Swiss, Cross

National Review Online, December 10, 2009

So far, so predictable. The now infamous referendum amending Switzerland’s constitution in a way that prohibits the construction of any more minarets in the land of Heidi (there are already, um, four) has been damned by the usual suspects, including a gaggle of Christian clergymen, a babble of media, crazy Colonel Qaddafi, Turkey’s thuggish Islamist prime minister (the one who once referred to minarets as “our bayonets”), Iran’s thuggish Islamist foreign minister, Egypt’s Grand Mufti (try building a new church in Egypt), a collection of Saudi “scholars” (don’t even think of building a church in Saudi Arabia), and, of course, Jon Stewart.

Yes, yes, I know what you are thinking, but condemnation by these clowns is not by itself a reason to decide that the vote went the right way — or that holding the referendum was a particularly good idea in the first place. It’s a start, however.

It is important to realize what the referendum was — and what it was not. What it was not was an assault on the ability of Switzerland’s 400,000 Muslims (roughly 5 percent of the population) to practice their religion. Their ability to worship freely is untouched, and they can build all the mosques they want — so long as they are not adorned with minarets.

But it is not unusual to find mosques without minarets, especially outside historically Muslim territories. Thus Switzerland has 150 to 200 mosques or public prayer rooms, but only those four lonely minarets, none of which — thanks to noise-pollution regulations — are actually used for the adhan, the call to prayer. Those numbers suggest that this vote is no threat to anybody’s freedom of religion. They also suggest that minarets are no threat to the freedom of the Swiss to be Swiss, but this is to miss the point. The referendum was always about more than a few towers. Voters took aim at the minarets as a way of venting their fears about militant Islam and, more generally, their unease at the ways in which their country has been — and is being — changed by high levels of immigration. The latter is a factor that should not be underestimated. Despite playing host to various international organizations, numerous banks, and countless tourists, Switzerland is at its core still a conservative, somewhat insular place, comfortable in its own skin and more than a little suspicious of outsiders. There’s a reason why the Swiss joined the U.N. (the fools!) only in 2002, and wisely continue to stay outside the EU.

The trouble is that fear and unease make bad legislators. The effect of the new rules may be mainly symbolic, but symbolism can kick both ways. It’s no great stretch to suspect that the consequences of this vote will be counterproductive. Switzerland’s Muslims, who mostly hail from the Balkans or Turkey, are a largely moderate, secularized bunch. Unfortunately, the result of the referendum — along with some of the ugly rhetoric that preceded the vote — risks changing these peoples’ sense of their own identity. There’s a danger that they will come to view themselves as primarily defined by their common religious background rather than by their very different ethnic and cultural heritages or, for that matter, their hopes of a thoroughly Swiss future. Banning the minarets may fill the mosques.

There’s also a clear risk that what is preached in those mosques will lurch in a more extreme direction. This would be a natural response to the sense of siege and resentment that the vote may create, particularly if that resentment is fanned by money and ideas from Middle Eastern sources keen to stiffen the resolve of co-religionists toiling in the land of the wicked, oppressive kuffār.

Rather than spending their time in architectural micromanagement, it would be far smarter for the Swiss to increase their efforts to integrate the Muslims in their midst, and to do so in a way that creates no special spaces, privileges (other, perhaps, than the extension to Islam of the “official” status enjoyed by other religious denominations in many cantons), or obstacles for their religion. No religion should be fenced off from the hurly-burly of debate, criticism, and ridicule. The fear of giving (dread word) “offense” should not be allowed to trump free expression. That would be true in the case of any creed, but it’s particularly true of Islam, a muscular faith with little room for clear dividing lines between mosque and state. Muslims should be free to practice their religion in Switzerland, but Islam must be made to take its chances in the rough-and-tumble marketplace of ideologies essential to any open society, and to do so within democratic constraints.

You’d think that this would be an obvious, even superfluous, argument to make, but in today’s Western Europe — hogtied by the exquisite sensitivities and repressive legislation that are the hallmarks of multiculturalism — that is no longer the case. One of the most telling moments in the referendum campaign came after the appearance of a controversial — and brilliantly designed — poster in which missile-like minarets pierced the Swiss flag, and a woman clad in abaya and niqab stared out with an oddly come-hither look in her eyes. Overstated? Certainly. Harsh? Certainly. Nevertheless, in a properly functioning liberal democracy, those who disagreed with the poster would have tried to dispel its message with the force of their arguments, not the force of law. Some did. Others preferred coercion.

The poster was banned in, to name but a few places with a thing against free speech, Lausanne, Fribourg, Basel, and Neuchâtel, in a spasm of censorship that, as much as anything else, demonstrates why so many Swiss have rallied behind the SVP (the Swiss People’s Party), a distinctly rough-edged party of the populist Right that is now the largest political grouping in Switzerland (it won some 29 percent of the vote in the 2007 elections) and was the principal driving force behind the referendum. To its discredit, the SVP has more than a touch of the bully about it, with, for example, a disturbing weakness for rhetoric that is as much anti-immigrant as it is anti-immigration. Sadly, that has only added to its appeal. But a large number of more moderate voters have found that they too have been left with nowhere else to turn but the SVP, a phenomenon echoed in the rise elsewhere in Western Europe of parties prepared to stray beyond the spectrum of conventional opinion.

It’s revealing that the referendum’s results came as such a nasty surprise to those who make up Switzerland’s traditional political establishment. Their shock was an embarrassing reminder of how out of touch they have become. And no, the result was not a simple matter of Left versus Right, of hick versus sophisticate. Not only did a striking 57.5 percent of those who voted favor the minaret ban, but the ban won support across the country, including, predictably enough, the heartlands of the Schwiizertüütsch, but far beyond too.

In the end, however flawed the referendum’s focus, there was something impressive about the way voters chose to defy the wishes of those who supposedly knew better. The government opposed the measure, as did a clear majority in the federal parliament, but (such are the joys of the Swiss system) there was nothing these politicians could do to block a referendum once 100,000 citizens had formally endorsed the call for a vote. And there was little, it turned out, that they could do to influence the way the vote went. The Swiss took their decision on November 29. The timing was almost perfect. Just two days later, the Lisbon Treaty (the European Union’s constitution in all but name) came into force. The latter was a triumph for the Brussels oligarchy, a win for deception, double-dealing, and the sidestepping of electorates. The former was a victory for a straightforward, bottom-up form of democracy that is the antithesis of everything for which the EU stands.

That contrast explains why the Swiss elite has become so keen that Switzerland should sign up for the EU, a political structure deliberately designed to replace the inconveniences of popular sovereignty with the smoothness — for those on the inside — of technocratic rule. If the Swiss had been members of Brussels’s unlovely union, it is highly unlikely that their referendum would have gotten as far as it did, and it is almost completely inconceivable that its results would be able to survive review by the EU’s rampaging judiciary. As it is, the voters’ decision is likely to face legal challenges arising out of other provisions in the Swiss constitution, not to speak of those flowing from the country’s international treaty obligations.

The fact remains, however, that there has indeed been a point to this once seemingly pointless referendum. Swiss voters may have exaggerated fears of the Islamic problem that they face now (the future is a different matter), but they have taken the opportunity offered by a stupid question to give a sensible answer to the political class. Their message was clear. Switzerland must have nothing more to do with the multicultural politics and misguided immigration policies that have done so much to contribute to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism elsewhere in Western Europe.

It’s worth noting that such a change of tack would not be possible were Switzerland to join the EU. More critically still, it would be difficult to reconcile with the existing arrangements that govern the free movement of workers between Switzerland and the EU, not that that fact would worry the SVP overmuch. The party would relish a punchup with Brussels.

What’s tricky is that most Swiss do not yet appear to feel the same way. They have backed the free-movement agreements (and then their extension) in a total of three referenda since 2000, the most recent earlier this year. With the EU’s elites opposed to putting their own house in order (and unwilling to offer their own increasingly discontented electorates the sort of say available to voters in Switzerland), the SVP’s leaders know how vital it is for the Swiss to restore absolute control over their own borders, but for most of their countrymen this remains a step too far. It is so much easier to grumble about minarets.

It is probable, therefore, that the next stages in this drama will remain rooted in the symbolic. A leading member of the SVP has announced that forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and the wearing of the burqa in public are all problems that need to be addressed. That’s certainly fair enough (and the SVP is not the only party to think so), even if some other areas of concern for the party (such as the existence of separate Muslim cemeteries) reveal that it has not lost its taste for provocation and overreach. Ultimately, however, these are all peripheral topics when compared to the more basic question of immigration. Indeed, they can be seen as a soft substitute for tough action in that field, something that remains unlikely for now.

But it will be interesting to see how the Swiss react if the European Court of Human Rights (its judgments are binding on all members of the Council of Europe, a grouping that is larger than the EU, and that includes Switzerland) tries to ban the minaret ban.

Sometimes a nation — if it is to remain a nation — just has to go it alone.

Sacred monsters

Michael Burleigh: Blood & Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism

The New Criterion, October 1, 2008

New York City, September 2001  © Andrew Stuttaford

If you are searching for a few scraps of comfort about the nature of our species, you would do very well to avoid Blood & Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, the latest in a series of profoundly depressing books by the British historian Michael Burleigh. If, on the other hand, your objective is to examine the current global eruption of Islamic extremism through a wider perspective than the usual minaret, mullah, and middle-eastern rancor, Blood & Rage is an essential, imperative read, and well worth crossing the cyber pond to buy (it’s as yet unavailable in the United States).

A decade ago this was probably not a volume Professor Burleigh would have anticipated writing.  In the final sentences of his grim, grand, and uncomfortably perceptive The Third Reich: A New History (2000), even the generally gloomy Burleigh was cheered by the way that the disasters of the twentieth century appeared to have dealt a devastating blow to the millenarian dreaming that had done so much to devastate that era:

The lower register, the more pragmatic ambitions, the talk of taxes, markets, education, health and welfare, evident in the political culture of Europe and North America, constitute progress… . Our lives may be more boring than those who lived in apocalyptic times, but being bored is greatly preferable to being prematurely dead because of some ideological fantasy.

The following year, the twin towers fell.

History, once again, had made a fool of the historian. By 2008 Burleigh could write, apocalyptically enough, of “an existential threat to the whole of civilization.” If the Clinton years had seemed a little “boring” when compared with what had gone before, it was only because we were too distracted, too complacent, and too incurious to notice what beasts were slouching our way.

Burleigh doesn’t want us to repeat that mistake. Blood & Rage is urgent, insistent, and angry, so much so that it occasionally topples over into the clichés of what Brits dub “saloon bar” wisdom (imagine Fox’s Bill O’Reilly pontificating in a Surrey pub). Like much of Burleigh’s work, Blood & Rage is panoramic in its scope (it begins with Fenians and ends with jihadis), and it’s packed with intriguing and awkward historical detail, quite a bit of which is guaranteed to irritate the usual suspects on campus and in the media. The book has been criticized for lacking a clear unifying theme, but there’s not a lot that nationalist killers such as, say, the IRA, ETA, or Black September have in common with the millenarian butchers of al Qaeda or the Russian anarchist fringe—except, most notably, the corpses they leave behind (it says a great deal about Burleigh that he often takes the trouble to record the names of the victims). If there is one broader lesson to be drawn from Blood & Rage, however, it’s this: terrorism may ebb and flow, but it will, like Cain, always be with us.

For a deeper understanding of the specific plague that we pigeonhole as “al Qaeda,” read Blood & Rage in conjunction with Earthly Powers (2005) and Sacred Causes (2006), Burleigh’s remarkable two-volume depiction of the danse macabre of religion, politics, and revolutionary violence that has whirled its way through four centuries of an emerging “modern” era that still has, evidently, plenty of room for the old Adam. Taken together, these three extraordinarily wide-ranging books can be seen, among the many other attributes they share, as a shrewd and unsettling investigation of the persistence, allure, and danger of religious (in a very broad sense of the word) absolutism, a phenomenon that has, in one way or another, been an important element in all too many of mankind’s attempts to establish an organizing principle for its societies.

In earlier epochs, enforcing its imperatives was made (for those who needed it to be made easier) by the belief that to do so was God’s will. Thus killing the heretic was worship, not murder, a tough, noble deed that brought heaven just a touch closer. But in Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes Burleigh reminds us that you don’t need God for an Inquisition or, for that matter, a religion. Oddly, Sacred Causes is subtitled “The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror.” Clash? It’s true that the years after 1918 were marked by an onslaught on the established churches by Europe’s new totalitarian states, but the nature of that attack was itself, in many respects, “religious.” This wasn’t a clash between religion and politics so much as an attempt to merge the two forcibly. Belief in God was sometimes a casualty, rationality always. “The people dream,” wrote Konrad Heiden (Hitler’s first biographer), “and a soothsayer tells them what they are dreaming.” As Burleigh explains, these totalitarian regimes “metabolized the religious instinct.” Both state and state-sponsored cult became, he argues, “objects of religious devotion,” their ideologies “political religions” of a type already visible in the revolutionary France that is in some ways the principal villain of Earthly Powers.

This is, I suppose, a perverse tribute to the persistence of man’s innate religious instinct, something to which Burleigh attaches an importance at odds with the usual orthodoxies. Of course, it’s not particularly novel to regard Nazism as a cult (although in The Third Reich, Burleigh extends this analysis further than most), but it’s somewhat rarer to see a similar diagnosis applied so comprehensively to Bolshevism (the Asian variants of Communism are, unfortunately, outside the scope of these books, although I can guess what Burleigh, a writer who is as humane as he is caustic, would have made of Maoism) and, more provocatively still, to the very roots of supposedly “scientific” socialism itself.

But if God died, He took His time doing so. We have grown accustomed to the idea that religion in Europe spent the post- Enlightenment centuries rapidly retreating to the private sphere, and thence to quietist oblivion. This process may have been uneven, but it was, so runs the argument, as continuous and as inevitable as the defeat of those throne-and-altar types who tried to impede it. Burleigh reveals this narrative to be as inaccurate as it is incomplete. He resurrects philosophers, politicians, and movements largely written out of more conventional accounts of the past. To be sure, some of those exhumed are so marginal and so mad that they might have been better left to molder on undisturbed, but the cumulative effect is fascinating, a rich rococo mess, rather than the dully one-directional tramline that defines the progressive view of history.

If the religious instinct survived (as it was always bound to—we are what we are), the weakening of long-established vehicles for its expression left it vulnerable to the new political religions and with them the delusion that it was possible for man to build heaven here on earth, a fantasy that paved the way for attempts to create a state of limitless reach and unbridled cruelty. That’s not to claim (and Burleigh wouldn’t) that the totalitarian impulse is now solely the preserve of the unbeliever. In an age defaced by the Taliban and al Qaeda, who could? Besides, attempting to pin the blame on either godliness or godlessness is less useful than looking at the very nature of belief itself—and how it can, and frequently does, mutate so horrifically, and how, for that matter, it can be manipulated.  After reading Burleigh’s books and contemplating their rogue’s gallery of madmen, prophets, and monsters, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion (even if it’s never directly spelled out) that the origins of jihadi violence lie as much in the darker recesses of the human psyche as in the peculiarities of any one religion or, indeed, region. As Burleigh demonstrates, a Bernard Lewis may be an invaluable guide to the appeal of bin Ladenism, but so is Fyodor Dostoevsky.

In his ideas, in the breadth of his writings, and in the distinct, acerbic, and sometimes bleakly humorous spirit that permeates them, there’s a hint of Edward Gibbon about Burleigh. If we listen to what he has to say (including some useful practical suggestions at the end of Blood & Rage), we may have a better chance of avoiding our very own decline and fall. The last one was bad enough

Turning Myth Into Cartoon

300

The New York Sun, March 9, 2007

Hades, the ancients warned us, is dreary, morose, and subdued, its only pleasure a certain resigned tranquility. However, once news of Zack Snyder's "300," an account of the battle of Thermopylae, reaches the shades of the Spartan dead, even that sad calm will be gone. There will be shouts of rage, muttered, if laconic, threats and most ominous of all, the sound of swords being unsheathed as the finest fighting men of all time set off to hunt down Mr. Snyder, this son-of-a-Helot who should have stuck to the zombies he handled so well in "Dawn of the Dead."

"300" marks the second time the work of comic book maestro Frank Miller has been brought directly to the big screen. The first, 2005's "Sin City," a flawed masterpiece jointly directed by Mr. Miller and Robert Rodriguez, was undercut by poor plotting and incoherent showiness, yet redeemed by a wild visual élan. If "Sin City" was a flawed masterpiece, "300" is just flawed.

For that, much of the blame must lie with Mr. Miller himself. Best known for the way in which his "The Dark Knight Returns" revived DC's flagging "Batman" franchise, he is an artist most effective within genres characterized by excess and self-caricature. "Sin City," an inspired, loopy riff on hard-boiled fiction and film noir, worked in ways that "300," based on real events, never could.

It's telling that Mr. Snyder has described Mr. Miller's "300" as an attempt to turn history into mythology — telling because it reveals how little he understands what Thermopylae means. Fearless, implacable Leonidas already is myth, legend, and dream: He has been since those days in 480 B.C. when he, his 300 Spartans and a few thousand soldiers drawn from other Greek states, took on the vast army (numbering at least 250,000, though other estimates are far higher) assembled by the Persian king Xerxes to invade and subjugate Greece. In the end, Leonidas's tiny force was overwhelmed, but his heroic stand not only helped inspire the Greek victories that followed, but set an example that has shone, scarlet and bronze, grand and bloody, for the best part of 3,000 years.

Leonidas had, wrote Herodotus, "proved himself a very good man." No more needed to be said. The Spartan's deeds spoke for themselves. Compared with this, the bombast and bluster of the Miller version is simply tacky, a transformation of history not into myth, but kitsch.

Under these circumstances, Mr. Snyder's decision to stay so faithful to Mr. Miller's graphic novel ( Mr. Miller is an executive producer of the movie) can only be described as unfortunate. Even more dismayingly, the changes he has made are generally for the worse. Thus Xerxes's Immortals, his finest troops, are reduced to grotesques, stray orcs shipped in from Mordor. The rest of the Persian king's horde now features so many savage freaks and oddball beasts that Leonidas looks to be doing battle not with the might of Asia, but against the worst of Barnum & Bailey.

Yes, the manner in which the filmmaker has reproduced the look and feel of Mr. Miller's work is technically impressive (almost all the sets were "virtual"), but "300" would have benefited from concentrating less on the temptations of the digital backlot and more on old-fashioned storytelling. No less damaging, despite the occasional striking image, "300" is as aesthetically clumsy as it is technologically sophisticated. For the most part its visual style is an unhappy mix of Leni Riefenstahl and Iron Maiden, a ridiculous combination better imagined than seen. Despite some enjoyably gratuitous naked writhing (Oracle Girl!), bringing this tawdry vision to the big screen has almost nothing to be said for it, other, I suppose, than as another useful reminder that slow-motion shots of macho men walking together is a cliché that should have been killed off somewhere between "The Wild Bunch" and "Armageddon."

The cast does what it can, but it's not much. If most of the actors, including the bellowing, bellicose, and ripped Leonidas (Gerard Butler), appear to have been torn from the pages of a comic book, that is hardly their fault. They have been. On the plus side, Lena Headey as Leonidas's Queen Gorgo, fierce, foxy, and sort of feminist (well, they had to do something to persuade a few, you know, girls, to come to this movie), manages to deliver a performance verging on the three dimensional: She succeeds in emerging with dignity, if not clothing, intact.

Meanwhile, Rodrigo Santoro as a Xerxes of indeterminate ethnicity, omnivorous sexuality, and undeniable power manages to steal every scene in which he appears. His god-king may owe rather too much for comfort to Jaye Davidson's Ra in "Stargate," but the final sequences he shares on-screen with Leonidas appear to hint that the tensions between the two men may be erotic as well as military, a concept that cannot be faulted for its novelty.

Intriguing though that idea might be, if there is any genuine interest to be derived from "300," it lies in seeing the extent to which it reflects (or doesn't) the conflict that dominates our own era. The last time Hollywood tackled Thermopylae was "The 300 Spartans" (1962), a blunt Cold War allegory from a time when the threat from the east came from Moscow, not Mecca. This updated version is not so direct. It couldn't be: Mr. Miller's original work predates the fall of the twin towers. But look at the movie a little more closely and the imagery of our current troubles creeps into view, not least in the way some of Xerxes's warriors opt for the Al Qaeda/ninja chic more usually associated with Osama bin Laden's training camps.

Perhaps even more revealing is the way that, like the graphic novel, the movie fails to address the central paradox of Thermopylae: the fact that freedom's most effective defenders cared so little for individual liberty themselves. Of course, in our age of Guantanamo and Jack Bauer, that's a question that still resonates. If Mr. Snyder has chosen to dodge it, he's not the only one.

Cultural Suicide

Ian Buruma: Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the limits of Tolerance

National Review, December 4, 2006

It’s far too soon to know if the 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim fanatic will turn out to be a warning heeded in time, or if it will prove to be just another episode in the decline of a country wrecked by the mixing of multiculturalism with mass immigration. Judging by the nature of the debate ahead of Holland’s upcoming elections, judging by the departure of parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali to the safer, more welcoming haven of America, and judging by this perceptive, misguided, depressing, and (sometimes unconsciously) revealing book, it will be the latter. If Murder in Amsterdam is a grim read, it’s not only because of the events its author recounts, but also because of the way he recounts them. Born in 1951, a child of the Dutch upper-middle class (“blazers and pearls and Hermès scarves”), and now a professor at Bard College, Ian Buruma is a distinguished man of letters, a gifted cultural historian, a skilled writer of impeccably refined sensibility: It’s no surprise to see his byline occasionally popping up in The New Yorker. This background makes him both one of the best possible guides to van Gogh’s murder and one of the worst.

Buruma’s Dutch upbringing and well-traveled later years have left him nicely placed to help us understand a small, clubby country that can be tricky to penetrate and even more difficult to decode. With his help, we mingle with intellectuals, with politicians, and with Muslims, young and not so young, pious and not so pious. We meet Hirsi Ali herself, and we visit van Gogh’s parents, still mourning the brilliant provocateur that was their wild, loutish, infuriating, and endearing son.

When it comes to describing the two protagonists in this terrible drama, Buruma rarely misses a trick. His vividly drawn portrait of Theo is made painful, not only by our knowledge of the slaughter to come, but also by the hideous irony that a man astute enough to realize that the old easygoing Holland was under lethal assault was too careless, too stubborn, and too confident to realize that he too was in danger. Nobody would harm him, said blithe, foolish Theo: He was just “the village idiot.” But that familiar comfortable village had been torn down, replaced by a multicultural shantytown, yet another miserable utopia in which there would be no room for rowdy jesters, rude pranksters, or free spirits of any kind.

As for van Gogh’s murderer, Mohammed Bouyeri, Buruma tracks his descent from minor misfit to holy warrior step by deluded step until that murderous November morning comes to seem inevitable, ordained, as logical as the carnage that concludes a Shakespearean tragedy. But if the how is made grippingly clear, Buruma leaves the why something of a mystery. Worse still, when it comes to suggesting how such horrors can be avoided in future, the best he can come up with is a bit more appeasement (he wouldn’t use the word, of course), yet more “tolerance” and acceptance of the fact that “Islam is a European religion,” a grand-sounding observation that is as obvious as it is unhelpful.

As always seems to be the case, some of the killer’s squalid why can be explained by personal inadequacies and, almost certainly, severe psychological problems, but to dismiss Bouyeri as Lee Harvey Oswald on a prayer mat is to miss the point. Buruma knows this perfectly well. He chooses to stress the unhappiness of the “immigrant” (Bouyeri is Dutch-born) marooned in a country where he will always be considered an alien. Fair enough, but it’s only part of the story.

Buruma has far less to say about the extent to which the Dutch themselves (or, more precisely, the Dutch elite) dug van Gogh’s grave. After all, these were the people who as a result of political correctness, indifference, and complacency did nothing to combat Islamic extremism. Not only that, but they went out of their way to vilify those who were prepared to do so (check out how Pim Fortuyn and van Gogh were described both before and after their murders). These people have spent decades denigrating their own history, their own culture, and their own traditions; to them, nationalism was among the gravest of sins. No wonder Bouyeri was unimpressed.

Buruma is too smart, and too honest, an observer to ignore these issues altogether, but his reluctance to spend much time on them shows that he has not moved as far from the attitudes of bien-pensant Holland as he would like us to think. Readers will look in vain for much sympathy for the ethnic Dutch, citizens of a state turned upside down with little discussion and less consent (raising these issues was “racist,” “Islamophobic,” choose your bogeyword) — omissions that go some way toward explaining why integration has been such a failure.

It’s also pretty clear that the author of Murder in Amsterdam, like so many other secular Europeans, has little idea of quite how dangerous truly fundamentalist religion can be. It’s telling that Buruma can find time to grumble that “conservatives” have appropriated the idea of the Enlightenment as a last redoubt from which they can defend their (presumably reprehensible) values. That’s a shot that’s not only cheap but also aimed at the wrong target. Standing up for reason is too important a task to be regarded as something reserved only for Europe’s Left or, for that matter, its Right. It’s going to be hard work and, yes, it may be a little uncomfortable at times: Café debates, ecumenical babble, and generous welfare payments won’t be enough to do the trick. Voltaire would have understood this. So, I’m sure, does Buruma; he just can’t face admitting it.

Holland’s establishment consensus is so stifling that it ought to be no surprise that the most prominent dissidents have emerged from outside the mainstream: the immigrant, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (now in exile); the homosexual, Pim Fortuyn (murdered); and the clown, Theo van Gogh (murdered). It ought to be no surprise, but maybe to Buruma it is. To read his descriptions of all three is to detect a certain distancing, a touch of disapproval, and perhaps even a little distaste. They rocked the boat, you see, in a way that was not very Dutch, no, not at all.

Euro Scare?

Claire Berlinski: Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis Is America’s, Too

National Review, May 8, 2006

There’s a bright, shining, merciful moment, right towards the end of this infuriating, odd, but occasionally perceptive polemic, when its author, Claire Berlinski, says what needs saying about the rancid and rabid anti-Americanism now disgracing Europe’s public discourse:

“[It] is a cultist system of faith, rather than a set of rational beliefs, and as such is impervious to revision upon confrontation with facts, logic, evidence, gestures of good will, public relations campaigns, or attempts on the part of the American secretary of state to be a better, more sensitive listener.”

Accurate enough, but her observation that there is nothing Americans can do to change this, “short of dying politely en masse,” suggests that Ms. Berlinski, a lively writer always happy to hype up the snark and the spark of her prose, is taking her readers not to France, or Germany, but to Planet Coulter. When, in another all-too-typical passage, Europe’s past is described as “one of nearly uninterrupted war and savagery,” it’s impossible to avoid thinking that while American anti-Europeanism is comparatively rare, given reason to flower — I note without further comment that Ms. Berlinski studied French literature at the Sorbonne — it can be just as irrational as the hatred for America stewing in the cafés of the Left Bank.

Oh, and while we’re on the topic, it may be quite true that Europe’s history is scarred by slaughter, but it’s quite false to suggest that this is something specific to that part of the world. Mass murder, butchery, invasion, and conquest are what humans do. All races. All cultures. Always have done. Always will do. Europe stands out only because of the extraordinary achievement that is the best of its civilization. It is not the corpses that surprise, but the contrasts: the juxtaposition of the charnel house and the cathedral, the victims trudging to the ovens to the sounds of an orchestra.

But this is not the sort of analysis you’ll find in Menace in Europe (lurid title, lurid book), a work dedicated to the wider, wilder, and highly marketable thesis of a possibly doomed, probably desperate, and certainly dangerous continent drifting into a gathering storm of economic failure, demographic crisis, and ethno-religious strife. Now, while Europe is undoubtedly facing (or, more accurately, failing to face) some very profound problems, it’s way too soon to be writing its obituaries. Claire Berlinski is careful to hedge her hints of apocalypse with caveats (“I do not prophesy the imminent demise of European democratic institutions, nor do I predict imminent catastrophe on European soil”), but there’s a clear sense that she, for one, is preparing for the funeral (“I don’t rule out these possibilities. . . . It is possible and reasonable to imagine a very ugly outcome”).

And, as has been the case with a number of other recent books on the Old World’s predicament (George Weigel’s The Cube and the Cathedral is a striking example), the logic of Berlinski’s thesis leads her to exaggeration. It has to, because the facts alone will not do the trick. So, for instance, it’s not enough for her to insinuate (with appropriate disclaimers) that the nastier ghosts of Europe’s past may be slouching towards rebirth, she also has to throw in the claim that “Europeans . . . sense in their lives a cultural, spiritual, and ideological void.” Good heavens (or not).

Certainly Europeans generally, and for excellent reasons, tend to be less optimistic than their counterparts across the Atlantic, but there’s no particular reason to think that (at least outside the more neurasthenic sections of the intelligentsia) they are wandering around their cities enveloped in black mists of angst, ennui, and existential despair. Quite how you measure a continent’s contentment, I do not know, but for what it’s worth, one recent (2004) Eurobarometer poll revealed that 85 percent of EU citizens were either fairly (54 percent) or very (31 percent) satisfied with their lives. Existence in a cultural, spiritual, and ideological void is not, it seems, quite as dreadful as some commentators appear to believe.

Far too often, Berlinski’s need to stick to her Chicken Little line forces her narrative in a direction that it should not take. A brutally effective demolition of French “peasant” leader José Bové (the clown who trashed a McDonald’s) dissipates into a discussion of the holy fools, cranks, fanatics, and zealots who have been bothering the continent for generations. It makes for some interesting history, but it’s irrelevant, and, if it is designed to demonstrate that susceptibility to psychopaths, charlatans, and madmen is (like war, genocide, and the rest of the rap sheet) a particularly European vice, it’s thoroughly misleading.

Similarly, the author passes over the opportunity to look at the (admittedly slim) prospects of a much-needed patriotic revival within Europe’s nations in favor of a lengthy and rather overwrought examination of the meaning of Rammstein, a popular German heavy-metal band that combines the style of Spinal Tap with the aesthetics of Albert Speer. Yes, this makes for good, alarming copy, and it’s a convenient device to bring up yet again the subject of that miserable Reich, but, in the end, Claire Berlinski’s horrified descriptions of leather, sleaze, bombast, and kitsch do little more than remind us that German rock is, like German cuisine, usually best avoided.

There are times too when she appears to have drunk too deeply of her own Kool-Aid. Suitably enough, given the doom and gloom that permeates this book, some of its strongest, and most convincing, sections relate to an area where some panic is indeed called for: Europe’s failure to integrate its growing Muslim minorities. It’s a problem that will only be made worse by additional inflows from the Islamic world, yet Berlinski’s overblown fears about the viability of an aging society mean that that mass immigration is, apparently, an “economic necessity.” (It’s anything but.) Equally, while she understands that the EU is no more than “a marriage of convenience” (a gross oversimplification, actually, but it will do), her nightmare vision of a feeble and feral continent leads her to describe this ill-starred union as “politically and economically imperative.” It is neither: It is, rather, both a symptom and a cause of Europe’s current impasse.

What makes Menace in Europe all the more frustrating is that, amidst the shouts of alarm, cries of disaster, and howls of invective, there are some very valuable insights, and, particularly in a sharp analysis of how Marseilles manages its multicultural population, some excellent reporting. In the end, however, they only compound the impression that this book is an opportunity missed.

How very European.

The Great Danes

National Review Online, February 14, 2006

It's been a rough, tough, dismaying week for those Europeans who like to believe that the pen is mightier than the scimitar. Yes, an additional number of publications reprinted those pesky cartoons, one selling out its print run when it did so, but these were brave, temporary gestures, as evanescent as the paper on which they were printed, as futile as fists waved in the face of a storm.

While the Danish prime minister was stubbornly sticking to the principles of free speech and a free press, principles which he had, perhaps naively, and certainly optimistically, thought would find support from governments across Europe, his words were nearly drowned out by hints, murmurings, and shouts of appeasement from the gray, shrunken statesmen of Brussels, Paris, London, Stockholm, and many other capitals—take your pick—of a continent that once saw itself as the home of Enlightenment.

Of course, there were exceptions to the dismal, despairing rule, and, naturally, one of them was the Somali-born Dutch MP, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, fearless and furious, one of the few politicians in Europe who still says how things really are:

"Shame on those papers and TV channels who lacked the courage to show their readers the caricatures in the cartoon affair. These intellectuals live off free speech but they accept censorship. They hide their mediocrity of mind behind noble-sounding terms such as "responsibility" and " sensitivity. " Shame on those politicians who stated that publishing and re-publishing the drawings was " unnecessary, "" insensitive, "" disrespectful" and " wrong." I am of the opinion that Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark acted correctly when he refused to meet with representatives of tyrannical regimes who demanded from him that he limit the powers of the press. Today we should stand by him morally and materially. He is an example to all other European leaders. I wish my prime minister had Rasmussen's guts... I do not seek to offend religious sentiment, but I will not submit to tyranny. Demanding that people who do not accept Mohammed's teachings should refrain from drawing him is not a request for respect but a demand for submission."

 

Indeed it is, and judging by the reaction of Dutch prime minister Balkenende, he's ready to grovel. He didn't, he sniffed, have "much use" for Hirsi Ali's contribution, a view that would not have been shared by Theo van Gogh, the director with whom she worked on the movie, Submission. Of course, van Gogh is dead now, butchered by a Muslim extremist offended (ah, that word again) by his film. Interestingly, if one recent poll on a related matter is any indication, the Dutch people themselves are likely to take a very different line from their prime minister. Eighty-four percent, apparently, believe that Hirsi Ali should make a sequel to Submission, even if many of them were far from being fans of the original movie. They are smart enough to understand that, if it is to mean anything, free speech must include freedom of speech about those with whom you disagree.

It was this freedom that van Gogh was testing, it was this freedom that Jyllands-Posten is testing, and it is this freedom that the Dutch foreign minister will be compromising when he travels this week to the Middle East alongside Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief, for talks aimed at reducing the tension over the cartoons, a pointless and humiliating exercise that can only reinforce the dangerous impression held by many of the region's Muslims that Europe's governments somehow control Europe's newspapers and can thus be blamed for their contents.

The fact that such a mission is unlikely to take much account of the opinions of Dutch voters should surprise nobody. Europe's leaders have long tended to prefer the top-down and the technocratic to the views of electorates they see as atavistic, irrational, and prone to disturbing nationalist enthusiasms. This is why they had the arrogance to prescribe multiculturalism as an appropriate response to mass immigration, an idea of remarkable stupidity that goes a long way toward explaining the predicament in which Europe now finds itself.

Of course, we don't yet know what this delegation to the Middle East will be saying, but comments made in an interview with the London Daily Telegraph by the EU's sinisterly named Commissioner for Freedom, Security and Justice reveal some clues. Saying that millions of Muslims felt "humiliated" by the cartoons, and referring to a supposed "real problem" faced by the EU in reconciling freedom of expression with freedom of religion (actually, there's no "problem" at all, unless fanatics choose to make one), he suggested that the press should adopt a voluntary code of conduct. By agreeing to this "the press will give the Muslim world the message: we are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression, we can and we are ready to self-regulate that right." Why the "Muslim world" outside Europe, much of which is represented by dictatorships, mullah-states and kleptocracies, should have any say in the contents of the continent's supposedly free press was not discussed.

In fairness it should be mentioned that the commissioner, Franco Frattini, subsequently put out a vague, ambiguous, and confusing press release purportedly intended to clarify his remarks, but once you have cut through the waffle, checked out the full text of the original interview, and grasped the fact that he was already talking about some sort of code before the current crisis, the commissioner's intentions become all too clear. One way or another, he wants the press muzzled.

And Frattini is not alone. The president of the EU's "parliament," and thus a man supposedly dedicated to the freedom of debate, could bring himself to defend free expression only "within the boundaries of respect for the religious beliefs and cultural sensitivities of others." Javier Solana meanwhile, paved the way for his trip by telling Al-Arabiya television that "respect does not stop at countries' borders and it includes all religions and specifically what concerns us here, our respect for the Islamic religion." As so often in the last week, the idea that "respect," if it is to mean anything other than capitulation, has to flow both ways, seems not to have merited a mention.

Of course, there is something more than a little disingenuous about the manner in which European politicians like to portray themselves as defenders of the right of free speech even as they reduce it to rubble. The Swedish government, at least, was being more straightforward when, just before the weekend, it arranged to shut down a website that had run one rather innocuous cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. Tellingly, the website belonged to the newspaper of a political party of the hard right, yet another sign of how the establishment's refusal to enter into any serious debate over multiculturalism has handed the issue over to Europe's rougher fringe, who can only gain as a result. It's telling too to read how the Swedish foreign minister reportedly excused her government's actions: "We are already seeing reactions in certain countries who have responded to the Swedish Democrats [the political party in question] having these pictures on their website, and this could naturally have grave consequences for Swedish people and Swedish interests." What, I wonder, is the Swedish for "submission"?

The Swedish authorities are unusual only in the directness of the measures that they have taken, and in the frankness with which they have explained the motives behind them. Other, more discreet, governments are probably content to let their laws take their course, something that will come as cold comfort to anyone who still believes in controversy, debate, and the free exchange of ideas. The development of Europe's state-sponsored multiculturalism has gone hand-in-hand, as it had to, with the enactment of laws that chip away at free speech (and have gone further, far further, than understandable restrictions on direct incitements to violence), but which have, ironically, encouraged and inflamed those that they were meant to appease.

Jacques Chirac was quick to condemn the republication of the Danish cartoons in Charlie Hebdo, an iconoclastic French weekly, as an "overt provocation", but was able to leave the dirty work to others. The French Council of Muslims, a body set up with official support, is reported to be organizing the prosecution of poor Charlie, quite for what remains unclear, but doubtless the Council's lawyers will be able to find something useful in France's laws against "hate speech" or any number of other offenses dreamt up by the enforcers of multiculturalism. The prosecution, like that of the author Michel Houellebecq may well end in failure, but any prosecution, successful or otherwise, comes with a cost in time, worry, and lawyers' fees, a cost that will make other authors, editors, and publishers think twice before publishing anything that might irritate the imams. And France is by no means alone in this respect. Many European countries can boast, if that's the word, similar laws on their own statute books, and even in Britain, traditionally a defender of free speech, the House of Commons recently came within one vote of passing a law that would almost certainly have made publishing the cartoons a criminal offense.

If the law doesn't do the trick, perhaps intimidation will. The threat of violence, and sometimes more than the threat, has run through the hysteria and bombast of recent days, and it has involved far more than the torching of a few embassies, appalling though that was. Sometimes the threats, usually of trouble from Europe's Muslim minorities, were explicit, and sometimes they were more subtle, a hint here, a comment there, that "provocations" such as the cartoons could further radicalize Islamic populations worldwide, further complicating the war on terror, and bringing the prospect of a terrifying "clash of civilizations" ever closer. If European governments are incapable of resisting such pressure, and, after the last week, it seems clear that they are, how many writers and artists can be expected to run the risk of Muslim wrath? Underlining that point, The Liberal, a small British political periodical, withdrew one of the Danish cartoons from its website after being warned by the police that they could not guarantee the safety of the magazine's staff.

At least the magazine was able to acknowledge what had happened by leaving a blank space marked "censored" on its website. After the events of these last days, we can be sure that other acts of censorship or self-censorship will pass insidiously and in silence, unnoticed, un-mourned, or, at best, explained away as a gesture of that "respect" that Europe's elites are now so eager to proclaim.

And as for the Danes, they must be feeling very, very alone. The notion of European solidarity has been revealed as the myth it always was. Denmark, and its tradition of free speech, has been left to twist in the wind, trashed, abused, and betrayed. An article published in Jyllands-Posten (yes, them again) on Friday revealed clear frustration over the way that the country is being treated. It's in Danish only, but one phrase ("Ytringsfrihed er ytringsfrihed er ytringsfrihed. Der er intet men.") stands out, and it deserves to be translated and repeated again, and again, and again: "Free speech is free speech is free speech. There is no but."

Fine words. Is anyone listening?