Support for VFR’s criticisms of mainstream conservatives

The Dutch blogger who names himself after the famous Dutch scholar of Islam, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, writes:

Keep on badgering Hanson and especially Steyn. You clearly and concisely show what is wrong with those “conservatives.” It is true that these people may have a function, but there will not be a better Steyn until someone takes them apart.

LA replies:

I very much appreciate your saying this. Sometimes I feel (and some readers definitely feel) that I overdo my criticisms of the conservatives, and that I am at risk of sounding like a broken record. But the reality is that the phenomenon of liberal mainstream conservatives, who seem to be defending the West but are not really doing so, is as important as any other issue we face, and, since this issue is naturally ignored both by the left and by the mainstream right, it is up to people like me to point these things out.

Moreover, amazing facts demand comment. When conservative readers at Amazon as in a chorus praise Mark Steyn—who openly expresses his cold indifference to the supposedly inevitable doom of Europe—as the top conservative of our day (!!), when Victor Hanson, another influential “conservative,” says that people who believe in the imposition of sharia law and the restoration of the Caliphate are actually fascists (!!), and when David Warren, a respected Canadian conservative columnist, writes that radical Islam is nothing but a pathetic pastiche of the detritus of failed 20th century totalitarian ideologies, such statements, in addition to being appalling and harmful, create a sense of wonder and amazement, and that’s why I write about them so much.

By the way, has there been any commentary in Europe about Steyn, who states definitely that European nations will cease to exist in the next few decades? And how does it make you feel when he says this in particular about your own county, the Netherlands?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 19, 2006 06:09 PM | Send