RUTHFULLY YOURS

Neither the Right nor the Left is doing a good job of defending, representing or embodying the values of our civilisation. Meanwhile, our public opinion is seduced by the dream of a world without enemies, by the pathologies of relativism—cultural, moral and epistemological.

The future of Western civilisation will depend on how well the present can mobilise the intellectual resources of the past to meet the challenges of the future. Today, we are threatened by an unprecedented array of external adversaries and dangers, ranging from Islamist terror and Russian or Chinese aggression to the fall-out from failed states. We also face internal threats—above all the collapse of confidence in Judeo-Christian values and democratic capitalism. Can either the Left or the Right rise to the challenge of the present crisis? Or are both political traditions mired in self-destructive mind-sets that prevent them from grasping the scale of the task, let alone reversing the decline?

I want to begin with the Right, because the crisis of conservatism in Europe, America and here in Australia seems too deep to be explained by the vagaries of individual personalities or parties. Most leaders of the centre-Right in the Western democracies appear to be the prisoners of their own anxieties: the fear of proscription by the self-appointed guardians of self-righteousness; the fear of humiliation for failure to flatter those who parade their status as victims; and the fear of oblivion for simply ignoring the clamour to do something when there is nothing useful to be done. The watchword of many a conservative statesman used to be masterly inactivity; now it is miserly depravity. There seems no place for the old-fashioned conservative who steers a steady course, is frugal and firm yet decent and honest; who, rather than pick people’s pockets, leaves their money to fructify there—in short, the John Howards of this world. When Theresa May, a strong prime minister in this tradition, took office two months ago after the vote for Brexit, she felt the need to make gestures to the nanny state: an “industrial policy” and an “equality audit”. Why does she think the British state, whose record of central planning and social engineering is lamentable, should repeat the follies of the past? Could it be that Mrs May still feels the need to appease the gods of socialism, in which nobody, least of all she, still believes? It seems scarcely credible. Yet the same phenomenon is observable everywhere. Conservatism as a living tradition, a coherent conceptual framework for freedom under the law, has been hollowed out and filled with the detritus of defunct ideologies.

This past week in Indonesia, several entire families of suicide bombers attacked Christian worshippers. Normally it is Jews who are on the sharp end of Islam’s enmity for all other creeds, yet somehow, unlike Hitler’s very few latter day disciples, Muslim hatred goes largely unremarked

Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers—already, you see, the world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing was Christianity!—then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies heroism and which opens the seventh heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so.
—Adolf Hitler

jew hate IIIn The Australian last year Julie Nathan of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry wrote an article headed in the ink-and-paper edition, “Attack on Jews a threat to all society”. I agreed with that. An attack on Jews is a threat to all society. But I found very little to agree with in the emphasis of the body of the article, which focused almost entirely on right-wing and neo-Nazi groups. There was just one passing reference to leftism and Islam: “Jeremy Corbyn also has shamefully tolerated and been accused of condoning anti-Semitism among the far-left and Islamist groups he has courted.” That’s all.

This is firing the guns in the wrong direction. It all but ignores the most powerful, well-financed and murderous anti-Semitic force in the world today.

A few weeks ago, 3000 Muslims outside the US embassy in London (video below) chanted the anti-Semitic cry, “Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud!” This translates as: “Jews, remember Khaybar! The army of Muhammad is returning!” This is a reference to the battle, constantly caressed in Muslim historical memory, when the last flourishing Jewish communities in Arabia, survivors of the Roman diaspora and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, were wiped out by Islamic warriors in 629.