(AP Photo)
The latest Muslim atrocity in Nice will have far-reaching international consequences, and not just for the countries of Europe. After promising a "pitiless" war against Islamic aggression, the Hollande government in France effectively came to an end last night on the Promenade des Anglais and will soon enough be replaced by the Marine Le Pen government. The British, having voted themselves out of the European Union, are effectively under siege by hordes of invaders gathered in Calais, preparing to storm the Chunnel in order to bring their unique brand of vibrant diversity to perfidious Albion's shores. Meanwhile, in Germany, the charmless Mutti Merkel mutters to herself as she plots to import even more "refugees" in order to destroy the Bundesrepublik she grew up learning to hate as a child in communist East Germany.
It will also affect the course of the American election. The utter bankruptcy of the Obama administration's deliberately feckless, see-no-evil approach to Muslim terrorism is now on plain display for all the world to see. It is written in blood on the bodies of the children who died for the crime of celebrating France's national day on a fine summer night along a sea that used to protect them from the north African Arabs, but now no longer does. It will be impossible for Hillary Clinton, whose charmless bovinity becomes more apparent to the electorate every day, to disassociate herself from what she herself has, in part, wrought, and her punishment at the polls should be spectacular.
Finally, it will set off a chain of events that will result in a serious sorting-out of the Arab world, the Muslim ummah, and its hostile intentions toward Christendom and the West. Although the secular liberals and cultural Marxist want to convince you that the West is no longer Christian, that's a lie. The atheists in government -- starting with the self-worshipping, Muslim-sympathizing man in the White House -- want you to believe that freedom of religion now means "freedom of worship" (the use of the Islamic-favored word "worship" is telling), but the fact is that almost everything about the West is Christian, from the late Roman empire on through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and into our own time. Some of our history may have been anti-clerical (the French Revolution comes to mind) but even the attacks on sect and dogma have derived from the rational principles of our Judeo-Christian heritage.
Confronted with its own overwhelming cultural, moral, physical and spiritual inferiority, the raging death cult that swept out of the north African desert and slaughtered its way across Asia Minor, the Indian subcontinent and all the way to Indonesia did its best to erase all traces of the captive lands' pre-Islamic past. Zoroastrian Persia fell to these barbarians, as did much of Hindu civilization. Although the Arabs soon lost control of their empire to those even more savage than they (the Turks, Mamelukes, and the Mongols, for example), the religion bound them all together in a shared hatred for the West.
One of the western bulwarks against Islam had been the Byzantine empire, the old, Greek-dominated eastern half of the Roman empire. While never militarily strong enough to defeat the Muslims, it was for hundreds of years strong enough to keep them at bay; meanwhile Byzantine diplomacy (every bit as Byzantine as it sounds) did the rest. The fall of Constantinople ("Istanbul" is merely a corruption of the city's real name) in 1453 left much of eastern Europe open to Islamic conquest, including Albania, which remains largely Muslim to this day, Bulgaria and Hungary, where memories of Muslim rule are as fresh today as they were in half a millennium ago.
What's past is prologue. From time to time, the Western powers undertook punitive expeditions against fanatical Muslim irruptions, such as Kitchener's demolition of the Mahdi's forces at Omdurman in 1898, in revenge for the sack of Khartoum and the death of General Gordon 13 years before. Gordon, one of Britain's greatest heroes, had earlier been instrumental in stopping the Arab trade in black African slaves, and was tasked with helping Khartoum's garrison of Egyptian Ottoman Muslims return to Cairo at the time of his death.
Islamic military prowess is long in the past; the West has not suffered a major defeat in any confrontation with Islam on the battlefield since Saladin expelled the Crusaders from Jerusalem in 1187. But pitched battles between great armies are no longer the confrontation of choice. As Nice, Paris, Orlando, San Bernardino and everywhere else a "holy warrior" has self-detonated have shown, the war has come to the streets of western cities, unpredictable in its timing and ferocity. And yet still the West refuses to take even the most rudimentary steps to protect itself against a known, sworn enemy. Why?
Lots of reasons: ennui, cultural Marxism, the mutation of the Left into a suicide cult that wants to take the rest of us with it. A loss of faith in organized religion (some of it brought on by the faiths themselves, or rather the imperfect men who represent and administer them). The transformation of government schools into babysitting services for subsections of the populace with severe cultural learning disabilities, no matter the skin color of the pupil. The marginalization of the very notion of excellence. And a political class that is little more than a collection of criminals, throne-sniffers, pantywaists and bum-kissers, all dedicated to their own enrichment.
As I argued in The Devil's Pleasure Palace -- and will expand upon in the forthcoming companion volume, The Fiery Angel -- the antidote to this is a return to our cultural roots, including the pre-Christian principles of Aristotle (passed down via St. Thomas Aquinas, among others) and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Those roots are neither race- nor faith-specific and in fact the genius of Western civilization is that its principles -- not "conservative" principles but civilizational principles -- have proven so successful that they resulted in the United States of America, the very embodiment of those ideas.
Which is, of course, why Islam and its ally of convenience, the Left, hate America so. We and our cultural heritage are the refutation of every satanic principle they hold so vengefully dear.
Western civilization has defended us for centuries. Isn't it about time we defended it?
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