Mark Steyn is right

John Hawkins: Give people who haven't read your book yet a quick
description of what you think Europe is going to look like in, let's say,
20 years because of declining birth rates, the enormous social benefits
they pay out, and the enormous number of unassimilated Muslims they're
bringing in to try to fill the gap.

Mark Steyn: Well, my view of Europe in 20 years' time is that you'll be
switching on the TV, you'll be looking at scenes of burning and
conflagration and riots in the street. You will have a couple of
countries that are maybe in civil war, at least on the brink of it.

You will have neofascists' resurgence in some countries and you'll have
other countries that have just been painlessly euthanized in which a
Muslim political class has effectively got its way without a shot being
fired -- and large numbers of people, particularly young people, have
left those countries and have moved on to whoever will take them.

You know, the Dutch are going to Australia, Canada, and New Zealand and
some of them, no doubt, would have liked to have gone to the U.S., but
the U.S. doesn't really have a legal immigration program. So, if you need
to get out in a hurry, it's no good going to the U.S. embassy.

John Hawkins: Mark, here's the $24,000 question: can you give us a quick
rundown on the reasons why Europe's birth rates have plummeted?

Mark Steyn: Well, I think it's true as countries get wealthy, birth rates
decline and that's true around the world even in Muslim cultures. For
example, more advanced Muslim societies such as those little wealthy Gulf
Emirates, they breed less than they do, say in Somalia or in Pakistan or
Yemen. So declining birth rates are merely one sign, you know, an
indication of increasing prosperity; however, they have gone way below
that in Europe.

In other words, they've gone past the symbol -- you know, wealthy middle
class moms deciding they'd like fewer children -- to an effect of huge
numbers of people in those societies deciding that they don't want any
children whatsoever -- huge numbers, and they basically pass the point of
no return. Essentially I think a lot of it is to do really with the kind
of re-organization of society in which the state has a primacy that was
once reserved for individuals of the family.

That's to say if the state basically becomes your patriarch -- if the
state becomes the one who looks after your elderly parents in old age,
takes them off your hands, and so frees you up not to have to look after
boring old granddad once he's getting into his 90's and he's incontinent
and he doesn't remember anybody's name. If they just say, " Well, we'll
house him, look after him, you can get on with your life," it's not such
a big step then to decide that if you do without grandparents, you can
also do without grandchildren -- so essentially the all powerful state
has severed man from the primal impulses including the survival impulse
and that's a very bizarre situation and if as people say, "How can that
be," I look at it the other way. I say, "Well, why should it not be?"

I mean this idea that it's normal for the state to be as big as it is in
advanced social democratic societies is something that would have seemed
incredible to anyone a hundred years ago. I mean, I remember being struck
by - on September 11th - and I was writing a column a couple of days
afterwards and, you know, we're all done with our initial reaction, so
you're trying to think a couple of days ahead and find a new angle on it,
and I happen to just notice that it was more or less (a hundred years
after the) assassination of President McKinley. I was thinking, well,
maybe I could tie these two things together, these two big traumatizing
events and, you know, bookending the century, whatever - you know, just
peck, peck, peck - we journalists always are going to peck.

So I sort of rummaged around the clippings of President McKinley's
assassination and realized that while people were upset about it, they
essentially regarded it as the removal of a remote figure who played a
peripheral part in their lives. To that point for most people in most
parts of the U.S. the federal government did not impinge on their life in
any way.

So when people talk about the modern social democratic state, you know,
cradle to grave entitlements, we should understand that it is, in effect,
a huge experimental departure from the normal course of human history -
and the experiment as we can see in almost every other country apart from
the U.S. has failed.

John Hawkins: Now, here's an even more relevant question: is there any
plausible way you can see to get them breeding again?

Mark Steyn: Yes, I think you can. I think you have to do dramatic -
effectively dramatic severely pro-"natalist" policies - which would mean,
I think, you know, essentially slashing tax burdens on people with any
kind of family, initiating policies that would make it easier to have a
family home in those societies because it's also true that the U.S. is
about the cheapest place in the world if you want to have a 3 bedroom
house and a couple of kids on a big lot.

Any way, other than the U.S., that's a very difficult thing to do. These
are societies in which, you know, people live in very uncomfortable,
pokey accommodations for the most part. So if you don't do something
about that - you have to do something about education which would be to
dramatically telescope education, say in effect the opposite of what all
the bores say to us, you know, when they say the sort of Clinton line
about how you want every American to go to college or the Howard Dean
thing about how we need to restore the Pell Grants.

No, you need to do the opposite. You need to start figuring out how to
teach people up to about 15, 16, 17, 18 - rather than encouraging them to
stay in school and wasting their time until advanced middle age.

I think that would make a huge difference and what we're talking about
there essentially is confirming what were the assumptions of the last two
generations -- basically everybody since the 2nd World War, that it is in
everybody's interest for people to have small families, put off having
kids, stay in college forever. Those things in particular circumstances
-- maybe in an individual's, it's sort of hard to argue that, given the
sort of vast human wreckage one sees around, that it's not necessarily
the case that even that's true, but it's certainly not in society's
interest.

John Hawkins: Now Mark, that of course would run absolutely counter to
pretty much everything Europe is doing. Because in addition to that,
you'd probably want to see cutting down on some of those pension
benefits. That would at least cut down on the number of Muslims coming
over to try to pay them. So let me ask, what's the reaction to your book
been in Europe?

Mark Steyn: ...I quote in the book Timothy Garton Ash because I think he
single-handedly represents the kind of contradictions of the European
reaction to my pieces. Timothy Garton Ash is one of those impeccably
respectable people who's a very charming man and actually writes some
good stuff at the tail end of the cold war and is quite a shrewd observer
of that situation.

He's a classic respectable opinion guy, he's the kind of guy NPR gets in
if they want someone to talk about Europe because he represents the main
kind of conventional wisdom, he teaches at Oxford, he has all the right
credentials, he's not like the Ayaan Hirsi Ali types who, you know, end
up living in hiding and eventually leaving the country.

He's Mr. Respectable on here and what he said initially when I started
making this argument was that I was talking nonsense. It was anti-
European nonsense -- this idea, the Islamification -- a country that was
appeasing itself because it understood that its future was Muslim and it
could do nothing about it.

He said it was rubbish, rubbish, rubbish - in no time, I was mad, I was
out of my tree, I'd been drinking the Neocon Kool-aid, I'd flown the
coop. Now recently in his latest comments, he said, yes, the future of
Europe is part of a Euro-Arabian partnership stretching from Morocco and
Algeria and all the way up through the Middle East...

So, it seems he's conceded the case and I think that is the problem that
there are really three groups of people in Europe among the native
Europeans and they're split three ways. Some of them will decide to fight
and turn to Neo-Fascism and some of them will just convert to Islam
because it's going to win and they'll talk themselves into figuring they
can be Muslim light and it won't make much difference and others will
just head to sea. They will just go to Australia, Canada or anywhere that
will take them and so I think that's the reaction now - that you've got a
lot of people who still say, you know, well, I'm exaggerating the threat
- but then whenever you pick up a British or a European newspaper and you
read the way the debate is framed, you understand that the threat is not
being exaggerated. It only appears that way because in effect the state
is still conceding on almost everything that matters in this debate.

John Hawkins: Let me ask you a related question, something you've touched
on before. Europeans, from what I've seen, have a generally more dim view
of the Middle East than Americans - like they think it's futile to try to
build democracy in Iraq. You know, everywhere that you talk about --
well, democracy in the Muslim world just won't work. Yet, they're
bringing in all the Muslims you could possibly imagine into their own
home countries, and they're building them up to such a percentage
that....if you get up to where 20%, 30%, 40% of your population is Muslim
and you don't think Islam is compatible with democracy, that's kind of a
weird combination. How's that happening?

Mark Steyn: I think that is the contradiction. If Islam is incompatible
with democracy, that's not a problem for Iraq, it's a problem for
Belgium, you know, because Iraq until, you know, a few months back had no
democracy to lose. They can easily adjust to the way it's always been.

For Belgium or for Denmark or for the Netherlands, they've got real
democracies and they are likely to lose and as you see, I think that is
really the issue here, that when these contradictions are pointed out,
Europeans essentially refuse to acknowledge them. Yet at the same time
they're making capitulations to the most naked form of political bullying
--and that's when Islam is officially a minority of, you know, 10% or so.
In those cities it's a lot higher already. What happens when it's 30%? I
mean, this is a question they never, ever ask themselves and you're
right, they do take a dim view. I think at some level there's something
else going on there, too, that a lot of these countries, you know, -- we
talk about the Middle East, democratize the Middle East - we forget Spain
was a dictatorship 30 years ago, Portugal, a little over 30 years ago,
Greece, same 30 years ago.

Italy and Germany and France, you've got to go back half a century, but
in essence the idea of living under non-democratic regimes is not foreign
to these people and I think they think of themselves, their identities
less as Europeans are less bound up with ideas of liberty than it is for
the U.S. You know, the U.S. is an ideological project in a way that Italy
isn't and so I do think that also accounts for part of the way they look
at it.

John Hawkins: You've said that the Muslims in Europe are much more
alienated than the Muslims in the Middle East. Why do you think that is?

Mark Steyn: I think it's because they have a miserable life and they see
that other people don't and I think it's also because they are put in an
almost continuous kind of conflict intention between their fair and the
wider society.

I mean, one shouldn't generalize, there are certain ways of dealing with
Muslims, but in France, they deal with them by housing them in these
grim, dehumanizing residential areas on the fringes of their cities that
are the worst things I've ever seen. I've seen Soviet housing on the
other side of the Iron Curtain - and it wasn't as bad as where the French
put their Muslims. It's public housing, you know, -- it's not even, they
don't even do the thing they do in Britain where they call it Winnie
Mandela House and they put some little decorative sculpture thing out in
front for the yobbos to kick over and deface. They don't even bother with
that in these French suburbs. They're just called, you know, dwelling
unit number six million and eighty three and they're like prisons.

The guys in Gitmo, for example, that Dick Durbin makes a big fuss about,
actually live in nicer accommodations than a lot of these Muslims do in
Clichy-sous-Bous.

And I think they have higher employment rates because of the employment
protectionism there. Again, this is a particular to France; in other
words, there's no economic opportunity there, not compared to the
opportunities that a Muslim has if he happens to be living in Baltimore
or in Chicago. It's a very different situation and they are up against
states that are much more at ease with racism.

France and these other countries are not multicultural states as America
or Canada or whatever understands, and they are up against states that
are much more at ease with racism. So it seems perfectly normal to the
French to have Muslims doing all the menial jobs, but not to have any
Muslims in your legislature or prominent positions in life.

....(Muslims) adopted then the characteristics of a kind of sub-class and
at the same time they then merge with the worst features of the host
society. You can be in a northern English town after 9 o'clock at night
on a Saturday night and these tattooed gangs of Pakistani skinheads came
rolling through town. You think, what the hell is this? It's like some
futuristic dystopian thing cooked up by some mad lab scientist in which
he's taken the worst pathologies of the western world and the worst
pathologies of the Muslim world and fused them together.

So you have this grotesque license, the sense of license and self
gratification that your ordinary English yobbo would have merge with the
sort of basic misogyny of the Muslim community and it produces something
quite terrifying in these rape gangs they've now got in Scandinavia and
France and Belgium and places. I think it's that the western world
impacts on a lot of young Muslims in ways that make them far more
alienated, far more fiercely Islamist in effect than to some goat herder
in Afghanistan.

John Hawkins: Why do you think Europeans have had a much more difficult
time assimilating Muslims than the United States?

Mark Steyn: Generally speaking, Britain and commonwealth countries have a
similar attitude to nationality that the U.S. does. Britain was the first
nationality to be defined not by, well, certainly the first since Rome,
but the first to be defined not by blood and ethnicity. In other words,
if you were born in Kingston, Ontario, Kingston, Jamaica, or Kingston, on
Thames England, you were a British subject and the Crown didn't
distinguish between you and any particular - and that's not an ancient
thing, by the way.

The 1948 British Nationality Act made a quarter the world's population
British subjects. You know, let me say, they're not all pure bred
Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, or Welshmen. They're mostly, you know,
all kinds of goofy Quebecers and.... people in Papua, New Guinea, all
kinds of people, but they were British and in law they were British as
anybody else was.

Now that's not the way they do it in, say for example, in Denmark. In
Denmark or Germany, in Germany there were ethnic Germans and there were
Turkish guest workers who found it very hard no matter how many
generations they were there to become eligible for German citizenship and
even when the law changed, the Germans still saw citizenship as
essentially a matter of race. I think that's true of Scandinavian
countries, too, so these aren't multicultural societies. They're much
more like bi-cultural ones. I think I say in the book at some point that
it's like imagining, you know, the Mayflower in colonial New England 30-
40 years after the Mayflower's docked and all the old ones are getting a
bit long in the tooth and they suddenly notice that everybody young in
town is called Achmed and Kalid and Mohammed. It's a bi-cultural society
and bi-cultural societies are always the most unstable.

John Hawkins: Speaking of bi-cultural societies, in the U.S. we have an
enormous influx of Spanish-speaking illegal immigrants coming in plus, of
course, we have a significant number of legal immigrants here, too. Do
you think that's a danger, that we'll get into our own little bi-cultural
situation here in the U.S.?

Mark Steyn: Well, I am slightly embarrassed at answering this because,
you know, I am a legal immigrant and you and...it's hardly my place to
tell you guys who you can and can't let into your country, but I would
say just as a general point of view, that in this day and age, if you
don't have borders, you don't have a nation.

That's the beginning and end of it - and so, in effect, I would say
again, to make a point that I make in the book, immigration has its
merits. I live in northern New Hampshire and I would certainly value it
if there were a kind of a better of a range of Thai restaurants in this
part of the world. So if I know a restaurateur in Thailand and I say,
"Hey, there's an empty building on Main Street. You could come run a
great Thai restaurant there," I mean, that's fine and dandy - but when
you become dependent on immigration as Europe is and Canada is, then
that's a sign of structural weakness.

So when people make the argument that we need immigrants to come here to
do the jobs that Americans won't do, that is also a sign of structural
weakness. If it's really true that you've got a huge seasonal fruit
picking industry, if you've got hotels that need the beds turned down and
people leaving the chocolate on, if you've got a big drywall and sheet
rock industry and...even though they're profitable industries to be in
supposedly and there's a huge demand for sheet rocking and drywall, and
you cannot so organize that industry as to be able to hire legal American
residents to do it, then that's a sign of a structural weakness.

So the answer isn't to say, "No, we need them," just to make it easier
for, you know, millions of Mexicans and Guatemalans and Venezuelans to
come in and do it. You should address the structural weakness which is
over-regulation of the economy and various other issues. ....I think
that's the real issue. The real issue isn't ...to corrupt your own state
databases and national security to facilitate the importation of a vast
tide of low minimum wage workers. It's to address the economic factors
that make it impossible for some of these industries to, in effect, hire
people to do those jobs at the market rate and I do think a dependence on
immigration is always a sign of structural weakness and when it's
dependent on one big source, then it does effectively become a
destabilizing thing, but we shouldn't blame the Mexicans. I like Mexico
and will be going there in a couple of days. I like Mexicans very much,
but I can't cross the border from Montreal down to New Hampshire and the
payphone in Burlington, Vermont, downtown Burlington is in English and
Spanish. There are 7 Hispanics in the whole of Vermont. There's no demand
for Spanish instructions on a pay phone in Burlington, Vermont, so why
are the instructions in Spanish? They're in Spanish because a huge chunk
of this country's establishment has sort of fetishized the idea of
bilingualism and bi-culturalism as a desirable end itself and I think
that is the real problem there.

Anyway, you don't have to look very far to understand that bilingualism,
in particular, is very destabilizing. You just look north of the border
to Quebec. The reason there are no Canadian troops in Iraq is because
French-speaking Quebec took a different view from English speaking Canada
on that and the French speakers prevailed. That's the point. It becomes
very difficult to have a shared culture, even a shared world view, if
you're in a bilingual society.

So, to willingly embrace bi-lingualism as a kind of fluffy feel-good
thing, like this stupid pay phone in Burlington, I think is, you know,
deeply short sighted...

John Hawkins: Drifting back towards Europe a bit, your book was kind of
apocalyptic in a way just describing Europe's future, but one of the most
shocking things I thought that was in there was that you were talking
about non-Muslim women in some areas of Europe today actually wearing the
veil out in order to be safe from harassment. Is that happening in a lot
of areas in Europe?

Mark Steyn: It's certainly happening in some cities. I heard it
anecdotally from two friends in the space of a week and I thought it was
very interesting that in both cases - one woman extremely wealthy, well-
to-do and the other woman just happens to be a poor divorcee living in a
part of town that is rapidly Islamifying - but they both reported the
same experience - you put on a head scarf and, you know, you don't have
to wear the burka, but you look, in other words, you don't look like a
full Wahabi woman from Saudi Arabia, but you look like say, an Egyptian
lady or a Jordanian. You wear the head scarf and a head to toe dress or
you're not showing bare legs, bare arms, uncovered hair. They were
stunned at how much more relaxing it was to stroll across the park,
stroll to the corner store. They suddenly felt far more secure, they felt
far more safe, they weren't jeered at for being an infidel whore or
anything - and I would imagine that, you know, it's not actually that big
a stage from sort of passing for Muslim in the street to actually
embracing it in some kind of way of residual way at least nominally for
the advantages of a quiet life.

That's why they do it. I mean, I was told by some French guy that 4 out
of 5 converts in Islam in Europe, to Islam, are women. I don't know what
basis he produced that statistic. When I talk to people, they don't
actually disagree with it if you ask around.

I get the feeling here without wishing to be any more homophobic than I'm
normally accused of, but in my part of country, almost every lesbian you
run across tends to be someone who's just been in a couple of really bad
marriages and despaired of men and I notice that in Europe, a sort of
similar trend is that women who have been in a couple of bad marriages
with western men basically embrace Islam as a way of, you know - and
again, whether it's your sort of boorish English soccer lout or your kind
of sweet, you know, new male that, "I'll do the ironing, darling" type,
that it does seem that the women up here in the north country embrace
lesbianism just as a kind of general weariness with the available range
of males. So I noticed that there's something similar with the women in
Islam in France and Belgium. (laughs)

John Hawkins: I think one question people have about Islam is sort of a,
why now, sort of thing. Why is it that in, let's say, the last 25 years
or so that Muslims in particular have gotten so much more into terrorism
and jihad, not that it didn't exist before then, it did. But why has it
sort of exploded on the scene like it has? Is it all demographics? The
spread of Wahhabism? Something else you think?

Mark Steyn: Well, I think it's a combination of factors that have created
a perfect storm. I think Islam has got very good on piggy-backing on
trends pioneered by others.

Even suicide bombing in the sense is basically, you know, in its modern
incarnation something more developed by the Tamil tigers so they can't
even claim a copyright on that and the whole fascistic totalitarian thing
is, in a sense, is something they picked up between the wars.

For all that we think of them as this sort of primitive, 7th century,
backward culture, they are actually very good at picking and choosing
aspects of the modern world that are useful to them - for example,
European totalitarianism, Tamil tiger suicide bombing, freelance nuclear
technology - you put them all together and you've got quite a serious
global insurgency, particularly when it's backed by this global
demographic thing.

Also, the confidence of Islam arose in a vacuum which was 2 things,
really I think the post colonial funk that the traditional great powers
like Britain fell into -- because no doubt actually the British have had
a bit of a good track record of actually holding Islam in check in India
and the ...United Arab Emirates. So they're actually very good at sort of
keeping the lid on the pressure cooker, but they fell into a post
colonial funk.

Their place on the scene was taken by the U.S. which in effect, I think,
operates, again I think I said in the book, operates foreign policy as a
kind of international version of the Affirmative Action program. When you
artificially downgrade your own voice and you artificially upgrade those
of Belgium and Luxemburg and so on. Now in 1945 when the Americans were
inventing the United Nations, maybe it didn't seem like such a big deal
upgrading the voice of Belgium and the voice of Luxemburg and the voice
of the Netherlands.

Then came de-colonization and it turns out that on the stupid U.N.
committees, you're not just upgrading the voice of Belgians, you're also
upgrading the voice of the Sudanese and the voice of the Yemeni and the
voice of Hugo Chavez, and the voice of 200 other countries artificially
and so I think it's the peculiar pathologies of the U.S. as a great power
do in fact impose a real question mark over the future.

You know, I understand you guys are not imperialists. I was real gung ho,
you know, for making the accusations of American imperialism a little
more literal, a little more merited in the days after 9-ll, but there
were no takers for it. You fellas do not have it from your DNA. You don't
have an imperialistic bone in your body and one has to respect that.
Nonetheless, the idea just this kind of essentially benign super power
that lets the world go on its way - unless you fellas really re-think
that, I think the American moment will end very quickly.

John Hawkins: Now, we've talked quite a bit about your book. Is there
anything else you'd like to add about it?

Mark Steyn: Well, I will say this - that I've actually been rather
touched by the success of it. I don't quite know why, but I do think that
it has got a message, that it does speak to people. Just this morning our
little online book store took an order from a guy in Alabama who ordered
54 copies and is clearly planning on giving them to all his friends. I'm
very touched by that.

I wish, after meeting the President in the Oval Office a few days ago and
he asked me to sign the book for him and I gather it's now on his bedside
table.

John Hawkins: Wow.

Mark Steyn: I wish in a way he'd read it before the election because I
think the connection I make between domestic policy and foreign policy
within a coherent vision is actually better than what the Republicans
ended up running on.

John Hawkins: That wouldn't be very hard.

Mark Steyn: No, I know, it wouldn't be very hard because in effect I
think they got the formula upside down. They were arguing for big bloated
pork chop government at home and this sort of attenuated tentative half-
hearted little bit of thankless neo-colonial policing operations abroad.

I think just as a big blow at home and the no longer full throated abroad
is the worst of all worlds. I think what happened on Tuesday is they
ended up losing the security vote. They left the national security
advantage and once they'd done that, then fiscal conservatives and so on
looked around and said, "Well, you take that away and what else is left?
Big government, prescription drug entitlements, illegal immigration." You
know -- and Nancy Pelosi, when people say it's going to be worse under
Nancy Pelosi, "It's going to be worse," is not a slogan you should be
running on...

I don't want to get into the Andrew Sullivan, you know, "You must read
this book," says Andrew Sullivan of Andrew Sullivan's fantastic new book.
I don't want to get into that kind of self endorsement, but I do think
there is a lesson in this book for the Republican leadership on how to
connect foreign policy and national security with domestic issues and if
they're looking around for ideas, as we certainly should be on this grim
morning after, then I hope they do take a look at that.

John Hawkins: Well, as someone who read your book, I can wholeheartedly
endorse it. It's one of the best books I've read in a long time, must-
read material.

Mark Steyn: Ok, that's great, but then I hope you don't have that to say
about Andrew Sullivan....

John Hawkins: No… I don't even read Andrew Sullivan's stuff. I'm not into
liberals pretending to be conservatives.

Mark Steyn: He's got a little good act going there. He's going to be put
up on TV as the voice of conservatism for the next 30 years because the
media is only interested in dissident conservatives. So he will be the
official voice of conservatism for decades.

John Hawkins: Yeah, that is ironic. Are there any blogs you like to read
regularly or semi-regularly?

Mark Steyn: Well, there are a lot actually. I think it is a particular
art in itself, not one I'm terribly good at because you do realize when I
occasionally think about it and I've tried it in small doses that
actually it's quite an art being able to come up with, you know, 75 words
on a subject and say something very pithy and meaningful about it and I'm
always in admiration about that.

I do think America has a much healthier blog scene than a lot of
countries in part because the newspapers are so bad here. I think it's
interesting to me that the blog thing hasn't really taken off in the same
way in Britain in part because a lot of the people who would be natural
blog writers are already hired as fantastically vicious columnists....

So I think in a sense the blog scene here has benefitted from the torpor
of the newspaper scene and there's no doubt, I read widely a whole big
bunch of them. I love Tim Blair down in Australia; I think he's a strange
kind of genius. I love Kathy Shaidle up in Canada. I had the pleasure of
introducing her to the editor of the National Post up there and that guy
is wasting his time trying to re-hire me every day of the week and I said
to him, "Man, that Kathy is the wave of the future. You should hire
Kathy," but I don't think he took her phone number as he should have
done.

So I do read widely on the blog scene. Obviously down here I like a lot
of the guys that everybody likes who I think do a terrific job. You know,
I can't understand why the people think that the Minneapolis Star Tribune
is always running these sort of snobby comments about the Power Line
guys. You know, who is actually producing something readable? The Power
Line guys are readable. Aside from its political bias, which I think is
actually quite disgraceful, the Star Tribune is just unreadable sludge
and in the end, people are not going to carry on paying money for
unreadable sludge. I think the newspaper industry in this (country) -
well, you saw the latest circulation figures - they were surprised by the
gains made by the New York Post and that is a newspaper whose senior
management has basically been imported from the other side of the world.
(laughs)

John Hawkins: They put out entertaining copy though, unlike a lot of the
other ones.

Mark Steyn: Yeah, they do. They do, but it comes to when people say, "How
come you Canadian and Australian and British people are writing in
America," and I say, "Well, that's because too many of you guys have paid
a fortune to go to journalism school and lost the ability to write."
(laughs) We foreigners didn't suffer that crippling disadvantage.

John Hawkins: Is there anything else you'd like to say or promote before
we finish, Mark?

Mark Steyn: No, John, that was great.

John Hawkins: Thanks a lot.

--
http://www.rightwingnews.com/

BOLUDOVSKY a écrit :

(SNIP)

Too long, too boring, too right wing...

Fred

BOLUDOVSKY a écrit :
>
> John Hawkins: Give people who haven't read your book yet a quick
> description of what you think Europe is going to look like in, let's say,
> 20 years because of declining birth rates, the enormous social benefits
> they pay out, and the enormous number of unassimilated Muslims they're
> bringing in to try to fill the gap.
>
> Mark Steyn: Well, my view of Europe in 20 years' time is that you'll be
> switching on the TV, you'll be looking at scenes of burning and
> conflagration and riots in the street. You will have a couple of
> countries that are maybe in civil war, at least on the brink of it.

Como decia un gran politico frances, hay dos prototipos de lider: los
que persuaden al pueblo que pueden conducirlo al pais de leche y miel, y
los que lo persuaden que viven rodeados de terribles peligros que solo
pueden ser conjurados confiandoles todos los poderes. Los primeros basan
su autoridad sobre la esperanza, los segundos sobre el miedo.
Es bastante revelador que los neoliberales hoy en dia no tengan otro
recurso que apoyarse sobre el miedo. Incapaces de proponer un mundo
mejor a construir, lo unico que tienen para proponernos es un mundo de
destruccion, terror y guerra... a menos claro que renunciemos al derecho
laboral, a la redistribucion fiscal, al habeas corpus, a la defensa en
juicio, al principio de legalidad de las penas, es decir, a todo aquello
que en nuestra sociedad protege al debil contra el fuerte. Si aceptamos
por ejemplo de darle plenos poderes a un tipo como Bush, en una de esas
nos salvamos. Con semejante alternativa, como sorprenderse que la
juventud este desesperada ?
Por suerte, el discurso terrorista de los neoliberales cada vez tiene
menos publico. El mejor ejemplo es tal vez el del hoy fenecido tratado
constitucional europeo. A pesar del discurso neoliberal que prometia
catastrofes innumerables si el tratado era rechazado (la hoy candidata
presidencial en Francia, Segolene Royal, afirmaba sin reirse que "si el
tratado es rechazado, no habra mas comida en las cantinas escolares"),
el pueblo rechazo el tratado... y el cielo no nos cayo sobre la cabeza.
Prueba que a los agoreros estilo Steyn hay que tratarlos como lo que
son: gente que busca inspirar el terror para obtener la acquiescencia de
los pueblos a sus politicas. Una forma de "terrorismo" que no por ser
menos violenta es menos "terrorista" que la de Al Quaeda...

Saludos

Mario "el franchute"