The West’s Last Chance? Has it already passed?

Those who make a business of projecting trends often neglect the acceleration factor. The march of history may be usefully described as “slowly” followed by “suddenly.” Yet we are rarely prepared for those times when history seems to “speed up,” and decades of change are compressed into years or even months. We assume that current trends will continue, and we are surprised when they don’t.

An excellent book on the subject is Tony Blankley’s The West’s Last Chance. Blankley, a nationally syndicated columnist who served President Reagan as a speechwriter and senior policy adviser, began the book with an overview of sudden changes in the course of history: the conquests of Alexander the Great, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, and the Nazi’s rapid takeover of much of Europe.

He then made the case that we are on the brink of another historical reversal of massive proportions—namely, the takeover of Europe by Islam. He suggested that the takeover would be accomplished through demographic changes rather than war and he further suggested that Europeans would mount little resistance to it.

According to Blankley, the lack of resistance would have its source in the fact that demographic changes move slowly and are thus less noticeable. One can see that an attacking army ought to be resisted, but the threat of rising birth rates seems a much less urgent matter.

Moreover, for much of the world the pre- 9/11 decades were a time of relative calm. For one thing, the differences between the West and the Soviet Union had been patched up. The liberal elites claimed that it was merely a case of mutual misunderstanding. The solution to most problems, it was asserted, was to understand the “other.” The best way to do that was to practice “political correctness”—a non-judgmental approach to political and social issues. Ironically, political correctness was the prelude to the highly judgmental ideology of “woke.”

According to political correctness, all cultures and religions are equally good and we have nothing to fear from the “other” except, perhaps, a mild case of heartburn from sampling his exotic dishes. As for Europe’s Muslim migrant problem, the multiculturalists assumed it would soon vanish. Once Muslims realized how warm and welcoming Europeans are, they would gladly assimilate to the host culture. But as Blankley realized in 2005 (the date of the book’s publication) things were not going as expected. Muslims were not assimilating, they were creating “no-go zones.” They were not adopting the liberal ways of the French and the Dutch, rather, they were importing the repressive customs of Morocco, Somalia, and Iran.

What was the problem? In answer, Blankley quoted Abraham Lincoln’s observation that “the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present…As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.”

But Europeans (and Americans) did not think anew or act anew. Faced with the entirely new situation created by the worldwide resurgence of Islam, they fell back on the inadequate dogmas of the quiet past. They fell back, in short, on political correctness and multiculturalism.

The chattering classes in Western societies insisted that what we needed was more understanding, more immigration, more welcoming, and more criticism of our own culture and heritage.

And more censorship and suppression, as well. Blankley worried that Europeans, blinded “by the effect of a politically correct mentality” would be unable to mount a sufficient resistance to Islamization. And he was right. But Europe’s political, academic, and media elites did mount a powerful resistance against anyone who, like Blankley, dared to bring up the subject of Islamization. —>Read the rest from William Kilpatrick HERE

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