The End of Appeasement is Not Yet

Ever since the disastrous appeasement of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s wise heads have said “Never Again.”

So President Bush crafted a forward strategy to combat the Islamicist movement’s threat to advance Islam by the Prophet’s method, by fire and the sword.

Only, of course, because Islam is politically, militarily, and economically weak, its strategy is a strategy of terror, the chosen strategy of movements without an army, without a country, and without an economic base.

It ought to be easy to isolate and eliminate the terrorists. But the problem is that appeasement is alive and well. The cultural elite of the West is not willing to sign up for a war on terror. It prefers to appease.

So we have the “quagmire” in Afghanistan, the opposition to the Iraq adventure, the hyping of every setback, the validation of the Muslims-are-victims strategy of western Muslim organizations, and now the piling-on over the alleged Haditha massacre.

You can see how appeasement worked in the 1930s. There were always people—educated, sophisticated people—available to argue against the hawks like Winston Churchill. And not surprisingly, people listened to both sides and took the easy way out.

So it is today, with sophisticated opinion relentlessly dripping scorn upon the forward strategy of George W. Bush, and characterizing the inevitable setbacks of his noble endeavor as incompetence and criminality.

In her book Londonistan excerpted in the London Times Melanie Phillips shows how the new appeasement works in London.

It started in the 1990s with the

“gentlemen’s agreement” that if [Islamic radicals] were left alone, they would not turn on the country that was so generously nurturing them.

Well, so much for that. The attacks of 7/7 showed up that little error. But the problem goes into the very attitude of the cultural elite in Britain, “its intelligentsia, its media, its politicians, its judiciary, its Church and even its police.”

The problem lies in a refusal to acknowledge that Islamist extremism is rooted in religion. Instead, ministers and security officials prefer to think of it as a protest movement against grievances such as Iraq or Palestine, or “Islamophobia”. They simply ignore the statements and signs that show unequivocally that the aim is to Islamicise the West.

They don’t want to face up to this because it requires admitting that we are in a real war, with real costs, and real uncertainty. But it requires admitting something even more difficult. It means admitting that we are in a religious war. Religious wars, remember, went out with the Enlightenment and the end of religious superstition.
How can we be in a religious war if we are sophisticated elites who are beyond religion?

So the elites choose the easy way out: appeasement.

And it doesn’t help that the Muslims have learned how to exploit the “victim culture” by which militant minorities can mau-mau the majority culture with the support of the leftist elite.

Britain effectively allowed itself to be taken hostage by militant gays, feminists or “anti-racists” who used weapons such as public vilification, moral blackmail and threats to people’s livelihoods to force the majority to give in to their demands. So when radical Islamists refused to accept minority status and insisted instead that their values must trump those of the majority, Britain had no answer.

If we step back and think clearly about this we can see that the West will not stop its appeasment until the “invasion of Poland” moment. We know what that will be. It will be an appalling outrage involving a use of nuclear materials.

Only then will the West be able to end its appeasement and go onto a true war footing. The elites will have to end appeasement. The people will demand it.

Conservatives should understand that there is a huge opportunity in this. We have said, from 9/11 onwards, that we are in a war, a long war, a World War IV. Our lefty friends have equivocated. The extreme left is in bed with the Islamists; the moderate left just doesn’t like America, and believes that violence never solves anything. They are caught because their secular religion tells them that nothing is worth dying for.

And if that is not enough, their culture of abortion and selfish creativity means that nothing is really worth living for either.

The coming conflagration will discredit the secular religion of Marxism/socialism/postmodernism once and for all. We conservatives will say that the left was wrong. It had always been wrong, and always will be wrong.

Because our Judeo-Christian-Anglo-Saxon democratic capitalism at which they sneer is worth dying for. And it is also worth living for.