After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (42 page)

Who in turn lacked food and education and much else, and had a much higher incidence of genetic disorders. It would have been asking an awful lot for them to remain in the teeming, pathogenic shanty megalopolises into which the Third World’s population was consolidating—rather than simply to sail over to Spain or Italy or the Côte d’Azur.

But never mind African-Asian or Cairo-Seoul comparisons, and consider the available models within Korea itself: in the south, a prosperous, educated, advanced nation; to the north, a dark, starving, one-man psycho-state tyranny that exported nothing but knock-off Viagra and No Dong.

The former is an erectile dysfunction treatment, the latter sounds like one but is in fact a long-range missile the Norks made available to interested parties such as Iran. Seoul was always vulnerable: it could be flattened by Pyongyang within minutes. Why ever would the Norks do that? Well, why in 2010 did they loose a couple hundred artillery shells at South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island, killing four civilians and injuring many more?6

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Who knows? No analyst was able to articulate a rationale. Because a ratio-nalist needs a rationale, but a psycho-state doesn’t.

This peripheral peninsula was a snapshot of the world to come: South Korea had one of the highest GDPs per capita on the planet, yet was all but defenseless without American military protection.7 North Korea had a GDP

per capita that was all but unmeasurable, down in Sub-Basement Level Five with Burundi and the Congo—and yet it was, after a fashion, a nuclear power. In the years ahead, these contradictions would resolve themselves in entirely predictable ways.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

identity and authenticity

The future belongs to those who show up for it. Yet in the multicultural West the question of human capital was entirely absent from most futurological speculation. “A growing number of people,” wrote James Martin in
The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint for Ensuring
Our Future
(2006), “will think of themselves as citizens of the planet rather than citizens of the West, or Islam, or Chinese civilization.”8

Mr. Martin provided no evidence for his assertion, and it should have been obvious even then that it was (to use a British archaism I rather miss) bollocks on stilts: the notion that an identity rooted in nothing more than the planet as a universal zip code would ever be sufficient should have been laughable. Yet nobody laughed, and certainly none of the experts so much as giggled even as the opposite proved true. The more myopic westerners promoted the vacuous banality of post-nationalist identity—what Mr Martin called “multicultural tolerance and respect”—the more people looked elsewhere and sought alternatives. Islam and “Chinese civilization” (to return to the author’s specific examples) both did a roaring trade, while “citizens of the planet” degenerated to a useful designation for the millions of unfortunates in collapsed cities and regions who fell between the cracks of the hardening ideological blocs. “Stateless persons,” we would once have said.

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It is only human to wish to belong to something larger than oneself, and thereby give one’s life meaning. For most of history, this need was satisfied by tribe and then nation, and religion. But by the late twentieth century the Church was in steep decline in Europe, and the nation-state was abhorred as the font of racism, imperialism, and all the other ills. So some (not all) third-generation Britons of Pakistani descent went in search of identity and found the new globalized Islam. And some (not all) 30th-generation Britons of old Anglo-Saxon stock also looked elsewhere, and found “global warming.” What was it they used to say back then? “Think globally, act locally”? It worked better for jihad than for environmentalism.

Adherents of both causes claimed to be saving the planet from the same enemy—decadent capitalist infidels living empty consumerist lives. Both faiths insisted their tenets were beyond discussion. As disciples of the now obscure prophet Gore liked to sneer, only another climate scientist could question the climate-science “consensus”: busboys and waitresses and accountants and software designers and astronomers and physicists and mere meteorologists who weren’t officially designated climatologists were unqualified to enter the debate. Correspondingly, on Islam, for an unbe-liever to express a view was “Islamophobic.”

As to which of these competing global identities was more risible, the 44th President of the United States promised to lower the oceans, while Hizb ut-Tahrir promised a global caliphate;
The Guardian
’s ecopalyptic correspondent Fred Pearce declared that within a few years Australia would be uninhabitable,9 while Islam4UK declared that within a few years Britain would be under sharia.10 I was never a betting man, even when it remained legal in Europe, but, if I had been forced to choose one of these scenarios, and had found an obliging bookie, I could have made a tidy sum . . .

So here we are with the oceans more or less exactly where they were, and Australia still habitable, and everything else utterly transformed. How pathetic it seems to have to state the obvious—that pseudo-identities cannot stand up to genuine identities. The “international community” proved to be fake, and hardheaded Russian and Chinese nationalism all too real.

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The collective “European” consciousness promoted by the European Union shimmered and dissolved like a desert mirage, unlike the collective Islamic consciousness of the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation. When push came to shove, when bailout came to bankruptcy, there was no “Europe”

beyond the official fictions of the Eurocrat elite. But, notwithstanding Sunni loathing for Shia, and Turk for Arab, and Arab for Persian, and Persian for Pakistani, Pakistani for black, Wahhabi for “moderate,” and fervent jihadist for non-observant semi-apostate, most Muslims were nevertheless happy to identify themselves as part of what the author Christopher Caldwell called “Team Islam.”

By 2010, the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation was already the largest single voting bloc at the UN, and controlled among other bodies the Human Rights Council. Which is why it quickly became an anti-human rights council, fiercely opposed to free speech, freedom of religion, women’s rights, and much more. The international institutions built by an un-imperial America after the Second World War were effortlessly co-opted by nations and alliances that barely existed then. The OIC’s conception of human rights came from their Cairo Declaration. Article 24: “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari’a.”11

Quite so. The OIC took the view that Islam, in both its theological and political components, should be beyond question, and its members supported the UN’s rapid progress toward the planet-wide imposition of a law against “defaming” religion—which meant in effect a global apostasy law that removed Islam from public discourse. Imagine if someone had proposed an “Organization of the Christian Conference” that would hold summits attended by prime ministers and presidents, and vote as a bloc in transnational bodies. But, of course, by the twenty-first century there was a “Muslim world” (as presidential speechwriters and
New York Times
headline editors casually acknowledged) but no “Christian world” (heaven forfend!): Europe was militantly post-Christian, Russia had applied for observer membership of the OIC, and, as the 44th president—Obama—

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bizarrely asserted to a European interviewer, America was “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.”12

And, if there was a “Muslim world,” what were its boundaries? The OIC

was formed in 1969 with mainly Middle Eastern members plus Indonesia and a couple more. By the Nineties, former Soviet Central Asia had signed on, plus Albania, Mozambique, Guyana, and various others. By the time the EU applied for observer status in the second decade of the twenty-first century, it seemed a mere formality.

And America? In 2007, the 43rd president had announced the appoint-ment of the first U.S. Ambassador to the OIC.13 There was little fuss when Michigan applied for membership.

And so it went. You didn’t need to go to “the Muslim world” to see

“Team Islam” in action, only to what we used to call Christendom. When the subject of a fast Islamizing Europe first arose in the Oughts, sophisticates protested that one shouldn’t “generalize” about Muslims. And it was true that, if you took a stamp collector’s approach to immigration issues, there were many fascinating differences: the French blamed difficulties with their Muslim population on the bitter legacy of colonialism; whereas Germans blamed theirs on a lack of colonial experience at dealing with these exotic chappies. And, if you were a small densely populated nation like the Netherlands, the difficulties of Islam were just the usual urban/rural frictions that occur when people from the countryside—in this case, the Moroccan countryside—move to the cities. It was the consequence of your urban planning, or your colonialism, or your wealth, or just plain you. But, if you were in some decrepit housing project on the edge of almost any Continental city from Malmö to Marseilles, it made little difference in practice. “If you understand how immigration, Islam, and native European culture interact in any western European country,” wrote Christopher Caldwell,

“you can predict roughly how they will interact in any other—no matter what its national character, no matter whether it conquered an empire, no matter what its role in World War II, and no matter what the provenance of its Muslim immigrants.”14 European Islam turned out to be less divided after 291

than Greeks from Germans, Swedes from Portuguese. Many ethnic Continentals only discovered the post-nationalist identity they’d been long promised after they converted to Islam: when the mirage of the “European Union” faded, the Eurabian Union was the desert beyond.

Nor could the over-Europeanized cult of transnationalism survive in the wider world. As the EU, the UN, and the G7 seized up, the tranzis turned elsewhere, ever on the lookout for the Newest Established Permanent Float-ing Crap Game on the geopolitical circuit. For a while, in the wake of the 2008 downturn, they pinned their hopes on the G20: same great poseur multilateralism, brand new secretariat. You could see what was in it for EU

prime ministers: the transnational talking-shops were the equivalent of those all-star charity fundraisers that spent so much money chauffeuring the stars to the stadium there was no cash left for the charity. Diplomacy used to be, as Canada’s Lester Pearson liked to say, the art of letting the other fellow have your way.15 By the twenty-first century, “soft power” had become more of a discreet cover for letting the other fellow have his way with you.

The Europeans “negotiated” with Iran over its nuclear program for years, and in the end Iran got the nukes and Europe got to feel good about itself for having sat across the table talking to no purpose for the best part of a decade.

In Moscow, Vladimir Putin, self-promoted from president to de facto czar, decided it was well past time to reconstitute the old empire and start re-hanging the Iron Curtain—not formally, not initially, but certainly as a sphere of influence from which the Yanks would keep their distance. Russia, like China, was demographically weak but geopolitically assertive. The Europe the new czar foresaw was one not only energy-dependent on Moscow but security-dependent, too. Hence, his mischievous support for a nuclear Iran—because mullahs with nukes served Russia’s ambitions to restore its hegemony over Eastern Europe. Only Washington was surprised at how far west “Eastern” Europe extended by the time Moscow was done.

In an unstable world, the Russians offered themselves as the protection racket you could rely on, and there were plenty of takers for that once every 292

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European city was within range of Teheran and the other crazies. Look at it from their point of view: as America’s “good cop” retreated to the precinct house, there was something to be said for a “bad cop” who still had some credibility when it came to head-cracking.

In the nineteenth century the Anglophone powers killed or captured pirates. Two centuries later, with primitive vessels seizing tankers the length of carriers off the Horn of Africa, it was all more complicated. The Royal Navy, which over the centuries had done more than anyone to rid the civilized world of the menace of piracy, declined even to risk capturing their Somali successors. They had been advised by Her Majesty’s Government that, under the European Human Rights Act, any pirate taken into custody would be entitled to claim refugee status in the United Kingdom and live on welfare for the rest of his life.16 There was a film series popular at the time:
Pirates of the Caribbean
. I doubt it would have cleaned up at the box office if the big finale had shown Mr. Geoffrey Rush and his crew of scurvy sea dogs settling down in council flats in Manchester and going to the pub for a couple of jiggers of rum washed down to cries of “Aaaaargh, shiver me benefits check, lad.” For his part, the U.S. Attorney-General, the chief law-enforcement official of the world’s superpower, was circumspect about the legal status of pirates, as well he might be. Obviously, if the United States Navy had seized some eyepatched peglegged blackguard off the coast of Somalia and hanged him from the yardarm or made him walk the plank, pious senators would have risen as one to denounce an America that no longer lived up to its highest ideals . . . and the network talking-heads would have argued that Plankgate was recruiting more and more young men to the pirates’ cause . . . and judges by the dozen would have ruled that pirates were entitled to the protections of the U.S. constitution and that under ObamaCare their peglegs had to be replaced by high-tech prosthetic limbs at taxpayer expense.

Conversely, a 2010 headline from the Associated Press: “Pirates ‘Have All Died,’ Russia Says, After Decrying ‘Imperfections’ In International Law.”17 Perhaps it seemed just as funny at the time.

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The Somalis had made the mistake of seizing a Russian tanker. When Moscow’s commandos took it back, they found themselves with ten pirates on their hands and the prospect of submitting them to an “imperfect”