All hopes for the future assume the end of liberalism

A reader writes

Look at what happened when the Afrikaners, the Israelis, or the Serbs asserted their right to exist. Whatever the specifics of their circumstances, their efforts at self-preservation were met with crushing hostility from other Westerners.

Do you think that if the French or Dutch started implementing your three-step out-migration program, an American president would levy sanctions or even dispatch bombers to ‘defend democracy’ or such?

My reply:

Look, I keep running into the same objection: “Such and such non-liberal solution that you are proposing will not be possible because the liberal world will not stand for it.” And my answer is always the same: Any hope that we can save ourselves rests on the assumption and hope that the world will be abandoning its liberalism. If the liberalism endures, all is lost anyway, no salvation will be possible.

I am not thinking within the terms of the present liberal order, I am thinking beyond the end of the liberal order.

Howard Sutherland comments:

Liberals can write off or stigmatize Afrikaners and Israelis as peripheral “settlers,” while Serbs are peripheral. Not so the French; they are at the core of the West and have been for a very long time.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 14, 2005 09:54 AM | Send