The Ancient Feud

John Derbyshire lays down his semen-spattered anthology of Kipling poems long enough to turn a gimlet eye on Mark Steyn's new book, and proclaim himself displeased.

The bone of contention seems to be that while Steyn loves the British Empire as passionately as any Serious Man must, he doesn’t understand that its like will not be here again:

Like many another, Mark is dazzled to blindness by the example of the British Empire. Note to Mark: It was a one-off.

That said, Derbyshire is quick to point out that Steyn's grasp of geopolitics is, in some respects, nearly the equal of his own:

At the end of the book Mark says we have three options: submission to Islam, the destruction of Islam, or the reform of Islam. Just so, just so.

I'm annoyed that Derb has given away the book's ending, but I'm happy to learn that he and Steyn - the Clausewitz and Rommel of their day - have managed, against all odds, to find common ground on the question of the Raghead Menace.

The first of these options can be ruled out right away: We can't submit to those confounded Muslim chappies. For one thing, there'd be no more ogling underdressed fifteen-year-old girls for Derbyshire. It's a safe bet that the Islamomaniacs don't like show tunes, either, which puts them at loggerheads with Steyn. Submitting to Islam is simply a nonstarter, no matter how much the jihadists share our hatred of fags, uppity women, frivolous lawsuits, and poststructuralist theory.

On the other hand - and this is where our bright boys give Sun Tzu a run for his money - we can exterminate the brutes. The complete "destruction of Islam" may be impossible, but what kind of defeatist would refuse to give it a whirl?

When Steyn claims that we can "reform Islam," I assume that this means nuking Mecca, at the very least. In the first place, "reform" usually means "destroy now and forever" in wingnut-speak. And Steyn and Derbyshire have insisted elsewhere on the perfect, implacable enmity of Der Ewige Muselmann.

Speaking of implacable enmity, Thomas Gallagher's book Paddy’s Lament quotes 19th-century British political economists to the effect that the mass migration of the Irish only seemed to reduce the threat posed to England by Celtic subnormality; the danger remained that these sickly Irish weeds would thrive and bloom unnaturally when transplanted to American soil. The London Times understood precisely what this would mean for Civilization:

We shall only have pushed the Celt westwards. Then, no longer cooped up between the Liffey and the Shannon, he will spread from New York to San Francisco, and keep up the ancient feud at an unforeseen advantage…To the end of time a hundred million spread over the largest habitable area in the world, and, confronting us everywhere by sea and land, will remember that their forefathers paid tithes to the Protestant clergy, rent to absentee landlords, and a forced obedience to the laws which these had made.

What makes the Irish so frightening, you'll note, is the notion that they might be holding a grudge. Their mistreatment in the past actually mandates their mistreatment in the present.

It's all fairly silly, like reading Victorian warnings against self-pollution. But it was serious and sober enough at the time, and the science of comparative physiognomy could confirm Irish viciousness in the rare cases when anecdotal evidence didn't.

I assume that Derbyshire and Steyn are wistful about the British Empire because they're both given to laborious affectation; yammering about the glory of the Raj and the ingratitude of the wogs is cheaper, easier to master, and manlier than wearing a monocle. But I suspect they also like it because it was an era in which the White Race was as ideal and effortless a subject for the sentimental palette as Children Found Dead in the Snow. Given how much of their political program comes from this sort of childish, crackpot aestheticism, it's no wonder that, as Thers says, it's "unachievable in any real universe."

(Illustration from Comparative Physiognomy by James W. Redfield, 1852.)