Conversations with History: Mark Steyn

[Music] welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guest today is Mark Steyn who's writing on war politics the arts and culture can be read around the world from the Atlantic Monthly to the Australian he's the author of America alone the end of the world as we know it he is visiting the Berkeley campus as the 2007 Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz lecturer at Berkley joining us in the studio is professor emeritus Thomas Barnes of history and law welcome gentlemen mark welcome to Berkley glad to be here where we were born and raised I was born in Toronto and I had I guess the bulk of my schooling over in the United Kingdom at King Edward's school which I was just talking with Professor Barnes is the alma mater of JRR tolkien a math so so however well my book does it's never going to be the top bestseller to be produced by anyone from that school and so I'm basically are we go myself as a child of the of the the tail end of the British Empire as it were and looking back how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world well that's that's interesting my my father's Irish and my mother's Belgian and they both wound up in Canada in completely different ways my father was doing what a lot of young men did at that time he was just kind of loafing around the colonies for a couple of years my mother was there in more dramatic circumstances her family had decided to abandon her native country Belgium and they just happened to pick Canada because their town had been liberated by Canadian troops at the end of the Second World War and that's why they chose Canada a lot of people did that a lot of Dutch people did as well and so in a sense their their reasons for being in Canada were completely different one was they're just out of that kind of sense of entitlement that the english-speaking peoples have that they can kind of go all over the world and live where they want and do as they please and whereas my mother was just sort of swept there by the tides of history and I do think in a sense that that kind of difference resonates with me to this day really was there a lot of talk around the dinner table about politics art and culture because you you cover so many topics in your writing and your writing is so globalised in a way well I I don't think my mother is a completely apolitical person you know if she she has any kind of credo it's you know the Beatles all you need is love and I just roll I roll my eyes and move on and this is a woman you know basically grew up under Nazi occupation and must understand and some basic level that this is not going to take you far in exceptional circumstances my father I think wasn't a great influence on me at least in terms of cultural writing because he certainly had of a broad range of musical and cultural interests in that way and and what did you have any teachers or mentors who who pushed you in the direction of wanting to be a writer I did have school teachers that did have an impact on me they were good teachers I was I was not a good student really right for me I would say what would now be added in a grade six or seven the equivalent that I was I got bored easily and if I felt had but kind of mastered the general thrust of things I had a tendency my mind and tendency to wander off I wasn't a particularly good student I I was billion Lea adept at inventing ever more implausible excuses as to why certain homework had internally some time and I think in I think what I did like about what I did like about the teachers I had was that they put up with a lot of that and they still gave you credit for when you when you did things and things right and I'm sometimes pleasantly surprised when you happen to be going through the Attic or whatever and you find something you wrote at 14 and you thought my goodness this actually yes this actually stands up pretty well it's it's the voice in embryo I happen to read an essay that Kingsley Amos the British novelist wrote at school when he was 11 and it is like it is actually the first draft of a Kingsley Amos normally if there was like a kind of junior Amos that's that's what it would be like all the kind of muscle and vigor of the pros the the is there present in embryo and I think that's always good when you can see you told the tale yesterday to brandon littles one-on-one session about having gone to the attic and found a book that you found very very useful when it came in precisely to doing the work for you might recount that because I think that's revelatory of many things I think it's revelatory first of all of the nature of the education you got and I guess also revelatory gives a light ear to your to your assertion that you were just more or less a goof-off well III after September 11th I found myself not everybody suddenly had to become an expert on Islam you know we all suddenly gotta have the maps of Afghanistan and we're pointing out what was gonna go right and what was gonna go wrong and I didn't actually find a lot of the commentary in the newspapers useful not just the pundits but every time they'd call on some professor of Middle Eastern Studies to write something and particularly when it came to Wahhabism which is that the form of Islam that the Saudis have done such a grand job of exporting all over the world it rang a very dim and distant Bell with me that I'd come across it before and I remembered what it was which was that at high school at some point doing a particular obscure corner of Indian history we'd learned about the attempted Wahhabi subversion of British India they did very well at one point one one guy fatally stabbed the Chief Justice of India and the following year another were happy fatally stabbed the Viceroy and as I said to Professor Barnes these these were yesterday in the class these were in fact the highest-profile successes of the Wahhabi statement until smile 11th and I'd had a kind of vague memory of that and I went upstairs to the attic where I had my old schoolbooks I went through the relevant history books and I found the one and I looked up a little bit more on it and it actually is in that incident is in America alone so kind of old-fashioned his history education can come in so I think you're saying that this kind of global education that you got as a result of who your parents were and being a emerging citizen of an empire you know in in the last stages suggests that that's really how you found your voice as a writer did talk a little about that well I think I think first of all if you're not from America it's easy to write in different markets if you notice it I go around this country and alpha if you go say to the New York Post it's full of Australians you'll go to other media outposts in America and they're full of British people there's a lot of British Canadian Australian people doing very well in the American media and there's not really a lot of equivalents to that if you go to there's normally a lot of Americans working in Britain or Australian Canada for one reason this is the most this is the number one country in the world so if you want to make it and you're an American you're already kind of in the in the top market why would he want to go to Canada or Australia or Britain and and so I think I do think one the advantages though being from those kind of other countries is that it is better it is easier to move around to write for different markets for different audiences and in a sense which i think is a particular concern aliens grow up as the world's greatest observer culture there they're the 49th parallel from a Canadian point of view is the world's biggest store window and you're you're on the outside looking in you I think that's one reason why Canadians particularly good at moving down here and becoming funny guys whether it's you know Jim Carrey or Leslie Nielsen or at the more elevated humorous tend as it were because because they watch American pop culture as outsiders and that can be very useful because you're you're both an expert in it but you're also at one removed from it which gives you a perspective on it which adds as said I think is particularly useful comedy I think that's but I think everyone in the in the in in certain parts of the english-speaking world at least I think everyone thinks they thinks they know America and in fact I think it's more complicated it's not more complicated than that the longer I live here the more I'm aware that Matar profoundly different from countries that a few years ago I thought were much more similar students and the general public watches I always like to ask writers like yourself what do you think are the skills and the temperament required for being a professional writer well I think I think the first thing is you just you just have to do it I think if you sit around waiting for the great opening sentence you'll never write anything you mentioned my father my father was a was an art expert and he he always you for years was planning to write a book on on art and he used to leave notes for himself by the telephone and it would be you know the note would be go to post office pay gardener write book and of course if you just leave notes by the telephone for you like that you never will write a book and I so I think a lot of it is just doing it and I'm often when I started and in journalism and you're like a kind of cocky young punk and you can't quite understand why it is that some of these guys you think are just like middle-aged bores who haven't written anything interesting in 25 years are holding down all the jobs and my limited experience of being in the editing rooms at newspapers is that often it's because they're the guys who are reliable that if you say we need this by 5:00 p.m. they deliver it by 5:00 p.m. you know we despair we have that awful phrase oh he's he's he's just phoning it in you'd be surprised if you were the editor from the editors point of view how grateful you are for the guy who phones it in compared to when it's five o'clock and you haven't got the copy and you're waiting there and all that so I think I think certain level you just got to be you just got to be reliable you just got to get get on and do it and I think after after that if you really don't want to be spending a couple of hours a day writing you really should not be writing you shouldn't be doing it I know I'm a painfully slow writer compared to a lot of people I'm always horrified when I hear people saying how long they take to to write a book or you know cuz I it comes very slowly to me but I think even if it comes slowly you've just got to actually sit down there and undo it you you are doing writing in a globalized world with multimedia platforms how does that complicate your vocation well I don't think I don't believe you can write for the world and I think when you try to you produce something very boring one example of that it was something I was just looking at in fact for in preparation for the Nimitz lectures is general me sheriff's biography or autobiography his memoir in the line of fire now when you listen to General Musharraf talk he has a very engaging in particular way of talking he speaks that that kind of clicked raj english that a lot of the Pakistani military do and it has a particular rhythm and and beauty of its own and I love it when he's he's talking there about these when you listen to him talk about these kada chaps in the in the Pakistani tribal lands now his book he did some I think of simon and schuster in New York his book has been either ghost written or rewritten by his editor into a kind of bland colorless standard American English and as a result it's not written it's a great book in many ways but it's not written in generally chef's voice and I think that's the danger that when you just try to write for everybody you come up with this bland vanilla style I mean I occasionally why do if I have a column that in Australia and it's republished in America I'll alter a Lowell to some of the slang expressions mmm but some I won't alter because I think well this is actually a great expression and be fun to introduce it to America and I think I think that's I think that sometimes I take great I think the differences in different forms of English one of the great pleasures of the language so you but you have to have an ear for that which you must have yes I do and I and and and I think it's difficult I think someone said to me once well you know I had read had had as some kind of exercise had compared a column of mine as it appeared in the show Chicago sun-times the National Post in Canada and the Daily Telegraph in Britain and noticed these particular variations said wouldn't it be just great if you could get a software program but we're just automatically replace the obscure canadian reference with an obscure american reference be careful what some point you have to have a kind of built in and you can't have an error you you can't you've got to have an and it's not just it's or it's not just about words i think it's all it is also about the rhythm of language and I think that is I think it's varied it would be very difficult to fake that it couldn't you can it's not quite it's in a strange way it's it because it's subtler it's it's not as easy as you know learning to speak an entirely foreign language and I think that's that's why you can't you unless you have a kind of aptitude for that you just can't plow through it translate I there's a very where I mentioned Kingsley a miss earlier I don't want to kind of beat up on his son Martin Amos but his his son has always loved America and he wrote a couple years ago he wrote a kind of an attempt at a kind of authentic American kind of postmodern thriller type thing and I thought the his air for Americanism was just completely ridiculous and absurd and unconvincing I think I think at some point you've got to have you've got to have your own voice but you've got to occasionally be you've got to know you've also got to know your audience and know when you're better off saying bloke rather than guy or whatever that's quite important Andrew Roberts the english-speaking people since 1900 do you think he's managed to to catch these sort of international resonance that will allow that to work equally in any one of the of the Anglosphere markets with Anglophone markets well andrew is a great is a great popular historian and a great writer but he writes much more I would say in a in a British voice I I regard myself much more as the kind of the classic ruthless cosmopolitan you know in both in my sinister membership of the International Zionist conspiracy but also but also I think in in in my writing style there's there's lots of there's there's lots of bits I think there's the the there's the bits about of me American English oddly enough was the first language I fell in love with really just from things at Warner Brothers movies and from and from popular songs you'd hear you'd hear old phrases yes and and and it was and they were really the first things to start me talking about him thinking about English as a language because obviously when you were child English is a given and you're learning Latin and French and all the rest of it and so that was the first one of brothers kind of gangster talk was one of the first things got me interested in English but I so i love that that side but i also love you know evil in war and peih-gee Woodhouse and and and you can hear that kind of clash sometimes in columns where there'll be some there'll be a lurch from the Amero bust American vernacular into something slightly more feet and ornate but yeah but you know I like that but before we talk go back to but I have one more question and that is your when when you look at the body of your work you there's interesting things going on in your vocation I think and one is that you are redefining what a public intellectual is or you're part of that process but secondly you're writing about you know movies theater musical politics war and so on any comments about how you bring all that together and how it makes a difference in the way you do you work well well I went a couple of months ago I was in Australia and I went into the ABC which is their big national broadcaster thinking I was going to do a show on the on the jihad and and global politics and everything and I got there and the guy says says well here's the way we're going to do it at first I want to talk about songwriting for the first half hour and then we'll move into the end of the world so you know will do they don't write them like they used to for half an hour and then it's the end it's the apocalypse let's head for the hills and and of course we had a tribe had to make a transition so at some point at 28 minutes personally half hour or whatever we had to stop talking about beloved old songs and slide into I think it was you know whatever particular war and conflagration was happening that morning I hope you use waltzing matilda to make that well i would i would have appreciated it's a musically but i made the point that in an idea obviously if in an ideal world i love writing that music i love writing about film and theatre and i would do that if this was an ideal world but i don't think i think at some point if there are great things going on in the world and you want to say something about them and you don't it's not going to be any consolation to me to have a great CD collection as Western civilization falls apart in a sense you've got to if you if you value the the freedom to stroll into some piano bar in a hotel somewhere on the planet and here a great singer singing the way you look tonight or whatever you've got to understand that even that little miniature experience is at the apex of a whole cultural foundation and that you can't just sort of share off the small pleasures of a 32 by a song from all the big big geopolitical issues they are explicitly connected in that sense let me show you a book now and then let's talk about your book America alone the end of the world as we know it and grow you out on that subject I think one of the first points that comes across very strongly is your view of Europe and its failure to meet the challenges of our world talk a little about that what's wrong with Europe well I think Europe is in a profoundly weak state as such it faces a perfect storm of crises that it is never that it would require huge skill to be able to line up like some kind of Rubik's Cube and figure out a way to get it all properly aligned and I don't think the political class in Europe which is an astonishingly complacent political class and one that is not as responsive to popular pressures as exists in the United States I think it's much more closed in that respect I think it's going to be very unlikely that they will muster the will to see that through you know their first problem is a basic one which they is that they have death-bed demography which is to say that 17 European countries are basically at what they call lowest low fertility rates which is 1.3 or below which no society is recovered from now that you can look at falling fertility rates around the world it's also happening in Japan is also happening in Canada it's also happening in in in parts of Asia but who gets there first it tuned to the real deathbed numbers is going to be critical and right now the Europeans are on line to get there first what have they done in effect they imported a Muslim population to be the children they couldn't be bothered having and that in turn I think has is transforming the political character of the continent had a very Swift rate and so I wrote the book in a sense because I I think that this idea that somehow it's simply george w bush's texan boorishness that a France Europe is is not really the issue here he could speak beautiful French and be charming and sophisticated with Jacques Chirac at continental banquets at the Elysee Palace and it would make absolutely no difference because what we're seeing here is a profound divergence between the continent of Europe and the United States that will become a permanent feature of life if you wish actually Eric you you have it's and you had 40 percent Muslim youth unemployment rates in your cities the last thing you need is to send your troops marching into battle alongside the Great Satan that simply it's not going to be a priority for you in any rational scenario and that's nothing to do with how swaggering bushes or how much of a Texan gunslinger he is or any of the things that European cartoonists make make fun of him for what do you see as the root causes that come out of domestic policy that essentially what the welfare state and that route has has led to an internal bankruptcy that is contributing to things like the the the death bed demography well I do think you can in a sense simply when life life becomes too soft and amusing I think it's very hard to reconnect with something as basic as a survival instinct you know in a sense what is what is a mysterious to often to people who look at it from this side of Atlantic is the French for example have much much more free time than we do they they work much shorter weeks they have a 35-hour week they retire earlier they have paid vacation long long long paid vacations and similarly in Germany Germany has very generous employment provision education provision you know people stay at school until well into their early mid thirties and and and they retire very early and you think to yourself well what do they do with all this free time you cannot look and look on what they are on the way Europeans live and think today that they are producing great art great music or any of these other things there are other features I think that of European life that indicate that in a sense they become kind of softened into a kind of semi-comatose State not just that shows not just in the demography but in the lack the whole lack of energy artistic energy entrepreneurial energy on the continent you talk about civilization exhaustion and and you you make a distinction between primary versus secondary impulses let's follow up on that because it's the way you develop this idea of where Europe has gone wrong yes I mean I think you I think you can reach a point where the state over guarantees so much of life that simply that you can maintain a population and kind of permanent adolescence and and in a sense where we're halfway there and Canada is you know 80 percent of the way there it's not just a European phenomenon we think it entirely normal not just the Europeans but many people in this country think it entirely normal for example that the state should be responsible for our health care while we we expect to be able if we go to the supermarket we expect to be able to choose from a range of a hundred breakfast cereals if we're ordering a cable TV package we expect to get 500 channels we demand more and more choice in peripheral areas of life but we but on the critical issues were happy to mortgage the choices to the government and I think at a certain point you reached the point where you can actually sever people from basic basic survival instincts and certainly from the cross-generational impulse if you think if you think it's perfectly normal that you're rather boring elderly parents should become the charges of the state because you don't want to have them living in your spare bedroom so the state should pay for them to go off and live somewhere else it's very easy then to say figure out if you can do without grandparents that you can also do without grandchildren it's not such a big leap and it certainly happened in here one might argue that changes in society changes in the international economy are all almost making these things that you're describing as inevitable an inevitable consequence how do you respond to that in other words help us understand why this isn't inevitable and what you have to do about it to make it not be inevitable well I you know I I should say up front I should have said early you know I certainly don't pretend to have the answer to all the questions you know even on shows like this but but I think it's hard to deny that there aren't very big questions out there now I look at the United States for example we can figure out which kinds of societies don't work you can make arguments in Europe about which countries have high birth rates and low birth rates but the however you slice it they're all failing to maintain stable populations by contrast if you look at for example the United States in amongst all its particular problems that people like to point out the 40 million with no health insurance the massive gun crime and all the rest of it in nevertheless in its course statistics is the one healthy Western nation so you can say to yourself if I were European I'd say to myself well we can we can argue about which of our whether Sweden system is marginally less bad than Italy's but in the end they're all they're all failing on the core numbers on the key numbers America isn't maybe we should learn from America you say at one point social programs are a security threat because they weaken the ultimate line of defense the Freeborn citizen whose responsibilities are not subcontracted to the government yes I think that I think that is true I think it's very different in Europe the the response of the Spaniards for example to the March 11th bombings three years ago you can argue about particular aspects of that but the fact is that the this is a people that fought a bloody civil war in the 1930s faced with an external challenge this time around they just basically shrugged and said okay it's not that important to us let's let's give up think you can see the same thing happening in Belgium and the Netherlands a kind of ennui that that sets in it's interesting to me that three years ago when I first started writing about demographic issues and positing a kind of islamification of the continent people said to me people European commentators said this is this is nonsense it's rubbish it's not going to happen now a lot of them said it would say well yes it is going to happen but maybe it won't be so bad and and and another group of them say ok well maybe it will be bad but there's nothing we can do about it so we might you just have to accept it I that fatalism I think is not a healthy so all all successful all successful societies have a kind of vigor and in part one of the problems that we deal with in the Middle East for example is that there again is a kind of fatalism that is built into certain aspects of Arab culture no successful society is simply fatalistic and a lot of continental Europe is the second piece of your book which I will show again America alone is the threat posed by Islam let's talk a little about that because it follows naturally because this Europe that you've just described is it is incapable of addressing the problem and in fact has become codependent or rather dependent on the Islamic world to as you said to bring in so that Europe can bring in people to have the workers to fund the Social Security system for the aging Europeans so what what is particularly the main aspect of the other threat of you of the Islam well well there's really two parts to that there's obviously and one should say straight out there's obviously millions and millions of Muslims around the world who just want to live their lives get on with their lives but what we're seeing is not just an increase in Muslim population around the world a very dramatic increase it holds a much bigger share of the population now than it did in the 1970s but we're seen also a radicalization of those Muslim populations and a conscious radicalization of those populations from Saudi Arabia Iran and other forces now it hasn't radicalized 100% of them it hasn't radicalized 50% of them but what percentage of them does it have to radicalize for it to place a a profound question mark over the future of societies with significant Muslim populations you know we often talk about how there's not a lot of freedom in the Muslim world it's also the case there's not a lot of freedom a once a Muslim population gets to about 20% if you look at the sort of statistics on this if a Muslim population is somewhere between 20 and 50 percent it's that it's harder to operate what we in America would regard as a classically liberal society I think there were three exceptions to that Serbia and Montenegro Benin and Suriname in the in in the form of the former Dutch colony and so those are not and I don't think those would be regarded as successful models by the United States so what does it mean for example to the Netherlands when they face that situation really within the next generation are they going to be a fourth exception to that rule eh-eh Muslims a state with a twenty percent Muslim population that is that is still relatively free or will they already be reaching accommodations to find ways of not offending those Muslim populations when you look at this itsy-bitsy news items to schools in Berlin have introduced separate entrance ways now for Muslim students and non Muslim students you're already seeing signs that the European response to this will be forms of segregation in forms of restrictions on on the speech of everybody in order to accommodate certain minorities that is not going to be a successful way to go people in the audience might say you're walking a fine line here that what you're saying sounds racist but I want to draw your argument out to to make the point that that isn't the case and what I want to address is something you say you say global jihad lurks within Islam and Islam is a political project and the example that you were just giving was suggesting that there is in Islamic culture a lack of division between what we consider to be secular and what is considered to be religious which goes back to this whole problem of the separation of the state from religion but that Islam never mastered and and I gather that's the point that you're trying to make that there is an insinuation in Western society where the what we call multiculturalism opens us up to not dealing well with this contradiction no I think Islam differs from Christianity say in that it is an explicitly political project and ending an explicitly imperial project to that I think Muslims are enjoined in effect to eventually bring the entire world within the house of Islam by Congress that was the way Mohammad saw it he was a great warrior he didn't do the Jesus thing with Jesus's final words to his disciples before he ascended into heaven where they told them to go to all the cities in the known world and persuade people so you look at how Christianity developed it percolated up from the lowest members of society eventually up to the top if you if you if you look at the way islam advanced it advanced mainly by conquest i think that that difference is built into islam and i don't regard it as a racist issue in part because i think Islam has a lot of appeal to pasty white folks if you look at two recent news stories you can see that we're seeing more and more white converts to Islam who were being attracted some of these jihadist elements said this plot last summer to seize these various airliners Heathrow and blow them up enroute to America or over America one of the one the fellows involved in that his name was he'd changed his name to Muhammad bin jihad or whatever but he was actually he was actually the son of a Conservative Party agent called he had a name like you know Nigel fotheringay-phipps or something straight out of was like Bertie Wooster the jihadis and so this I don't think it is a racial issue I think this is in a sense and an IDE an ideology that has great appeal whatever a particular race you happen to belong to and I think that that is that I think we have a difficulty understanding that aspect of it because when a mosque opens on Main Street we don't in our mind we don't distinguish between that and a new Congregational Church opening or a new Episcopal Church and we see it as a house of God God and that is all it is but it is not all it is and also in our particular as you mentioned multiculturalism I think I think in a multicultural society in a sense it we have great difficulty I think coping with the idea of a kind of unique cultural society and as I am is really the perfect Union cultural society in which in which both your faith and your political system are bound up in this one perfect system and a multicultural society that wants to just put Islam as one of those things on the smorgasbord with with Episcopalian ISM and baptism and Catholicism and Judaism and Buddhism and new age and Wiccans and all the rest it's not it's something more than that and Kay tackle Johanna booknotes program a little while ago what would you give your final answer what'swhat's your final answer to K well she was a she was a lady caller on a on a show I was so I was on and she had that thing which I find slightly unnerving which is that that kind of faintly sort of New Age passivity that people have I don't mind I quite like the kind of conspiracists who say oh you know Bush pulled off 9/11 it was an inside job and all that ugly cos at least they're kind of engaged ok belongs to a group that I regard as really much much more worrying is the people who work sort of exist in a in a fluffy cloud of multicultural complacency if they cite any historical precedence to you it's always Martin Luther King and Gandhi and I think it's very easy to adopt that strategy if you're dealing with you know racist American rednecks or British imperial administrators I don't believe either of their strategies would have worked if you up against the guys who killed all those kids in that schoolhouse in Chechnya all the fellas who blew up the nightclub in Barney and I think that I think this idea that some that the sort of give peace a chance thing is not going to work he I mean these these are people who are yeah you know I quoted to K a thinking it would get a rise out of had poor lady the words of a British Muslim speaking at Trinity College Dublin somebody in the audience said what is Muhammad's message to unbelievers and he said Muhammad's message to unbelievers is I am here to slaughter you all I quoted this I'm Takei and she goes well that only means we have to redouble our efforts to work even harder now what she means by redouble our efforts to work even harder is she basically means she's not making any efforts she's not gonna redouble anything she just doesn't want to think about it she doesn't want to have to think about it and I think the idea that it makes no difference to a society if you happen to live in a town and it's 80% Congregationalist I'm no fan I'm not citing them as no I'm no fan of the Congregational Church at all really but but let's let's say that for say 80 percent Congregationalist and 20 percent Muslim or it's 80 percent Muslim and 20 percent congregation list those are two very different societies you make a point of emphasizing the Saudi role in bringing out some of the worst aspects of Islam and and pushing this Wahhabi strain which we were talking about earlier let's play that out a little in other words how do you see them what is their nefarious role in all of this in making the possibilities of Islam go in a direction that really leads to terrorism well I think Saudi Arabia is the great foreign policy mistake of the 20th century it's a state that should never have been created and never entrusted to that family and even said god bless him very successfully played off the British and the Americans against each other in there I think the whole of the modern Middle East which was invented you know by the British and French in 1922 is a disaster in fact but even on the scale of that disaster the creation of Saudi Arabia is far worse it speaks I think to one of the more problematic aspects of the United States which is that America is a non imperial superpower so it in a sense it's always preferred to do business through clients and in it and in this case it created these clients in the Middle East and they turned into a monster now when the president says you're either with us or you're with the terrorists the short answer to that is that Saudi Arabia has has checked the both of the above box occasionally they're there more that the the princes they put up on CNN give the impression that they're with us but the they're also funding their the main ideological funders of our enemies around the world and it's not just that they're both with us and with the terrorists but that every time somebody goes and gas is up at and fills their car up they they too are funding both sides of this war because Saudi Arabia's principle export is not oil but ideology and all the oil does is enable them to fund the ideology is the prescription then to decline ties them to pull the rug out from underneath the Saudi royal family what do we do I think I think I'm not I'm not one of these people who thinks that if you get rid of the House of Saud whatever follows will be worse I think that there would be a lot of benefits to basically you know in a sense the jihad at one level is a Saudi problem the Saudis successfully exported to the rest of the world it would be a very good thing to repatriate the problem and say that if they want to dupe this thing out they would be better to do it on the Arabian Peninsula rather rather than in Indonesia and Central Asia and Europe and North America and all the other parts of the planet they've disable Obama you you say so you make an intriguing point an important point in discussing Islam you say the moderation of Islam comes from the surrounding culture meaning the places where Islam has gone and been shaped and adapted by culture talk a little about that because that's an important point and you see Europe unable to do that yeah but clearly we in the United States are able to to some extent do do it successfully I think I think I'm not you know I'm not complacent about about it at all but I do think that the United States is a much better job of assimilating Muslims than the Europeans do there is an American dream and Muslims can tap into them if there is a Belgian dream or a French stream Muslims are by and large excluded from it I mean it's a horrible these dehumanizing estates that they keep Muslims in in France it's it's a shocking and disgraceful and disgraceful thing and that's why in effect they're becoming more radicalized with each generation so when you look back anything well what are the kind of societies in which Islam exists in a kind of more or less benign tension with the broader society they're not very encouraging examples Central Asia under the Soviets those Muslims in in in that part of the world in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan they they were moderate imbibe us of alcohol not on the same industrial level as the average Slav was at to the north but they certainly were moderate moderate drinkers and and Islam was not a problem under the Soviets within months in effect of the collapse of the Soviet Union these the Saudis and the Iranians had spent all this walking around money up there and successfully radicalize them one exception Turkmenistan where the crazy dictator Turkmenbashi effectively wrote his own Koran this absurd book which is like some Deepak Chopra rewrite of the care and demanded it be placed in every mosque and when the Haredim am objected to it he basically fired him and tossed him in jail and and this guy again success it's the one it's the one stand where there aren't guys jumping up and down in the street shouting death to the Great Satan similarly Indonesia under the dictatorship of course if you say this to Americans these are not encouraging examples so you know if that's what it takes to moderate Islam nobody here wants to become the Soviet Union or Turkmenbashi or the Indonesian dictatorship even when you look at a British India which held Islam in in its Muslim minority there in a kind of controlled State even that is not an encouraging example to to the Americans but it does show I think that Islam in a sense is as opportunist as the broader society allows and the problem in Europe is that the modern multicultural state of continental Europe is a nullity even if you wanted to assimilate with it how could you what does it mean to be British in the year 2007 the fellas who blew up the London Tube were British born and bred they'd been raised in British schools they'd they like fish and chips they like cricket they like lousy English pop music and leisure wear and in the end they got on those tubes and blew up their fellow British subjects simply but there is in in those cut those societies that promote this kind of weak weedy lowest-common-denominator multiculturalism there's nothing to assimilate to so why do you believe that America is uniquely qualified alone to to address these problems well I think America in some ways and one you know obviously in a sense this is a 50-50 nation and at any one time half the country will disagree on some of these things but America is the last really the last state in the Western world with the possible exception of Australia where qualities like self-reliance are still valued where the birth rate is still healthy and where it is still not the accepted role of life that the the primal responsibilities of adulthood should be exercised by the government you know that is true when when I bought my house in New Hampshire I was bitten now as an a kind of urban guy I wasn't too used to living in the country and at that first night I heard something which was you know probably just a some kind of animal wandering around the door and I got a little nervous and I called my police chief and said well what should I do with it if it's an intruder what should I do and the police chief went well you know you need to disable him yourself because if you call me I'll be asleep and by the time I get by the time I get there I'll be dragging you out I'd much rather drag him out and this is that is simply not something you would ever hear for example in the United Kingdom in the United Kingdom if you hear somebody my poor old sister-in-law lives in bucolic part of the English countryside she hears somebody prowling around the perimeter she calls 999 which is their 9-1-1 and it comes through to to some to some answering machine off the coast of scotland somewhere and they get back to her two weeks later I mean it simply simply put this is I think the last the even in you know in a vulnerable state this is the last country where people where where what we would regard as traditional impulses of adulthood are still wielded by a significant proportion of the population it seems to me that in your book what what you're you're you see resolve in confronting these threats is very important but on the other hand you are also open to array of vehicles for dealing with the threat is that fair yes I do think resolve is what matters because I think nobody nobody is scared of America's nuclear arsenal they're scared about the possibility of America using it you can have all the tanks and all the ships and all the guns in the world and if nobody thinks they ever have to fear you using them it doesn't make any difference doesn't make any difference at all and in fact that is the calculation that America's enemies have made through on the basis of things like Mogadishu ten years ago they base it they basically concluded that that the vast arsenal counts for as nothing measured against a feud a few dozen body bags on TV that in a sense America is like a late period Ottoman Sultan lying on his cushions and if you prick him in your toe in his toes he'll howl up in pain he's not a genuine superpower that's the calculation that the jihad has made and that alq medina jad makes and that Kim Jong Il makes and that a lot of others make and America at some level has to show that that is a false view of the United States but but you also suggest in your book that emphasizing women's rights in the Islamic world that their their various vulnerabilities that one has to play yeah to succeed I I'm in favor of creative destabilization I think it's disgraceful that this country spends a fortune on intelligence operations and gets nothing from the CIA the CIA sits around in Langley Virginia and reads emails from outer space all day that's that's what they do and it's outrageous and and there are a lot of things that we could be doing that would would ensure that those guys had a few of the headaches that that we do and that a lot of European prime ministers have right of this man and the and the women's rights issue I think is absolutely the critical wedge into that world because it's true a lot of women I mean you look at the appeal of Islam on the continent where a lot of wits a lot of women who convert to Islam they don't it's clear that there is a substantive chunk of modern Western women who don't want to don't regard Britney Spears as the be-all and end-all don't want to go around with navel piercings find the sort of slatton leanness of that all vain but that doesn't mean on the other hand that they want to live in a world that starts with genital mutilation and ends with honor killing there is a vast potential for subversion by bringing women's rights to the forefront of American policy which doesn't mean sending Karen Hughes to traipse around the Arab world in a designer burqa you know that is completely ridiculous but there there we should not be beyond the wit of this country for the amount of money it spends on intelligence to figure out how to use that as a wedge into the Muslims I'm afraid our time is out time we boast about I won't mark I want to thank you very much for coming to be the Nimitz lecturer and appearing on our program and I will show your book one more time America alone and thank you very much for joining us well thank you thank you I I've been little ill-at-ease with the Berkeley this is the first your share is the first thing I've done here I haven't worn a tie now you're wearing one we've got a fool the audience very much for joining us for this conversation with history [Music]

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 225,672

Keywords: Mark, Steyn, Islam, America

Id: K375rwCgTSs

Length: 55min 46sec (3346 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 10 2008