John C. Wright's Journal

Sleepwalking Into a Nightmare: Remarks to a Jewish National Fund Meeting at the Selig Center
By Newt Gingrich, 3/12/2008 10:47:55 AM

I just want to talk to you from the heart for a few minutes tonight, and share with you where I think we are.

I think it is very stark. I don’t think it is yet desperate, but it is very stark. And if I had a title for tonight’s talk, it would be “Sleepwalking into a Nightmare,” ’cause that’s what I think we’re doing.

I gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute recently, at which I gave an alter native history of the last six years, because the more I thought about how much we’re failing, the more I concluded you couldn’t just nitpick individual places and talk about individual changes because it didn’t capture the scale of the disaster.

And I had been particularly impressed by a new book that came out called “Troublesome Young Men,” which is a study of the younger Conservatives who opposed appeasement in the 1930s and who took on Chamberlain. It’s a very revealing book and a very powerful book because we tend to look backwards and we tend to overstate Churchill’s role in that period.

And we tend to understate what a serious and conscientious and thoughtful effort appeasement was and that it was the direct and deliberate policy of ve ry pow erful and very willful people. We tend to think of it as a psychological weakness as though Chamberlain was somehow craven. He wasn’t craven. Chamberlain had a very clear vision of the World, and he was very ruthless domestically.

And they believed so deeply in avoiding war with Germany that as late as the spring of 1940, when they are six months or seven months into the war, they are dropping leaflets instead of bombs on the Rohr, and they are urging the British news media not to publish anti-German stories because they don’t want to offend the German people. And you read this book, and it makes you want to weep because, interestingly, the younger Tories who were most opposed to appeasement were the combat veterans of World War I, who had lost all of their friends in the war but who understood that the failure of appeasement would result in a worse war and that the longer you lied about reality, the greater the disaster.

And they were severely punished an d isol ated by Chamberlain and the Conservative machine, and as I read that, I realized that that’s really where we are today. Our current problem is tragic. You have an administration whose policy is inadequate being opposed by a political Left whose policy is worse, and you have nobody prepared to talk about the policy we need. Because we are told, “if you are for a strong America, you should back the Bush policy even if it’s inadequate,” and so you end up making an argument in favor of something that can’t work.

So your choice is to defend something which isn’t working or to oppose it by being for an even weaker policy.

And this is a catastrophe for this country, and a catastrophe for freedom around the world. Because we have refused to be honest about the scale of the problem.

Let me work backwards. I’m going to get to Iran, since that’s the topic, but I’m going to get to it eventually.

Let me work back from Pakistan. The dictatorship in Pakistan has never had control over Wiziristan. Not for a single day. So we’ve now spent six years since 9/11 with a sanctuary for Al-Qaida, and a sanctuary for the Taliban, and every time we pick up people in Great Britain who are terrorists, they were trained in Pakistan.

And our answer is to praise Musharraf, because at least he’s not as bad as the others. But the truth is Musharraf has not gotten control of terrorism in Pakistan. Mus harraf doesn’t have full control over his own government. The odds are even money we’re going to drift into a disastrous dictatorship at some point in Pakistan. And while we worry about the Iranians acquiring a nuclear weapon, the Pakistanis already have ’em, so why would you feel secure in a world where you could presently have an Islamist dictatorship in Pakistan with a hundred-plus nuclear weapons? What’s our grand strategy for that?

Then you look at Afghanistan. Here’s a country that’s small, poor, isolated, and in six years we have not been able to build roads, create economic opportunity, wean people off of growing drugs. A third of the Afghani GDP is from drugs. We haven’t been able to end the sanctuary for the Taliban in Pakistan. And I know of no case historically where you defeat a guerrilla movement if it has a sanctuary. So the people who rely on the West are out bribed by the criminals, outgunned by the criminals, and faced with a militant force across the border which practiced earlier defeating the Soviet empire and which has a time horizon of three or four generations. NATO has a time horizon of each quarter or at best a year, facing an opponent whose time horizon is literally three or four generations. It’s a total mismatch.

Then you come to the direct threat to the United States, which is Al-Qaida. About which, by the way, we just published polls. One of the sites I commend to you is AmericanSolutions.com. Last Wednesday we posted six national surveys, $428,000 worth of data. We gave it away. I found myself in t he uni que position of calling Howard Dean to tell him I was giving him $400,000 worth of polling. We have given it away to Democrats and Republicans alike. It is fundamentally different from the national news media. When asked the question “Do we have an obligation to defend the United States and her allies?” the answer is 85 percent yes. When asked a further question “Should we defeat our enemies?” — it’s very strong language — the answer is 75 percent yes.

So the complaint about Iraq is a performance complaint, not a values complaint.

When asked whether or not Al-Qaida is a threat, 89 percent of the country says yes. And they think you have to defeat it, you can’t negotiate with it.

So now let’s look at Al-Qaida and the rise of Islamist terrorism. And let’s be honest: What’s the primary source of money for Al-Qaida? It’s you, re-circulated through Saudi Arabia. Because we have no national energy strategy, when clearly if you really cared about liberating the United States from the Middle East and if you really cared about the survival of Israel, one of your highest goals would be to move to a hydrogen economy, and to eliminate petroleum as a primary source of energy

Now that’s what a serious national strategy would look like, but that would require an actual change.

So then you look at Saudi Arabia. The fact that we tolerate a country saying no Christian and no Jew can go to Mecca, and we start with the presumption that that’s true, while they attack Israel for being a religious state, is a sign of our timidity, our confusion, our cowardice, that is stunning.

It’s not complicated. We invited Saudi Arabia to come to Annapolis to talk about rights for Palestinians when nobody said, “Let’s talk about rights for Christians and Jews in Saudi Arabia. Let’s talk about rights for women in Saudi Arabia.”

So we accept this totally one-sided definition of the world, in which our enemies can cheerfully lie on television every day, and we don’t even have the nerve to insist on the truth. We prete nd the ir lies are reasonable. This is a very fundamental problem. And if you look at who some of the largest owners of some of our largest banks are today, they’re Saudis.

You keep pumping billions of dollars a year into countries like Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and Russia, and you are presently going to have created people who oppose you, who have lots of money. And they’re then going to come back to your own country and finance, for example, Arab study institutes whose only requirement is that they never tell the truth. So you have all sorts of Ph.D.’s who now show up quite cheerfully prepared to say whatever it is that makes their founders happy — in the name, of course, of academic freedom. In this context, why wouldn’t Columbia host a genocidal madman? It’s just part of political correctness. I mean, Ahmadinejad may say terrible things; he may lock up students, he may kill journalists, he may say, “We should wipe out Israel,” he may say, “We should defeat the United States,” but after all, what has he done that’s inappropriate? What has he done that wouldn’t be repeated at a Hollywood cocktail party or a nice gathering in Europe?

And nobody says, “this is totally, utterly, absolutely unacceptable.”

Why is it that the number-one threat in intelligence movie s is a lways the CIA? I happened the other night to be watching an old movie, “To Live and Die in L.A.,” which is about counterfeiting. But the movie starts with a Secret Service agent who is defending Ronald Reagan in 1985, and the person he is defending Ronald Reagan from is a suicide bomber who is actually, overtly, a Muslim fanatic. Now, six years after 9/11, you could not get that same scene made in Hollywood today.

Just look at the movies. Why is it that the bad person has to be either a right-wing crazed billionaire, or the CIA as a government agency? Go look at the “Bourne Ultimatum.” Or a movie like the one that George Clooney made, which was an absolute lie, in which it was implied that if you were a reformist Arab prince, the CIA would kill you. It’s a total lie. We actually have SEALS prot ecting people all over the world. We actually risk American lives protecting reformers all over the world, and yet Hollywood can’t bring itself to tell the truth, because (a) it’s ideologically opposed to the American government and the American military; and (b), because it’s terrified that if it said something really openly, honestly truthful about Muslim terrorists, they might show up in Hollywood, and somebody might be killed as the Dutch producer was killed. They’re cowards.

And so we’re living a life of cowardice, and in that life of cowardice we’re sleepwalking into a nightmare.

And then you come to Iran. There’s a terrific book. Mark Bowden is a remarkable writer who wrote “Black Hawk Down,” has enormous personal courage. He’s a Philadelphia newspaper writer, actually got the money out of the Philadelphia newspaper to go to Somalia to interview the Somalian side of “Black Hawk Down.” It’s a remarkable achievement. Tells a great story about getting to Somalia, paying lots of cash, having the local warlord protect him, and after about two weeks the warlord came to him and said, “You know, we’ve decided that we’re very uncomfortable with you being here, and you should leave.”

And so he goes to the hotel, where he is the only hard-currency guest, and says, “I’ve got to check out two weeks early because the warlord has told me that he no longer will protect me.” And the hotel owner, who wants to keep his only har d-curr ency guest, says, “Well, why are you listening to him? He’s not the government. There is no government.” And Bowden says, “Well, what will I do?” And he says, “You hire a bigger warlord with more guns,” which he did. But then he could only stay one week because he ran out of money.

But this is a guy with real courage. I mean, imagine trying to go out and be a journalist in that kind of world, OK? So Bowden came back and wrote “Guest of the Ayatollah,” which is the Iranian hostage of 1979, which he entitled, “The First Shots in Iran’s War Against America.” So in the Bowden world view, the current Iranian dictatorship has been at war with the United States since 1979. Violated international law. Every conceivable tenet of international law was violated when they seized the American Embassy and they seized the diplomats. Killed Americans in Lebanon in the early ’80s. Killed Americans at Khobar Towers in ’95 and had the Clinton administration deliberately avoid revealing the information, as Louis Freeh, the Director of the FBI, has said publicly, because they didn’t want to have to confront the Iranian complicity.

And so you have an Iranian regime which is cited annually as the leading supporter of state terrorism in the world. Every year the State Department says that. It’s an extraordinary act of lucidity on the part of an institution which seeks to avoid it as often as possible

And you have Gen. Petraeus come to the U.S. Congress and say publicly in an open session, “The Iranians are waging a proxy war against Americans in Iraq.”

I was so deeply offended by this; it’s hard for me to express it without sounding irrational. I’m an Army Brat. My dad served 27 years in the infantry. The idea that an American general would come to the American Congress, testify in public that our young men and women are being killed by Iran, and we have done nothing, I find absolutely abhorrent

So I’m preparing to come and talk today. I got up this morning, and a friend had sent me yesterday’s Jerusalem Post editorial, which if you haven’t read, I recommend to you. It has, for example, the following quote: “On Monday, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said, ‘The problem of the content of the document setting out joint principles for peace-making post-Annapolis has not been resolved. One of the more pressing problems is the Zionist regime’s insistence on being recognized as a Jewish state. We will not agree to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. There is no country in the world where religious and national identities are intertwined.'”

What truly bothers me is the shallowness and the sophistry of the Western governments, starting with our own. When a person says to you, “I don’t recognize that you exist,” you don’t start a negotiation. The person says, “I lit erally do not recognize” and then lies to you. I mean the first thing you say to this guy is “Terrific. Let’s go visit Mecca. Since clearly there’s no other state except Israel that is based on religion, the fact that I happen to be Christian won’t bother anybody.” And then he’ll say, “Well, that’s different.”

We actually tolerate this. We have created our own nightmare, because we refuse to tell the truth. We refuse to tell the tr uth to our politicians. Our State Department refuses to tell the truth to the country. If the President of the United States and again, we’re now so bitterly partisan, we’re so committed to red-vs.-blue hostility, that George W. Bush doesn’t have the capacity to give an address from the Oval Office that has any meaning for half the country. And the anti-war Left is so strong in the Democratic primary that I think it’s almost impossible for any Democratic presidential candidate to tell the truth about the situation.

And so the Republicans are isolated and trying to defend incompetence. The Democrats are isolated and trying to find a way to say, “I’m really for strength as long as I can have peace, but I’d really like to have peace, except I don’t want to recognize these people who aren’t very peaceful.”

I just want to share with you, as a grandfather, as a citizen, as a historian, as somebody who was once speaker of the House, this is a serious national crisis. This is actually 1935 or 1936, and it’s getting worse every year.

None of our enemies are confused. Our enemies don’t get up each morning and go, “Oh, gosh, I think I’ll have an existential crisis of identity in which I will try to think through whether or not we can be friends while you’re killing me.” No; our enemies get up every morning and say, “We hate the West. We hate freedom. We will kill them all”

They would not allow a meeting with women in the room. I was once interviewed by a BBC reporter, a nice young la dy who was only about as anti-American as she had to be to keep her job. Since it was a live interview, I turned to her halfway through the interview and I said, “Do you like your job?” And it was summertime, and she’s wearing a short-sleeve dress. And she said, “Well, yes.” She was confused because I had just reversed roles. I said, “Well, then you should hope we win.” She said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “Well, if the enemy wins, you won’t be allowed to be on television.”

I don’t know how to explain it any simpler than that.

Now, what do we need?

We need first of all to recognize this is a real war. Our enemies are peaceful when they’re weak, a re ruthless when they’re strong, demand mercy when they’re losing, show no mercy when they’re winning. They u nderst and exactly what this is, and anybody who reads Sun Tzu will understand exactly what we’re living through. This is a total war. One side is going to win. One side is going to lose. You’ll be able to tell who won and who lost by who’s still standing. Most of Islam is not in this war, but most of Islam isn’t going to stop this war. They’re just going to sit to one side and tell you how sorry they are that this is happening.

We had better design grand strategies that are radically bigger and radically tougher and radically more honest than anything currently going on, and that includes winning the argument in Europe, and it includes winning the argument in the rest of the world.

And it includes being very clear, and I’ll just give you one simple example because we’re now muscle-bound by our own inability to talk honestly. Iran produces 60 percent of its own gasoline. It produces lots of crude oil but only has one refinery. It imports 40 percent of its gasoline. The entire 60 percent is produced at one huge refinery.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan decided to break the Soviet empire. He was asked: “what’s your vision of the Cold War?” He said, ‘Four words: we win; they lose.’ He was clearly seen by The New York Times as an out-of-touch, reactionary, right-wing cowboy from California who had no idea what was going on in the world. And eleven years l ater t he Soviet Union disappeared, but obviously that had nothing to do with Reagan because that would have meant he was right. So it’s just a random accident the Soviet Union disappeared.

Part of the war we waged on the Soviet Union involved their natural gas supply because we wanted to cut off their hard currency. The Soviets were desperate to get better equipment for their pipeline. We managed to sell them, through third parties, some very, very sophisticated American pipeline equipment, which they were absolutely thrilled to buy, and thought they had pulled off a huge coup.

Now, we weren’t playing fair. We did not tell them that the equipment was designed to fail; to blow itself up. It was in the software that ran the equipment, and they never detected it. One day in 1982, there was an explosion in Siberia so large that the initial reflection on the satellites looked like it was a tactical nuclear weapon. One part of the White House was genuinely worried, and the other part of the White House had to calm them down. They said, “No, no, that’s just our own equipment blowing up.”

In the 28 years since the Iranians declared war on us, in the six years since 9/11, in the months since Gen. Petraeus publicly said they are killing young Americans, we have not been able to fig ure out how to take down a single refinery. Covertly, quietly, without overt war. And we have not been able to figure out how to use the most powerful Navy in the world to simply stop the tankers and say, “Look, you want to kill young Americans, you’re going to walk to the battlefield. You’re not going to ride in the car, because you’re not going to have any gasoline.”

We don’t have to be stupid. The choice is not cowardice or total war. Reagan unlocked Poland without firing a shot, via an alliance with the Pope, with the labor unions, and with the British. We have every possibility, if we’re prepared to be honest, to shape the world. It’ll be a very big project. It’s going to require an effort much closer to the effort we put into World War II than it is to anything we’ve tried recently. It will require great effort, real intensity and real determination. We’re either going to do it now, while we’re still extraordinarily powerful, or we’re going to do it later under much more desperate circumstances after we’ve lost several cities.

We had better take this seriously, because we are not very many mistakes away from a second Holocaust. Three nuclear weapons is a second Holocaust. Our enemies would like to get those weapons as soon as they can, and they promise to use them as soon as they can

I suggest we defeat our enemies, and create a different situation long before they have that power. Thank you.

The Mr. Ross of this parallel universe is more obvious in his intellectual dishonesty, because no one thinks arguing over impressionism versus realism in art is motivated by fanatical hatred akin to Nazi race-hatred. The dishonesty is more obvious; but otherwise it is the same.

Let us select another parallel universe, where a microscopically different version of Mr. Ross is writing, not about Creationists, but about Prohibition.

Suicide bombers driven by fanatical hatred of infidel kafirs, Neonazis driven by fanatical hatred of cosmopolitan dilution of racist nationalism, and teetotalers driven by fanatical hatred of the idea that liquor is sold and consumed freely do have something in common. Intolerance of fanatical hatred is a painful duty.

Well, Carry Nation chopped up saloons with an axe, which is almost the same as igniting dynamite to kill yourself and any Jews in the area, is it not? Or is there a hairsbreadth of difference between Nazis and the Temperance Movement?

Let us select another parallel universe, and peer over the shoulder of another Mr. Ross, this one writing on current events.

Suicide bombers driven by fanatical hatred of infidel kafirs, Neonazis driven by fanatical hatred of cosmopolitan dilution of racist nationalism, and Democrats driven by fanatical hatred of George Bush do have something in common. Intolerance of fanatical hatred is a painful duty.

Now, is the Mr. Ross of that parallel timeline a shill for the Republicans or for the Democrats? Do you think you can guess his party affiliation? Do you think his characterization of the Democrat misgivings about the Bush Administration is a fair, proportionate, well-balanced, and thoughtful statement about the mind and the attitude of the Democrat Party? Do you know of any Democrats who killed thousands of Jews or strapped dynamite to their children in the course of their strongly-felt differences of opinion on this particular controversy?

Would you say that the hypothetical Mr. Ross who equates Democrats with Neonazis and Suicide Bombers was being fairminded? Or would you think that this is a piece of propagandistic crap unworthy of any honest man?

If you are too close to the Democrat or Republican camp to render a calm verdict on the matter, we can take the example from the other side of the aisle, if you like.

Suicide bombers driven by fanatical hatred of infidel kafirs, Neonazis driven by fanatical hatred of cosmopolitan dilution of racist nationalism, and Republicans driven by fanatical hatred of Bill Clinton do have something in common. Intolerance of fanatical hatred is a painful duty.

Would you say that the hypothetical Mr. Ross who equates Republicans with Neonazis and Suicide Bombers was being intellectual honest?

Let us compare the intellectual honesty displayed in the sentence with that displayed in another sentence written long ago by another thinker:

Reason directs those who are truly pious and philosophical to honor and love only what is true, declining to follow traditional opinions, if these be worthless.

For not only does sound reason direct us to refuse the guidance of those who did or taught anything wrong, but it is incumbent on the lover of truth, by all means, and if death be threatened, even before his own life, to choose to do and say what is right.

Do you, then, since you are called pious and philosophers, guardians of justice and lovers of learning, give good heed, and hearken to my address; and if you are indeed such, it will be manifested.

For we have come, not to flatter you by this writing, nor please you by our address, but to beg that you pass judgment, after an accurate and searching investigation, not flattered by prejudice or by a desire of pleasing superstitious men, nor induced by irrational impulse or evil rumors which have long been prevalent, to give a decision which will prove to be against yourselves.

For as for us, we reckon that no evil can be done us, unless we be convicted as evil-doers or be proved to be wicked men; and you, you can kill, but not hurt us.

Contemplate the stoic temper of this last sentence for a moment. Savor it as you would a sip of fine wine, or the taste of a gourmet morsel. It is perfect.

No, this paragraph was not written either by Socrates nor again by Marcus Aurelius, albeit the writer clearly reflects their thoughts. It was written by one Justin Martyr, a philosopher of the Academic School. This Platonist was converted to Christianity when, as a philosopher, it was strongly brought home to him that the accusations made against the Christians could not be true if the Christians behaved with the courage they evidently did: it was not logical to maintain the Christians could be hedonists and also be martyrs.

His investigation into Christianity convinced him of the truth of the claims made, and he converted about A.D. 130. He taught and defended the Christian religion in Asia Minor and at Rome, where he suffered martyrdom about the year 165.

His academic colleagues, “philosophers” and “seekers after truth” that they were, somehow found that turning him in to the secret police was easier than answering his dialogues.

There are duties more painful than hatred of intolerance. Justice, moderation, intellectual honesty, a minimum of fairmindness and not deliberately being an idiot rank among those duties.

I will retract my hard statements about Mr. Ross the moment he can show me the mass-graves of the countless victims of Darwinists the Creationists have put into death-camps.

So, my fellow atheists, the reason why I left your camp was due to a conversion that had nothing to do with you. But the reason why I have no regret, no nostalgia, no sympathy remaining for your camp is the company you keep. A man who cannot tell his wife from a hatrack has a severe mental disease. A man who cannot tell a Creationist from a Neonazi is a base rhetorician whose deviation from honesty is as severe as the madman’s deviation from sanity.

ADDENDUM: If anyone thinks I am quoting Mr. Ross out of context, let me give the whole of his comment:

Suicide bombers driven by fanatical hatred of infidel kafirs, Neonazis driven by fanatical hatred of cosmopolitan dilution of racist nationalism, and Creationists driven by fanatical hatred of the idea that they may be related to other animals do have something in common. Intolerance of fanatical hatred is a painful duty.

The Abrahamic god, the “God of our fathers” (Goof), is a species attractor that I believe shows Dawkins’ genocentric view of Darwinian evolution to be essentially correct. Once you see that, you cannot naively believe in Goof. You can accept its power, just as you can accept the power of hunger as a behavioral driver, but understanding drives out superstition.

That is the whole of the entry for that day: perhaps further explanation or support exist on other entries, or unwritten in his mind, but at this point, my faith in Mr. Ross’s reasoning powers, or his ability to express himself clearly, is undermined.

I mean, this is a guy who rejects superstition, but believes in the genocentric view of Darwinian evolution, that little bits of twisted matter in my cells make me believe in God, but SOMETHING ELSE, allows him to have “understanding” that drives out that belief.

I suppose his world view would be shattered if he discovered that disbelief in God were based on a defective gene, or an atrophy of the part of the brain that senses such things.

Imagine the blind man who discovered these little round wet balls in the faces of everyone but himself. He would, as a faithful and unquestioning materialist, conclude that these balls of matter were influencing the brains of the sighted people; there is even a nerve cord running from the matter ball to the brain! “No wonder you believe in Light, that most naïve of superstitions! Those little balls on the front of your face are sending signals into your brains. My face is not defective like yours; my powers of understanding allow me to overcome this absurd belief in “Light”, or, as I like to calling it, the Luminous Spaghetti Monster.” 

Unfortunately for the genocentric theory, genes interact in complex ways to produce phenotypes, and the relation between phenotype and behavior is unexplained, to say the least (even identical twins do not have the same personalities or values). If genes act in concert to produce outcomes, then the outcomes cannot be reduced to single or selfish gene levels. Using genes as the basis or ultimate explanation of human behavior is about as simplistic an idea as astrology, which used the positions of planets in the zodiac to explain human behavior.

Of course, in astrology theory, it was postulated that influences from the stars showered down from heaven and changed the souls and destinies of men born on earth, one spiritual substance impressing another spiritual substance. Astrologers had an explanation, albeit a false once, how the astral powers of the stars could effect the soul of man. But in the genocentric view, there is no explanation, no influence, no mechanism even postulated to explain how the neuro chemical make-up of the human organism leads, or can possibly lead, to magical influences over a man’s nature and destiny.

I was once an atheist and now I am a Christian. Did my genes change? Was there a hidden chemical in my brain that waited until I was 42 before it released its mystical philosophy-changing power? Which gene, precisely, makes me worship Jehovah but not Jove?

And what makes you atheists think your genes are not the defective ones, that you are missing something the rest of us have? Since atheists range from Objectivists to Marxists to Nihilists, the absence of the God-gene seems not to have given your tribe any particular insight or skepticism in any other area: you are a remarkably gullible lot, if you consider all the branches of the atheist race. Think of how many of your fellow atheists believed everything Stalin said. 

(I call you a race and a tribe, because, logically, if you are missing the God-gene then you must be related by blood to a common ancestor, the first mutant born with the God-Gene missing, possibly Epicurus. I mean, we all know all Black people are Baptists and all Jews are Devoutly Jewish, right? So clearly denomination is an inherited characteristic like eye color!)

You had better hope your theory is wrong, O ye materialists, because if it is true, all that will result is that the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (or whoever is put in charge of gene-programming for the Brave New World) will inject you with the Christianity gene, the “doctrine of nonresistance” strain, and you will then believe that obedience to civil authority is an absolute and unmitigated duty.

You see, if the religion gene is something that natural selection has overwhelmingly made dominant in the human genome, what grounds do we have for assuming that the natural processes behind political and  cultural evolution will not likewise favor that same gene? What use is it to throw off the superstition gene, O Darwinist, if the net result is that your fertility rates drop below the fertility rates of your more superstitious and more numerous neighbors?

Come, let us reason together: if the content of the human brain is determined by the composition of his genes, what cause have we to believe that this belief (or any other) deserves our loyalty if it does not survive the brutal test of survival of the fittest?

If the Creationists are more fit to survive, if they prove to be the tougher breed, and if you nonetheless think their beliefs do not deserve our assent, then you tacitly admit that something other then the gene-determined content of the thought is worthy of assent.

This admission, tacit or not, is fatal to the materialist argument: because once you say a person should believe what is true due and only due to the “truth value” of the belief, you admit, nay, you make it a moral imperative,  that something other than gene-content determines belief.

See, for example, this comment by Mark Steyn:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzJiYjUwMDU4OTFmZjJmODZjYzAzNmJmYzNiZjcyMTA=

A while back I mentioned Harvard’s decision to ban men from its pool and fitness center six times a week in the interests of “accommodating” Muslim women. Our pal Michael Graham picks up the theme:

In the old days, Harvard would have laughed if some Catholic or evangelical mother urged “girls-only” campus workouts in the name of modesty. Today, Harvard happily implements Sharia swim times in the name of Mohammed.

At Harvard, that’s called progress.

Well put. And thus “progress” comes full circle.  In Minneapolis last year, the airport licensing authority, faced with a mainly Muslim crew of cab drivers refusing to carry the blind, persons with six-packs of Bud, slatternly women, etc, proposed instituting two types of taxis with differently colored lights, one of which would indicate the driver was prepared to carry members of identity groups that offend Islam. Forty years ago, advocating separate drinking fountains made you a racist. Today, advocating separate taxi cabs or separate swimming sessions makes you a multiculturalist.

Note there was is going on. The Jihadists do not need to take and hold territory by military means. All they need do is cow a sufficient number of people to make a sufficient number of concessions to them, in order to propagate their culture as the norm, and relegate our culture to a secondary status. They can afford to wait for demographics to do the rest.

Do you think of the Anarchists of the last century had been facing a culture as morally and mentally bankrupt as ours, and had been funded by oil money, and had been aided and applauded at every turn by appeasers, fellow travelers, and useful idiots, that they would have had so little impact on history? Myself, I would think the Bolsheviks to be a closer parallel than the Anarchists, and Islam is a larger and older religion than the Communist movement ever commanded, and build on sounder principles than Communism.  

The Muslim Jihad are an existential threat in the same way the German barbarians were a threat to the Roman empire. The German tribes simply did not have the manpower or military might to defeat the Empire, until the years came when the Empire, split in two, economically crippled, overtaxed and overregulated, was dying of myriad internal causes. The difference is that the Germans were willing to adopt the laws and religion of Rome, and to be civilized. The Jihad does not want that, they want the opposite.

The fellow-travelers and collaborators among the West who favor the Jihad, also want the downfall, not of civilization, but of the traditions, virtues, philosophies and values that are necessary preconditions to civilization, but which the they, for some odd reason, regard as optional, or even dismiss as a barrier to progress.  

So, your question is a red herring. The survival of the West is not in jeopardy, if by that we mean the Jihadists will wipe out the White Races as sailors wiped out the dodo. The survival of the West as an institution, as  a culture, as a people, is very much in question, particularly if we examine, not what is likely to happen within a decade, but what is likely to happen in a century.

We do not have the will to fight. The dominant social philosophy of the West is no longer Christianity, which can serve, if need be, as a fine warrior’s religion, but is hedonism, which can never serve, by its very nature, as anything but a peacetime philosophy forever operating toward the disunion and disintegration of society.

Three hundred epicureans and playboys cannot face three hundred Spartans, because the epicureans are only individuals, atoms without bonds, whereas the Spartans are a machine.

The war is a spiritual one, fought by ideas. Islam is an ancient religion with a backbone of strength to it. Modern secular humanism is a threadbare philosophy, a hulk of exhausted promises and lies, that inspires neither loyalty nor zeal.

Do you think three hundred men who think that they are no better than monkeys or meat-robots, men loyal to no ideal nobler than self-interest rightly understood, can face three hundred Holy Warriors animated by an unearthly hope of paradise? Their eyes are set on nothing of this world; therefore nothing in the world can deter them.   

Some quotes from the interview. About the origin:

Last year we were having a discussion about how popular culture has ignored the war with radical Islam and our talk turned to the death of Steve Rogers, Marvel Comics’ original Captain America. Sleet was particularly annoyed at this event and said to me “You’re a comic book fan. Why don’t we write our own comic?”

About the title:

St. James, the patron saint of Spain, and how he appeared before the Spanish forces during their fight against the Umayyads at the battle of Clavijo in the ninth century. After the battle, the Spanish called the saint “Santiago Matamoros,” or “St. James the Moor-slayer,” and used his cross-the Cross of St. James-as an emblem for an order of Knights, the Order of Santiago, during the reconquista of the Iberian peninsula.

About the cover:

The cover shows a Moorish-style doorway with a crumbling painted Cross of Santiago Matamoros -the emblem worn by the Knights of the Order of Santiago during the reconquista-painted on the wall. It looks like a locale from the reconquista hundreds of years ago. But the cross is crumbling, old and forgotten-almost like the status of Western civilization in Europe . And instead of a European soldier, the cover shows an American soldier. It’s as if the Europeans have given up fighting against the jihadist imperative to “fight until all men say ‘there is no god but Allah.'” Now it’s up to the 21^st century’s successor to those old Spanish knights-the American military.

I doubt many European elites know about the Order of Santiago and if they do I’m sure they would call those Knights thuggish Islamophobes who destroyed that allegedly tolerant paradise of Andalusia which was so wonderful that both Averroes and Moses Maimonides had to run for their lives from the Iberian peninsula . The Spanish knights who fought the reconquista were outnumbered, outgunned and fought the imperialistic superpower of their day. They were fighting to get their country back. Europe has nothing to be ashamed of regarding those men, but dhimmified elites are today banning images and events related to St. James and the reconquista in Spain because they’re deemed “offensive.”

Once it was, in the name of freedom and women’s equality, stigmatized rather than lauded for women to remain chaste until marriage, the supply of available demimondes and nymphs increased. A similar cultural shift away from duty-based morality toward moralities based on enlightened self interest ushered in intellectuals (ranging from the sincere to the truly strange) who then supported  the pursuit of unenlightened self-interest. A decline in religious sentiment and a general contempt for marriage and family formed an coincidence of interests, a meeting of minds, so to speak, between the Hugh Hefner like exploiters of women and the Gloria Steinem like defenders of women’s equality: both hated each other, but both were allied against marriage.

It is marriage and childrearing, more than any other single factor, that turns boys into men.

When marriage is optional, and man can philander or move in with concubines without benefit of marriage, moving out whenever his enlightened or unenlightened self-interest might prompts him, then manhood is optional as well. Since they have the advantages of marriage, the bed, without the commitments of marriage, the ring, and since they have the advantages of manhood, a job, without the commitments of manhood, a household to mind, a township to serve, why should these boy-men not beguile away the hours playing online games?

It is a question of economics. There was a time when womankind acted as a monopoly. All women cooperated in keeping the price of the marriage bed high; the price was the marriage ring. Any women who did not cooperate was ruthlessly ostracized, and, in earlier times, faced legal and not merely social penalties. Removing those penalties breaks that monopoly and cheapened the value placed on virginity, and therefore cheapens the esteem paid women. In terms of game-theory the price to be paid for refusing the advances of a suitor who wishes a prenuptial roll in the hay is higher because the other women in competition, who are will to provide that service without asking for marriage in return, are now numerous rather than rare, now the norm rather than scarlet-lettered freaks.

Back when women were inferior, they were honored and respected as superiors. Now that they are the equals of men, they are treated with contempt as inferiors. Make of that what you will.