The Ugliness of the Indian Male and other Propositions by Mukul Kesavan

Author:Mukul Kesavan [Kesavan, Mukul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orient BlackSwan Private Ltd.
Published: 2018-06-12T00:00:00+00:00

29

The Defence of the West;

or, Christopher and His Kind

For an Indian, one of the most instructive things about the response of the West to 9/11 is how swiftly large sections of its liberal establishment circled their wagons against Muslims. Instructive because this manoeuvre illustrates the extent to which Western democracies are based on majoritarian assumptions, assumptions that override the liberal values that in easier times are invoked as the distinguishing features of countries like Britain, France, and the US. Even more interesting is the way in which the case for the illiberal, coercive, and even punitive treatment of Muslims is made, the way in which the demonization of Muslims as a matter of public policy is presented as a properly liberal project for all but soft-headed bleeding hearts.

A short essay that illustrates this tendency perfectly is Christopher Hitchens’s review of Mark Steyn’s book, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. Steyn is a hawkish right-winger who argues in his book that the West, with the exception of the US, has surrendered to the jihadist tendency within Islam. Europe in particular, with its doctrines of multi-culturalism and its declining birth rates, is doomed to be taken over by fast-breeding immigrant Muslims who see its woolly tolerance for the weakness that it really is.

Hitchens, who started his political life as a Trotskyist, decided after 9/11 that he had found a political project worthy of the rest of his life, namely, unrelenting opposition to the menace of fundamentalist Islam for which he coined a term, Islamofascism. He supported the American invasion of Iraq for many reasons, one of which was Saddam Hussain’s alleged alliance with Al Qaeda.

Hitchens likes Steyn’s book, agrees with its main arguments, finds it admirably tough-minded, and praises Steyn for his pioneering work in making people aware of the menace of Islamism. For Hitchens, Steyn makes an ‘immensely convincing case’ for the imminent swamping of European civilization by Muslim migrants who breed much faster than the local white population. This quote from the book (chosen by Hitchens in his review) summarizes Steyn’s argument from demography:

Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography—except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out—as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.

Hitchens has a few reservations about Steyn’s conclusions: it’s a reductionist explanation of the Bosnian violence because it doesn’t account for Croation irredentism and Steyn makes a Muslim–European clash seem inevitable because he mistakenly sees Muslims in Europe as a single monolithic community when, in fact, immigrant Muslims are hugely various. But Hitchens’s differences with Steyn are minor ones:

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