It’s the end of the world as we know it…
Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a
muezzin. Europeans already are. "The biggest globalization success story
of recent years is not McDonald's or Microsoft but Islamism," writes
Steyn.
...much of what we loosely call the Western world will not
survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear
within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries. There'll
probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the
Netherlands -
probably - just as in Istanbul there's still a building
known as Hagia Sophia, or St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral;
it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the
Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate.
In this, his first major book, Mark Steyn takes on the great
poison of the twenty-first century: the anti-Americanism that fuels both Old
Europe and radical Islam. America, Steyn argues, will have to stand alone. The
world will be divided between America and the rest; and for our sake America
had better win.
And liberals will still tell you that "diversity is our strength"—while
Talibanic enforcers cruise Greenwich Village burning books and barber shops,
the Supreme Court decides sharia law doesn’t violate the "separation of
church and state," and the Hollywood Left decides to give up on gay rights
in favor of the much safer charms of polygamy.
The future, as Steyn shows, belongs to the fecund and the confident. And the
Islamists are both, while the West—wedded to a multiculturalism that undercuts
its own confidence, a welfare state that nudges it toward sloth and self-indulgence,
and a childlessness that consigns it to oblivion—is looking ever more like the
ruins of a civilization.
Europe, laments Steyn, is almost certainly a goner. The future, if the West
has one, belongs to America alone—with maybe its cousins in brave Australia.
But America can survive, prosper, and defend its freedom only if it continues
to believe in itself, in the sturdier virtues of self-reliance (not
government), in the centrality of family, and in the conviction that our
country really is the world’s last best hope.
Mark Steyn’s America Alone is laugh-out-loud funny—but it will also change
the way you look at the world.
