As we survey the contemporary international scene, we remark a multitude of forces arrayed against the historical and cultural integrity of Western civilization, of which Islam is one of the most potent and longstanding, dating back a millennium and a half. There are other antagonistic powers, of course, emanating from both without and within the Western liberal ethos, whether the autocratic impulse associated with the Sino-Russian political matrix or the flirtations with social anarchism and political collectivism that form part of the Western intellectual tradition.
But the greatest enemy the West now faces is itself. As the eminent philosopher Pogo famously noted: “We have met the enemy and he is us,” certainly far truer today than it was sixty years ago [1]. He was not referring to some disparate aspect or specific movement within the context of Western political evolution but to the big picture, the whole Okefenokee we find ourselves inhabiting. The evidence is now all around us of a civilization at war with itself, bent on corrupting and surrendering a magnificent heritage — even if too often honored in the breach — of rational thought, judicial impartiality, electoral franchise, separation of church and state, the right of assembly and freedom of expression. Each one of these hard-won and precious goods is now being eroded under the auspices of cultural relativism, “the tawdry mother philosophy of political correctness,” in Roger Simon’s apt phrase [2], and the source of multicultural “tolerance,” cultural self-loathing and the infantile liability to subscribe to fairy-tales and myths rather than face the salutary unpleasantness of hard facts.
With few exceptions, one cannot open a newspaper or watch a television newscast or talk show or go to a Hollywood movie or attend a university humanities class without coming across instances of pure apocrypha. Whether we are informed that jihadist attacks have nothing to do with jihad; that Islam with its historic toll of 270 million [3] deaths is a religion of peace; that university campuses across North America are crawling with student rapists; that marital violence is always initiated by men; that all cultures enjoy equivalent status despite their human rights records; that truth is no defense against charges of “hate speech”; that criminals have every right to sue their resistant victims; that citizens can be legitimately hauled into court for defending themselves; that the earth is heating up; that costly, draconian measures are necessary to reduce our “carbon footprint”; that exorbitant and ineffectual green energy installations are preferable to cheap and plentiful standard sources; that rejecting ID requirements, that is, what every sensible person knows is an attempt to facilitate electoral fraud, is really a way of ensuring minority voting rights; that Third World peoples are invariably the casualties of Western depredations and are themselves innocent of wrongdoing; or that Western democracies are morally obliged to make reparations to the rest of the world—in every case we are being indoctrinated to embrace manifest lies, evasions and grotesqueries that render us prey to a destructive ideology of guilt, fear, and self-contempt. We are denizens of a postmodern era in which the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, noble and ignoble has been generally annulled—or selectively manipulated, chiefly by the left, in the interests of an ideological program.