The (liberal) desire to annihilate Islam

In my comment at FrontPage Magazine this evening (which I also posted in slightly revised form here), I concluded:

The fact which [Pipes], and all of us, must face is that the only way for Islam to stop being jihadist is for Islam to cease to exist. Since we don’t have the ability or desire to eliminate Islam from the world, the only rational option is to contain Islam within the Islamic lands.

In response to this statement, about six FP commenters said, not that my proposal was too hard-line, but that it was not hard-line enough, because what they want to do is annihilate much of the Islamic world with nuclear weapons, or at least annihilate Mecca, and so demoralize and destroy Islam.

I’ve written about this disturbing phenomenon before. It’s almost as if people can see no alternative between, on one hand, trying to reform and get along with Islam, and, on the other hand, liquidating millions of Muslims.

In my view, both of these positions represent modern liberal distortions. Either the Muslims must blend with us in a common, ecumenical, global society, or, if they refuse to do so, we must blow them off the globe. The genocidal position is the flip side of the one-world position. It’s an insistence that we all be part of the same system. So if someone doesn’t fit in that system peaceably, he must be destroyed. By contrast, my strategy of containing and isolating Islam appeals to the traditional order of the world, in which different peoples, cultures, religions, and civilizations occupy different parts of the planet. In the traditional view, since we don’t demand that the Muslims feel like us or see like us or be like us, we don’t care if they are the way they are, so long as they are not in a position to hurt us. And this we can achieve only by defining Islam as our permanent adversary, and confining it where it will have no power to reach us.

I have no desire either to get along with Muslims, or to destroy Muslims. What I want is that we not have to deal with Muslims, because any close involvement with them is only harmful to ourselves.

It’s like the scene in the movie “Barfly”:

Woman: Do you hate people?

Man: Nah, I don’t hate people … but I feel better when they’re not around.

That’s the way I feel about Islam. I don’t want to wage war on Islam, and I don’t want to be friends with Islam; I just want it not to be around.

But my view seems to be in a small minority.

- end of initial entry -

Ken Hechtman, a leftist Canadian journalist and regular VFR reader, writes:

Generalize this and it’s the insight I find philosophically appealing about conservatism. There will always be people around who disagree with us (however “us” is defined) on subjects we think are important and irreconcilable. It’s not possible to convert them all to our way of thinking, and we shouldn’t kill them all even if we could. So what do we do?

Liberals don’t have the answer. They can’t imagine an end-game in which everyone in the world is not a liberal. Liberalism says, “We can convert anyone we need to since anyone with a basic moral compass who knows what we know will want what we want.”

The hard left doesn’t have the answer either. They haven’t thought through the logistics of it the way Stalin and Pol Pot did, but in their vision of the future a whole lot of people are simply missing from the picture.

Conservatism has the answer. It says, “We will organize the world so the people who disagree with us have no power to do anything about it. They may think it’s unfair, but they won’t be able to do anything about that either.”

I thank Mr. Hechtman for these observations. I would only add that neoconservatism ought to be included in his schema as a variant of liberalism, or even as the real liberalism. After all, neocons, even more than today’s liberals, say, “Everyone should want what we want.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 17, 2006 11:44 PM | Send