A Clockwork Muslim

From Jihad Watch:

A Clockwork Muslim


This week I read the following on DNA India:



Al-Qaeda military strategist Ilyas Kashmiri is recruiting Britons and training them for launching Mumbai-style attacks in the UK, France and Germany during the Christmas period, a media report said today.

Kashmiri, described by The Sunday Times as the new Osama bin Laden and one of the most dangerous men on earth, was last week named as al-Qaeda's chief military strategist in Afghanistan and Pakistan.



Headlines always send me back to my books. I wrote last week about The Camp of the Saints, a potent nightmarish vision of the West overwhelmed by hordes of culturally and religiously alien interlopers, which proved eerily prophetic. Today, I'd like to address a work by Anthony Burgess--the novelist, essayist, and critic most famous for A Clockwork Orange, which depicted a soulless, socialist Britain where urban crime has gotten so out of control that police begin to use behaviorist conditioning on criminals, literally taking from them the free will to offend. Burgess clearly understood the power of futurist satire to make concrete and tangible the danger posed by evil or mistaken political ideas, and the work I'm treating today, his 1978 book entitled 1985, Burgess undertakes both to explain why such works are effective, and to illustrate his principles in practice.



To sum the narrative section of the book up very briefly: Burgess depicts a Britain where Margaret Thatcher never got elected, and the power of the trade unions has become almost absolute. Labor strikes paralyze the economy and make it almost ungovernable, until at last the Trades Unions Congress (TUC) gains formal power and renames England TUCland. Resistance breaks out, and one of its participants, Bev Jones, is a man whose wife burned to death in a fire, while striking fireman sat and their hands and watched. Indeed, Jones has lost almost everything to the bankrupt socialism that strangles the new Britain: Once a history professor at university, he was laid off when the pragmatists running the school deemed his subject matter superfluous; only pragmatic, industrial disciplines are worth teaching anymore, and Jones takes a job at a candy shop. When he rebelliously goes to work one day despite a strike, Jones is summarily fired. His mentally ill daughter must go into a wretched state institution, and Jones is rendered homeless. Stealing to survive, he ends up in custody--not at a jail but in a kind of re-education center, where representatives of the new socialist state attempt to indoctrinate him, and remake him as a "productive" and cooperative citizen.



Unconvinced, he serves his time, and upon his release he blunders into the ranks of the new-born resistance, a group called the Free Britons. Seemingly a group of genuine patriots, the Free Britons are essentially an army of strikebreakers, funded by mysterious paymasters whose agenda remains under wraps. At last, the government of TUCland falls, and the Free Britons take power. Then it's revealed that their funding came from wealthy Arab immigrants, who control the movement secretly, and by the end of the book are imposing on Britain an Islamic state. This is symbolized by the fact that Britain's national drink, warm beer, has been replaced in all the pubs with a kind of ersatz drink that uses a mild tranquillizer instead of alcohol--since such drugs are not forbidden in the Qur'an. Bev tries for a while to keep up a kind of resistance, teaching English history to the few who will listen, but in the end he commits suicide--as his country has.



It's a strange bird of a book--a novella that comes with a treatise. The first half of 1985 is a learned discussion of the genre of novel Burgess (somewhat pedantically) insists on calling not "anti-utopian" or "dystopian" but "cacotopian." He spends the most time on the best-known examples of such books, Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World--books which he points out are best read together, since they illustrate, respectively, the toxic extremes of ideological authoritarian statism, and libertine consumerist technocracy. Liberals during the Cold War used to enjoy playing "moral equivalence" between the Communist bloc and the Western states it threatened, by pointing out that if 1984 showed the dangers of socialism, Brave New World exposed the weaknesses of capitalism. The rejoinder I used to make to them was this: The horrors Orwell described in 1984 were really not much worse than the conditions Josef Stalin had already created in Russia, or those Mao Zedong was soon to bring about in China. Orwell's book was not so much a warning as a piece of fictionalized journalism. Huxley's picture of a toxic, pleasure-addicted utilitarian future where biotechnology obliterated the need for human virtue, and in the process hollowed out human nature, was in fact far ahead of its time. We are still only halfway down the road to Huxley's horrorshow, though our scientists are working late shifts trying to finish the job. Perhaps too many future researchers read Brave New World in high school and found the book inspiring, so now they're keeping it on their bedstands and using the novel as a roadmap for the future.



Likewise, 1985 proved creepily prescient. I read it in 1978 when it came out, and I was still in high school. The prospect of high-powered imams blustering from pulpits all across London, urging the imposition of sharia, seemed as outlandish to readers as Huxley's picture of a future where all reproduction was conducted in laboratories. How quickly things change, when demography instead of ideology is in the saddle. Try as they might, the Soviets could never produce that new species Marx dreamed of, "socialist man." But Muslims throughout the West are filling the cradles with the next generation of activists, evangelists, and terrorists. As commentors on this site pointed out in response to my piece on Paul Kengor's book Dupes, Communist ideology never sank so deep into the culture of eastern Europe, even of Russia, in the decades when it ruled, as Islam has penetrated every culture where it dominates. The ideological lie of Communism was a pale and paltry thing, compared to the 1,000-year old phenomenon that is Islam. I believe that at its heart Islam is an ideology with religious implications--a pretext, on Muhammad's part for personal power, and on the part of his followers for Arab conquest and subjugation of foreigners. It is an elaborate blueprint for expansion, domination, and assimilation, whose tyrannical program is spelled out and rendered dogmatic in the religion's infallible holy book. Imagine if the New Testament included in it the details of how to set up and run the Spanish Inquisition. It's hard to imagine how such a religion can ever be reformed. Indeed, as Robert Reilly points out in his excellent The Closing of the Muslim Mind (which will be reviewed here soon), the only times when Islamic faith seemed to flag were when Muslim countries were militarily and economically weak, when believers saw themselves as backward. That shook their faith, since Islam is a religion of success. It promises pleasure and power, and when these don't get delivered, one's faith is shaken. By contrast, Christianity saw its explosion of growth during a ferocious Roman persecution. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church--not of the mosque.

Posted by Roland Shirk on December 22, 2010 9:37 PM