very interesting.  He is a great writer, conservative but humorous and witty and easy to read.



From Mark Steyn: Why America will have to fight alone in the battle for Western civilization
America Alone
by Mark Steyn
Are you ready for a conflict between America and the rest of the world? In America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, Mark Steyn (the most widely read and wittiest columnist in the world today) argues that that’s just what’s coming. European and Islamic anti-Americanism, he explains, threatens to leave us isolated in the world: the global situation is rapidly reaching a point at which America will have to confront the enemies of civilization without help from anyone else. And when the world is divided between America and the rest, all those who don’t want to see the world shrouded in a new Dark Ages should hope that America wins.

Steyn argues forcefully that much of the Western world as we know it will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes -- including many if not most European countries. He shows how this process is already well advanced, and explains that whether we like the New Order in Europe and the world depends on whether America can summon the will to shape at least part of the emerging global picture. If not, then it will mean the end of the American moment and the beginning of the new Dark Ages: the return of much the planet to a primitive state.
America is facing this life-and-death challenge, says Steyn, because of the Western world’s demographic decline; the unsustainability of the welfare state in Europe (as well as in the United States, Canada, and Australia); and the apparent exhaustion of Western civilization. Suffused with Steyn’s trademark wit and piercing insights, this book calls on us to summon the will to fight this great struggle for Western civilization. In America Alone, Mark Steyn provides an enlightening primer to just how bad things are likely to get, and what we must do now to ensure that our children and grandchildren live in the bright light of freedom.

Illuminated with wit and wisdom by Mark Steyn:


The hidden reason that the problem of Islamic jihad has exploded across the world since 1970

Why the threats that the world faces today should be taken much more seriously than the environmental scare-mongering that has been going on since the 60s (and, thanks to Al Gore, continues)

The likely outcome of today’s global situation, in which Islam is militarily weak but ideologically confident -- while the West is militarily strong but ideologically insecure

Disquieting implications of the fact Islam is a religion, not a race or nationality (as it is commonly portrayed in the West) -- and an explicitly political religion at that

Why the liberal talk of finding the “root causes” of terrorism in the errors and excesses of Western foreign policy is so wrongheaded

The correlation between the structural weaknesses of the social-democratic state and the rise of a globalized Islam

Why we are witnessing the end of the late twentieth-century progressive welfare democracy

What is revealed about our civilization by both the non-problems that terrify us and the real problems we pay no heed to

Why Libya’s Colonel Qaddafi is probably correct when he says that “there are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe — without swords, without guns, without conquests”

How the environmentalist fantasy about the grave ecological threat America poses to the globe actually reveals how unthreatening America really is

Why the problem Europe faces today is not one of race, but of culture

How the willingness to subordinate individual liberty to the primacy of society – as expressed by Nazism, Communism, and more – has blighted Europe for over a century

The dangerous consequences that are likely to come from manifestations of “cultural sensitivity” -- such as the fact that U.S. guards at Gitmo must handle copies of the Koran only when wearing gloves because the detainees regard infidels as “unclean”

Universally ignored: the single most important fact about the early twenty-first century in Western countries

How the terrorist attacks in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 – along with other events such as the murder of Theo van Gogh — were the opening shots of a European civil war

The little-noticed reason why America’s European “allies” failed to grasp the significance of September 11

Why the progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control but not both – and how that mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse

Sobering facts about how advanced civilizational suicide already is in Japan and Russia

How mosques in the West serve as recruiters for the jihad and play an important role in ideological subordination and cell discipline

Why the Spanish government was so eager to appease the jihad terrorists after the Madrid bombings of March 2004

How oil isn’t the principal Saudi export, Islamic jihad ideology is — and our oil money bankrolls its spread

Why the war against global Islamic jihad will be harder to win the longer it goes on

How Western analysts continue to fall into the error of thinking that if a violent Muslim has no ties to Al-Qaeda, he cannot be a terrorist and poses no threat

Europe’s suicidal multicultural malaise -- and why jihadists understand that the Continent is ripe for the taking in a way that America isn’t

Why it is so important for Americans and others who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society to understand that the life we’ve led since 1945 in the Western world is very rare in human history

How the ultimate victory of Islam in America can be avoided not by more government but by less: by government returning to the citizenry the primal responsibilities it has taken from them in the modern era

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Any thoughts on this?  Will report back after I read it.

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[nonesuche]

Anna-

This does look to be an interesting book, I'd love to hear your thoughts post reading it.

Didn't a pulitzer prize winner writer with the NYTimes also pen a book a few years back regarding some of this scenario?

[LouiseVargas]

I haven't read it but I heard it was good. I think it is short sighted. I will not be around at the end of the 21st Century and I'm sure most of you won't be either. Add 94 years to your present age.

I've always heard civilizations only last about two or three thousand years and then collapse. The rise and fall of the Roman empire, the rise and fall of the Third Reich (that was only a very short time), the Egyptian civilization, what about the relics and societies that archeologists dig up thousands of years later. Atlantis. The Vikings and Eric the Red's discovery of America and how they died out. What about the advanced Aztec and Mayan civilizations. Machu Pichu. Gone. Israel. Babylonia - that's where Saddam lives now. The South Pacific societies.

We are given an amount of time and it seems human nature comes out on top time after time. The instinct to conquer and make war. Or else the instinct to not fight back and let itself be conquered. Even the most advanced societies could not survive human nature.

[Anna]

Louise,
I understand what you are saying but would hope we have more than the 200 years this country has been in existence.  A return to conditions worse than the Dark Ages just does not appeal to me.  And while I will not be alive, this is not something I wish for others to endure either.  

Not sure what the connection to human nature would be other than survival of the fittest and it is one of those that I would prefer to be.  Maybe it's a question of who has the better genes to pass on to the future.  And in that case, you are correct.  Those who will not fight back will not survive and will totally cease to exist as a subspecies.  And the suffering and horrors of a truly backward and repressive subspecies will reign supreme.  But no one remains on top without the will to preserve that position and we seem to have lost that in much of the world.

There are nations that claim to promote democracy and yet refuse to defend or sustain it even for themselves.  A rather grim future in store for our progeny.

[Anna]

Today's article by Mark Steyn.  Although a Canadian, he does have a way with words when it comes to the political pulse in America.


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U.S. must prove it's a staying power
(http://www.suntimes.com/news/steyn/132340,CST-EDT-steyn12.article)

November 12, 2006

BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist
On the radio a couple of weeks ago, Hugh Hewitt suggested to me the terrorists might try to pull a Spain on the U.S. elections. You'll recall (though evidently many Americans don't) that in 2004 hundreds of commuters were slaughtered in multiple train bombings in Madrid. The Spaniards responded with a huge street demonstration of supposed solidarity with the dead, all teary passivity and signs saying "Basta!" -- "Enough!" By which they meant not "enough!" of these murderers but "enough!" of the government of Prime Minister Aznar, and of Bush and Blair, and troops in Iraq. A couple of days later, they voted in a socialist government, which immediately withdrew Spanish forces from the Middle East. A profitable couple of hours' work for the jihad.

I said to Hugh I didn't think that would happen this time round. The enemy aren't a bunch of simpleton Pushtun yakherds, but relatively sophisticated at least in their understanding of us. We're all infidels, but not all infidels crack the same way. If they'd done a Spain -- blown up a bunch of subway cars in New York or vaporized the Empire State Building -- they'd have re-awoken the primal anger of September 2001. With another mound of corpses piled sky-high, the electorate would have stampeded into the Republican column and demanded the U.S. fly somewhere and bomb someone.

The jihad crowd know that. So instead they employed a craftier strategy. Their view of America is roughly that of the British historian Niall Ferguson -- that the Great Satan is the first superpower with ADHD. They reasoned that if you could subject Americans to the drip-drip-drip of remorseless water torture in the deserts of Mesopotamia -- a couple of deaths here, a market bombing there, cars burning, smoke over the city on the evening news, day after day after day, and ratcheted up a notch or two for the weeks before the election -- you could grind down enough of the electorate and persuade them to vote like Spaniards, without even realizing it. And it worked. You can rationalize what happened on Tuesday in the context of previous sixth-year elections -- 1986, 1958, 1938, yada yada -- but that's not how it was seen around the world, either in the chancelleries of Europe, where they're dancing conga lines, or in the caves of the Hindu Kush, where they would also be dancing conga lines if Mullah Omar hadn't made it a beheading offense. And, as if to confirm that Tuesday wasn't merely 1986 or 1938, the president responded to the results by firing the Cabinet officer most closely identified with the prosecution of the war and replacing him with a man associated with James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and the other "stability" fetishists of the unreal realpolitik crowd.

Whether or not Rumsfeld should have been tossed overboard long ago, he certainly shouldn't have been tossed on Wednesday morning. For one thing, it's a startlingly brazen confirmation of the politicization of the war, and a particularly unworthy one: It's difficult to conceive of any more public diminution of a noble cause than to make its leadership contingent on Lincoln Chafee's Senate seat. The president's firing of Rumsfeld was small and graceless.

Still, we are all Spaniards now. The incoming speaker says Iraq is not a war to be won but a problem to be solved. The incoming defense secretary belongs to a commission charged with doing just that. A nostalgic boomer columnist in the Boston Globe argues that honor requires the United States to "accept defeat," as it did in Vietnam. Didn't work out so swell for the natives, but to hell with them.

What does it mean when the world's hyperpower, responsible for 40 percent of the planet's military spending, decides that it cannot withstand a guerrilla war with historically low casualties against a ragbag of local insurgents and imported terrorists? You can call it "redeployment" or "exit strategy" or "peace with honor" but, by the time it's announced on al-Jazeera, you can pretty much bet that whatever official euphemism was agreed on back in Washington will have been lost in translation. Likewise, when it's announced on "Good Morning Pyongyang" and the Khartoum Network and, come to that, the BBC.

For the rest of the world, the Iraq war isn't about Iraq; it's about America, and American will. I'm told that deep in the bowels of the Pentagon there are strategists wargaming for the big showdown with China circa 2030/2040. Well, it's steady work, I guess. But, as things stand, by the time China's powerful enough to challenge the United States it won't need to. Meanwhile, the guys who are challenging us right now -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere -- are regarded by the American electorate like a reality show we're bored with. Sorry, we don't want to stick around to see if we win; we'd rather vote ourselves off the island.

Two weeks ago, you may remember, I reported on a meeting with the president, in which I'd asked him the following: "You say you need to be on the offense all the time and stay on the offense. Isn't the problem that the American people were solidly behind this when you went in and you toppled the Taliban, when you go in and you topple Saddam. But when it just seems to be a kind of thankless semi-colonial policing defensive operation with no end . . . I mean, where is the offense in this?"

On Tuesday, the national security vote evaporated, and, without it, what's left for the GOP? Congressional Republicans wound up running on the worst of all worlds -- big bloated porked-up entitlements-a-go-go government at home and a fainthearted tentative policing operation abroad. As it happens, my new book argues for the opposite: small lean efficient government at home and muscular assertiveness abroad. It does a superb job, if I do say so myself, of connecting war and foreign policy with the domestic issues. Of course, it doesn't have to be that superb if the GOP's incoherent inversion is the only alternative on offer.

As it is, we're in a very dark place right now. It has been a long time since America unambiguously won a war, and to choose to lose Iraq would be an act of such parochial self-indulgence that the American moment would not endure, and would not deserve to. Europe is becoming semi-Muslim, Third World basket-case states are going nuclear, and, for all that 40 percent of planetary military spending, America can't muster the will to take on pipsqueak enemies. We think we can just call off the game early, and go back home and watch TV.

It doesn't work like that. Whatever it started out as, Iraq is a test of American seriousness. And, if the Great Satan can't win in Vietnam or Iraq, where can it win? That's how China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Venezuela and a whole lot of others look at it. "These Colors Don't Run" is a fine T-shirt slogan, but in reality these colors have spent 40 years running from the jungles of Southeast Asia, the helicopters in the Persian desert, the streets of Mogadishu. ... To add the sands of Mesopotamia to the list will be an act of weakness from which America will never recover.

©Mark Steyn, 2006


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[Carnut]

Yep.

[LouiseVargas]

The Republican pundits on TV are saying that if Bush had announced Rumsfeld's departure a month ago when it was decided he would step down, that the Democrats would have not won the Congress. I think Bush took a chance and did what he thought was the best bet. Now he sees what he should have done.

[Carnut]

The Republican pundits on TV are saying that if Bush had announced Rumsfeld's departure a month ago when it was decided he would step down, that the Democrats would have not won the Congress. I think Bush took a chance and did what he thought was the best bet. Now he sees what he should have done.

Heh, heh, maybe GW and Rummy decided the Irag war was lost and that if they waited the Dems would be elected and in control of congress.

Then after the Dems push forward on their 'change in direction' they will get the blame for loosing Iraq.

[LouiseVargas]

Heh, heh yourself. We all know who gets the blame for Iraq and it's not the Democrats who got us involved in a situation that we can't get out of. The Republican party cannot get us out of Iraq. Bush had NO PLAN. Like Viet Nam, we just need to get out of there and our young men will be brought home soon.

[Carnut]

Heh, heh yourself. We all know who gets the blame for Iraq and it's not the Democrats who got us involved in a situation that we can't get out of. The Republican party cannot get us out of Iraq. Bush had NO PLAN. Like Viet Nam, we just need to get out of there and our young men will be brought home soon.

Yeah, kind of shame all those Israeli Boys are gonna be left to deal with what remains.

[LouiseVargas]

The Israeli "boys" as you call them, are the MEN who will take out Iran's nuclear reactors, just like they took out the Iraqi Osiris (named after the Egyptian god of the dead) reactor years ago on June 7, 1981. Israel cannot afford to take any risks and wait for the red tape it would take the US in order to back them up. Iran has already said it's sweetest goal is to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Israel is not waiting on Bush43. It will do the job itself. The US and other countries will be grateful and sigh in relief. When this comes to pass and Israel takes out the reactors in Iran (thus saving the world from Nuclear distruction), I would like you to send me a graphic of the Israeli flag. Thanks in advance.

[Carnut]

So, the Big Bad USofA can't win a war in Irag but little Israel is powerful enough to take on Iran and the rest of the Arab world with no problems at all.

You actually believe that?

The only thing defeating the US is the Democratic party.

[LouiseVargas]

Let's wait and see what happens, ok?

Start looking for clip art.

[Carnut]

Huh? What's the big deal about the Flag of Israel?

[LouiseVargas]

Laughing. That's a lovely image. Good job - only you have sent it too early. I asked you to send it AFTER Israel takes out the Iranian reactors. Timing is everything in both cases.

To me the meaning of the Israeli flag is as revelent to that country as the American flog is to the US. I know you were in Viet Nam. I was outraged to see the Stars and Stripes burned in political protests. Jews around the world respect the Israeli flag, second only to the flags of their own countries.

[Carnut]

Laughing. That's a lovely image. Good job - only you have sent it too early. I asked you to send it AFTER Israel takes out the Iranian reactors. Timing is everything in both cases.

To me the meaning of the Israeli flag is as revelent to that country as the American flog is to the US. I know you were in Viet Nam. I was outraged to see the Stars and Stripes burned in political protests. Jews around the world respect the Israeli flag, second only to the flags of their own countries.

'Jews around the world' humm, guess Muslims around the world tend to have similar feelings about supporting the fight against the 'infidels'.

[Carnut]

Humm, CNN is reporting that

'Arab ministers decided Sunday to end a financial blockade on the Palestinians to show their anger over U.S. veto in the Security Council on Saturday.'

Does appear that the Arab League views the U.S. as a bit of paper tiger for some reason. Wonder if it has anything to do with 'new direction' in congress.

The Whole Story here