Our Existential Peril

Sobieski at the Seige of Vienna, by Juliusz Kossak

We are at an existential crossroads here in the West and, as every traveler must do at such junctures, we have choices to make. That is a fancy way of saying that what we have at stake in our choosing is no less than our cultural, political and spiritual existence as a people. Our first choice, as individuals and as a society, must be whether or not we want to continue to exist as a people rooted in Judeo-Christian economic, political and religious freedoms, accept an alien religion as our creed, or live in subservience as Dhimmis under Sharia Law.

The choice is that stark, I'm afraid, and there are no pain free answers to the question. Nor can we duck the question. Any refusal on our part to make decisions will simply mean those who are demanding our submission will determine our fate. Accordingly, we must choose, and decide well, for our time of happy indolence is over as the ground shifts beneath our feet.

The threat to us is threefold in nature. First, as we can discern from events around the globe, Islam our old relentless enemy has emerged from the defeats induced by our overwhelming military, political and economic might during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was not always so, for during the previous thousand years Islam tended to be the victorious expansionist power and Christianity the colonized and threatened.

After centuries of conquest, forced conversion and repression, the old Orthodox Christian lands of the Mediterranean are now Muslim and the Christian remnant is lying low or fleeing from Muslim persecution. Abdul Raham, threatened with death in Afghanistan for the crime of converting to Christianity, is now living in Italy to escape the wrath of so-called moderate mullahs.

In a very real sense Mohammed's followers are again as they were in 1529 and 1683 moving on Vienna, but this time they are within the gates as well as without. Modern large-scale Muslim immigration into Europe since World War II has changed the old strategic dynamic and the change is not to the advantage of Europeans.

The second threat, more serious because it disarms us as we engage the first, is of our own making. Western society has become nihilistic, self-loathing, hedonistic, narcissistic, and utilitarian in its actions and view of human life. The acceptance and advocacy of euthanasia, abortion, and infanticide; the decline of the family; the destruction of marriage and the resulting plummeting in the birth rate may well result in the ceding of Europe to Islam before any defence can be properly mustered.

The latter point is very relevant. As in the thirteenth century, the capacity of the West to withstand the Islamic threat is today compromised by internal divisions. In 1204 invading Catholic crusader armies from Latin Europe sacked Constantinople. These crusader depredations weakened the Eastern Empire leading to the eventual defeat of Byzantium by Sultan Mehmed II (known as The Conqueror) two hundred years later. The lands of Orthodox Christianity are now Islamic lands and the great Cathedral of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, known as the Hagia Sophia, became a mosque. Repressive Muslim zealots are even now driving the tiny remnants of this once great Christian culture from the lands of their birth.

Today, many in the West reject Christianity because they see it as the enemy of personal freedom. It is not. It is the enemy of their personal licenciousness. Their growing effort to remove Christianity from the public square, in order to clear the ground for the pursuit of untrammelled hedonism is weakening this society at a time when it needs to be united. Our post-Christian latte sipping compatriots have no idea what awaits them should the Islamists triumph.

To be continued ...