Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I shall endeavour to be here for our midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.
~We have an exciting new featurette to accompany our equally new and exciting audio serialisation of my ancient but highly prescient bestseller. Drumroll, please!
YOUR AMERICA ALONE THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: From the sod-bollocking opening of the book, as you can hear me read this coming weekend - yours truly in 2006:
One day, years from now, as archaeologists sift through the ruins of an ancient civilization for clues to its downfall, they'll marvel at how easy it all was. You don't need to fly jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. As a matter of fact, that's a bad strategy, because even the wimpiest state will feel obliged to respond. But if you frame the issue in terms of multicultural 'sensitivity' the wimp state will bend over backwards to give you everything you want – including, eventually, the keys to those skyscrapers.
And here we are, with those last words pretty much literally true. A year from now, for the official annual commemoration at the very scene of the "flying jets into skyscrapers and killing thousands of people" phase, New York City will be represented by its new Muslim mayor. He currently has a fifteen-point lead over his nearest rivals - because, within the constraints of multiculti sensitivity, no one can quite figure out an objection as to why a Twelver from Uganda who's only been a US citizen for seven years should not be given "the keys to those skyscrapers".
Likewise in the imperial metropolis Americans chose to throw off, it has taken them a mere quarter-millennium to re-align with exquisite synchrony. As I noted ...twenty sodding years ago? Er, no. Just for a change, it was only forty-eight hours:
Well, whether or not [America Alone] was 'alarmist', it's happened. Which is why, circa 2030, either Shabana Mahmood or Zia Yusuf will be Britain's prime minister.
Hardcore Muslim vs "moderate" Muslim: is that the new two-party system?
To be sure, there are still countries for which terrorist movements remain an existential threat, as today's Israeli strike on Qatar has reminded us. But there is nowhere Austria or Sweden can drop a bomb on to take out the entire leadership of the particular threat to their own countries. Instead, thanks to that enduring multiculti sensitivity, they're all around - in the mini-cabs, in the shisha bars, in the security services. And so the UK Cabinet minister with responsibility for inter alia immigration, border enforcement and phony-baloney "inquiries" into Muslim rape gangs is herself a very observant Muslim. Here is how Shabana Mahmood was welcomed to her powerful new job by His Majesty's Government:
For over two centuries, the Home Secretary has safeguarded the nation. Today, we begin a new chapter as we welcome @ShabanaMahmood to the Home Office as the new Home Secretary.
As Richard North intuits at The Conservative Woman, that rather curious phrasing "seems to imply that the Home Secretary will no longer safeguard the nation". Be that as it may, the first ever Muslim Home Secretary's very first day in office was marked by the arrival on England's shores of one thousand of Ms Mahmood's coreligionists - or what the King has lately commenced calling "irregular migrants". It's not "irregular" at all; it's regular as clockwork.
So Muslim terrorism - at least in the narrow and evasive sense of Bush's disingenuously formulated "war on terror" - has turned out to be less of an existential threat to some of the oldest nation states in the world than the suicidal fetishisation of "diversity" and "multiculturalism". Which is why the west's political establishment is now handing over not only the keys to those skyscrapers and to government ministries but also the keys to the local four-star hotel and the elementary school across the street from it. To modify T S Eliot:
We are the hollow men
Of hollowed-out countries
We are the stuffed men
In the Australian sense...
This is the way the world ends
Not with shock'n'awe but a whimper...
A week ago, I linked to a news story about the murder of a young Ukrainian woman in North Carolina and remarked that "she would have been safer in a war zone". Which is true. Her name was Iryna Zarutska, twenty-three, and she was killed on a Charlotte commuter train by a career criminal called Decarlos Brown Jr, who had been lightly slapped on the wrist, if that, for over a dozen previous crimes, such as assault and robbery with a dangerous weapon. From his extravagant rap sheet and his ridiculous forename, you will have deduced that Mr Brown is African-American. Whether or not his blackness is relevant to the erasure of poor Miss Zarutska from her too short time on this earth, it is certainly relevant to her equally thorough erasure from the repulsive American media. Unlike George Floyd
Iryna Zarutska would have understood the media blackout on her own violent end. Back in her modest accommodations, she had "Black Lives Matter" and "I can't breathe" dutifully scrawled on her whiteboard. She was one of those old-fashioned immigrants, who had so fully assimilated with the delusional bollocks of bienpensant liberal America that it killed her. Whereas your typical Afghan sex fiend expects his host nation to assimilate with him.
I doubt back in Ukraine Miss Zarutska had ever known a black person. I didn't see a single one when I was there at the start of the war - though one assumes there are a few among the Deep State operatives dispatched to Kiev by the four-star wokesters at the Pentagon. Indeed, the only non-Ukrainian I encountered in the country was a Moldovan lady I fell into conversation with in the bar one night. I was happy to celebrate (token) diversity into the small hours. Yet, had I chanced to find myself on a bar stool next to the non-diverse Iryna Zarutska, I would have advised her to flee the war for Moldova rather than America, for the very basic reason that she'd still be alive - in part because the homicide rate is less than half and, in the event of bad luck, the depraved "mainstream" media will not add insult to fatal injury. Instead she is dead because she chose to come to the United States. And, because black men who slaughter white women does not comport with the Official Lies enforced by the diversity press, it is necessary for Iryna to be conscripted into the massed ranks of racist whites whose pallor advertises their guilt and whose dispatch to hell therefore does not rate a mention on NPR or in the Times.
There is a video on the Internet, which is only for those of a strong stomach. Mr Brown rises instantly to plunge his knife into his unsuspecting victim's neck. The other passengers all, equally instantly, move calmly away; none goes to the girl's assistance. They are grateful, I suppose, that it is not their neck that caught Decarlos Brown's fancy: it is all very Eloi and Morlocks.
There have been many protean "diversity" experiments around the map, bedevilling to this day: Prods and Papists in Ireland, British and French in Canada, the indigenous iTaukei and South Asian Indians in Fiji, Muslims and Orthodox in Bosnia, Muslims and Anglicans in Nigeria, Muslims and whatever almost anywhere... You would have thought that, when Ted Kennedy was pushing his changes to immigration law, what the US papers of the time called "the Negro problem" would have been sufficiently sobering not to breezily add a Somali problem in Lewiston-Auburn, Maine and an MS-13 problem in Long Island and a Haitian problem in Ohio... But apparently not.
Well, that's for the US to resolve. But the tragedy for the rest of the west is that left-wing "intellectuals" succeeded in exporting America's very particular racial paradigm everywhere else from Canada to Scandinavia, along with an historically fraudulent cure for it: "a nation of immigrants'. So, unlike models closer to home, from Quebec or Ulster or Bosnia, the self-extinction of the European peoples is seen through one ludicrous and largely alien prism: the Swedes are the antebellum south, the Dutch are Jim Crow; everyone white is institutionally guilty and every incoming Sudanese clitoridectomist wading ashore at Dover Beach is Jussie Smollett with a machete where his meatball sub should be. The native peoples of France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden are supposed to be Iryna Zarutska writ large: you just haven't been stabbed yet. And, when you are, you'll be eighty-sixed from the media as totally as the girls of Rotherham
So forget the now risible "war on terror": we lost that one years ago. As I wrote two tosspotting decades ago:
The real suicide bomb is 'multiculturalism'.
And so it has proved. The good news is that at long last sufficient people have noticed to make a fight of it. The bad news is that, as on light rail transit in Charlotte, it is likely to be bloody.
~Thank you to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club in this our ninth year, and thank you to those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
If you were too busy this weekend trying to recite Kipling in a burqa, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.