Summary
- Western civilization is under assault.
- Victor Davis Hanson explores why the West seems ready to fight back.
- The Islamists think the West is decadent and hate the West for seducing them into its decadence.
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
We’re watching Western civilization and Western countries worldwide under assault, sometimes militarily, sometimes economically, but recently, socially and culturally, from within and without.
I’ll give you a few examples.
There’s an iconic video going around the internet of the riots in Paris, and a young woman whose family owns a store. She’s blocking the entrance to looters who seem to be first- and second-generation immigrants from Africa and Asia in France, and she says, “Stop. Don’t do this,” meaning, don’t loot our entire livelihood. And they push her away. And then she says something to the effect of, “But I’m on your side. I voted for open borders.” I’m paraphrasing. And then they sort of manhandle her.
And then we’re forgetting what Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said a few years ago when she opened the borders, not just of Germany but of Europe, because people came through Germany into Europe.
She said, “Yes, we can do this.” Meaning, I think, we’re so guilt-ridden—Germany in particular, for obvious reasons—but we Westerners are so guilt-ridden about the success of our civilization and its global reach historically that we owe other people our largesse. So come on in, and we’ll give you a social welfare net.
In fact, 40% of the budgets of these European countries now, unsustainably, are for social welfare, a large percentage of which goes to unassimilated immigrants.
And in England, the U.K., Britain, there’s an epidemic of violence among Pakistani men against women: sexual harassment and sexual violence. And they are not accorded the full extent of the law as an indigenous population in Britain.
In Britain today, if you openly complain about unassimilated immigrants and the need for closed borders, and you fly the flag of St. George or any type of British nationalist emblem, you’re more likely to go to jail than someone who sexually harasses a young girl, if you’re an immigrant.
In the Somali community, we have 80,000 to 100,000 people, many of whom, inordinately, demographically inordinately, have been engaged in what may be a $9 billion fraud.
And we were told that these were refugee people who came here for a better life and would assimilate, integrate and acculturate. In fact, they’re doing what the Dearborn Muslim community is doing. They’re self-isolating. They resent the country that they’re living in.
No better emblem of that is the quote by Ilhan Omar that the United States is the worst country in the world.
My friend Christopher Hitchens, the late Christopher Hitchens, came to this farm right where I’m speaking, and we had a long talk. He was a colleague of mine for three years at Hoover. We disagreed politically, but we agreed socially and culturally on a number of issues, not about lifestyle but the threat of radical Islam.
And he often said, and he wrote a book, and he’s now being quoted widely post facto, that the Muslim radical community, both in the Middle East and in the United States, wants to destroy Western civilization.
They’re like a moth to a flame. They’re attracted to it. They’re attracted to the prosperity, the freedom, the security, the personal bounty and leisure, but they resent that attraction within them, and they hate the narcotic that they’re addicted to.
They have to get to the West, but once they get to the West, they feel they’re not as purely Islamic as they were before, and they blame the West for their growing appetites for the West.
Sounds a little complicated, but Christopher and others had articulated that paradox quite well. Will the West respond?
Will the West finally wake up and say, “We have nothing to apologize for. We gave the world classical civilization. We gave the world consensual government. We gave the world rationalism. We gave the world equality between the sexes. We gave the world scientific methods. We gave the world technology. We gave the world the Renaissance. We gave the world the Enlightenment. We gave the world the Judeo-Christian alternative. We gave the world … ”
The modern world, as it is, is not globalized; it’s Westernized. If you have a cellphone in Sudan, or you’re working on a laptop in Bolivia, or you’re posting on social media in China, where did all that come from originally?
It came from Western civilization. It’s worth defending. It’s not worth surrendering and just agreeing with your critics.
So the question we have today is: Is the West going to react? If you don’t have confidence in your own border, as Joe Biden did not, and you let in 10 million to 12 million people, 10,000-plus a day, who have no audit—you don’t know anything about their background—500,000 of whom were criminals, and then you say, “We cannot deport them. We’re not capable psychologically, legally, materially,” then you’ve given up.
Donald Trump and others said, “We can do this. We’ve done it in the past. We’ll try to do it as humanely as possible. But if you’re in the country illegally and we catch you, you’re going to have to go back and start all over again in legal fashion.
“Now, if you’re here criminally, we’re going to apply the full weight of the law. No more, no less, but the full weight of the law.”
In Europe, you’re starting to see that there is a reaction, and it’s a demonized reaction because the technocratic class, the aristocratic class, the elite class of Europe that created this mess in its fashionable flirtation with postmodernism—Foucault, Derrida, Sartre, Gramsci—who created this mess, are now under assault by their own citizens, who say, “You did this. You did this.”
We haven’t got there in California yet. We don’t say to Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom and people, “You did this to our state,” but it’s coming.
And they’re saying it in Germany with the Alternative for Germany, and they’re saying it with Ms. Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Mr. Nigel Farage in the U.K., and others. The only way you’re going to silence us in popular opinion is either to censor us, contrary to your belief in free speech and the Western tradition of dissent, or you’re going to have to cancel the election because you’re going to lose.
And we see that in the United States. We saw that with the lawfare committed against Donald Trump. He basically said to the Left, “I’m going to wage a counter-revolution and restore norms and traditions.”
And they said, “Not over my dead body. We’re going to get five criminal and legal suits. We’re going to try to get you off the ballot. We’re going to raid your home. We’re going to impeach you twice. We’re going to try you as a private citizen when you’re out of office. We’re going to debank you so you can’t write a check. We’re going to strip you of social media so you cannot communicate.”
And it all backfired.
Israel had believed that the answer to Palestinian terrorism and radicalism was to sort of agree that maybe they should just get out of Gaza, and they did. And maybe they should allow them food, water, electricity, and fuel, and welcome the international community, which gave over $40 billion.
Supposedly, we were told in 2005 that the newly elected government, once there was no more Hamas government, would turn this beautiful 34-mile, 24-mile, whatever it is, beach frontage into Dubai or something like that, or maybe the French coast.
Nothing happened like that. In other words, it was a terror haven.
And the Israelis said, “Maybe if we invite 20,000 Gazan citizens into our own country every day and pay them $12 an hour and work beside them in the kibbutzim, they will see a different paradigm, and our magnanimity will be reciprocated.
“They’ll say, ‘How did you bloom the desert?’ And we will do the … ”
It didn’t work that way. Human nature being what it is, and radical Islam being what it is, basically, they said, “You have things that we don’t, and you’re not as pure religiously as we are, and you don’t deserve it, and we’re going to kill you.”
And everybody said, “There’s no antidote to that.”
They killed 1,200 people. People were celebrating in the streets, not lamenting. They were celebrating what Hamas had done to the Israelis.
And they waited 20 days, and they said, “Please give back the hostages.” “No.” “Please give back the architects of this terror.” “No.” “Please come out of the tunnels and let your citizens go into the tunnels while we go in so we don’t have collateral … ”
“No.”
And the Israelis unloaded on them.
And now there is not really a Hamas to speak of. Hezbollah were the stormtroopers of the terrorist Middle East. Everybody said you can deal maybe with Hamas, but not Hezbollah, and it’s pretty much decimated.
And Iran was the bully of the Middle East, 93 million people. Whatever you do, do not cross the Iranians. They have a 50-year history of terror. They’ve killed more Americans after 9/11 than any other terrorist organization.
Now look at them. They’re basically denuclearized, deindustrialized and demilitarized, and we have done that at the loss of about 22 Americans and $45 billion halfway across the world.
So what I’m getting at is, if you arouse the West and you keep pushing it, and you keep saying it’s the worst country in the world, and you hate the United States, and you think Sharia law is superior, or that you don’t want to criticize radical Islam, if you keep doing that enough, or you say this is a trashy country, or it’s the worst country in the world, or I hate the United States, as some of the left-wing candidates who self-identify as Islamists do, then there’s going to be a reaction.
Because I don’t think the American people, I don’t even think the European people, as problematic as Europe is, are simply going to say, after 2,500 years of civilization, “You’re right. We’re guilty. We feel guilty. We apologize. We apologize, and we’ll hand it over, and you’ll be nice, and we’ll be nice.”
Because they know now it doesn’t work.
The more immigrants you let in illegally, the less they assimilate and integrate, the more they feel that they have disrespect, and they hate you.
When you look at the faces and the voices of the demonstrators in Europe, it’s not, “I’m so glad to be out of Nigeria, Chad, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan and enjoying the largesse of the French people.”
It is, “You are stupid to let us in because we’re going to change your civilization because we come from a superior religion, and you’re decadent, and you’ve lost your own faith. And it’s just a matter of fertility and demography, and we’re going to take over this West, and we’re going to turn it into the hellhole that we left.
“And you may think that’s crazy, but at least we’ll be pure in the religious sense. And you’re decadent, and we want to destroy you.”
I think now, for the first time, Europe is starting to see the Frankensteinian monster they created, and the United States is starting to see it as well, and there’s going to be a counter-revolution. It’s happening.
Watch for the cries of racism, nativism, hatred from the Left. The Left created this problem. They’re the doctors who created the Frankensteinian monster. They don’t know how to deal with it, and the people who deal with it, they will criticize.
And in the end, it won’t matter. It’s either … It’s a struggle for civilization.
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