I subscribe to the Human Events newsletter, as I've noted before, because it's good for keeping tabs on the angry-wacko contingent of the right wing. (Which is approximately why I also subscribe to Ralph Nader's newsletter, and why I sometimes read through the comments pages on truthout -- and btw, the comments that people leave on the Human Events site and on truthout are eerily similar; the internet is teaching us, isn't it, that wackos of whatever political stripe share with each other a lot more than they'd care to -- or be able to -- acknowledge?)
Anyway, Human Events is certainly not mainstream (it shares, with, say, truthout, a deep disdain for the "MSM"), but it's also not a fringe publication written and edited by a Unabomber-type guy in his garage and sent to 150 subscribers. Ronald Reagan claimed it to be his favorite paper. It's the editorial home of Ann Coulter. It's peripherally associated with Robert Novak's Evans-Novak Political Report. It runs Pat Buchanan's syndicated column. It is, in other words, very conservative, but it's not fringe.
The subject line of the current newsletter is, "Islam will conquer Rome." (Fucked up, right? Who knew?) Many of Human Events' newsletters are devoted to getting people to subscribe to Human Events; this one (see screengrab at right; click for a larger view) is one of those. The deal is, subscribe to the print version, and you'll get, free of charge, a copy of Mark Steyn's book America Alone: The End Of the World As We Know It, a $27.95 value. (On the cover of the book, we see a globe on which are planted several flags; aside from the American flag sticking up out of the U.S., all of the flags are green, Muslim-looking ones. "Soon to be banned in Canada," a sticker on the jacket boasts, stupidly and almost certainly inaccurately.)
I've got nothing to say about Steyn's book; I haven't read it. What I know about it is what the newsletter says about it. By way of introduction, the newsletter says this: "Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a Muslim muezzin. Millions of Europeans already do." (Now, you've got to wonder... I mean, there are millions of Muslims in Europe, just as there are millions of Muslims in the U.S.; are these "millions of Europeans" merely the millions of Muslims who live in Europe? Also, what about the millions of Muslims in the U.S. and in Europe who wake up to Christian church bells? Whatever; that's different... Clearly...)
It continues: "And liberals will still tell you that 'diversity is our strength' -- while Talibanic enforcers cruise our sities burning books and barber shops... the Supreme Court decides sharia law doesn't violate the 'separation of church and state'... and the Hollywood Left gives up gay rights in favor of the much safer charms of polygamy."
(A note: it's interesting to see Human Events, publisher of the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries" -- Mein Kamph, The Feminine Mystique, Beyond Good and Evil, the Kinsey report, etc. -- coming out quite so strenuously against book-burning. It's more interesting still to see Human Events become such a staunch defender of the separation of church and state.)
Anyway, according to the newsletter, Mr. Steyn's book imagines/predicts a Muslim takeover of the western world ("Europe, laments Steyn, is almost certainly a goner," and it's interesting/puzzling to see Human Events lament anything to do with European misfortune) if we continue down the path we're on, embracing the tolerance and multiculturism which "the liberals" insist is what makes us strong.
So, what I'm trying to figure out is: exactly how different are these bigotry-fueled, hatred-stoking words from the stuff that the Nazis used in the 1930s to whip an embittered, under-employed German populace into a world-domination-aspiring, Jewish-people-killing war machine?
Now, I want to make it clear that I understand the following: that the far left and the far right are fond of comparing their ideological enemies to Hitler, to the Nazis, to Stalin, to the Gestapo, to the KGB, to the SS, etc. I think it's important to make such comparisons cautiously.
But please read all of this newsletter (again, you can do that by clicking the image above, or, for that matter, by clicking here). There are real similarities between Nazi rhetoric and this Human Events stuff. There is the identification of "the other," the ones who are not like us (the ones, in the case of these Muslim types, who would sound-pollute our cities with their terrorism-inciting muezzin prayer calls five times a day). There is the suggestion that unless stopped now, they will overrun the world (indeed, that they've already started: poor Europe, already a "goner"). Attributed to these people are hazily generalized characteristics which will allow them to accomplish this ("The future belongs to the fecund and the confident. And the Islamists are both, while the West -- wedded to a multiculturism that undercuts its own confidence, a welfare state that nudges it toward sloth and self-indulgence..."). They are spoken of as a massive, dangerous bloc (no distinction is made between "Islamists" and "Talibanic enforcers" on the one hand, and... well, the vast, vast majority of Muslims on the other).
Human Events doesn't suggest what the solution might be to this imagined Muslim problem (aside, perhaps, from subscribing to Human Events, which has the added benefit of being a great way to "tick off a liberal"). Then again, to the best of my knowledge, in his early days, Hitler was somewhat vague on what to do about Germany's imagined Jewish problem; it was only later that he made it clear what his "final solution" was.
Do I think that Human Events is going to lead the way to a twenty-first century Muslim holocaust? No. But I think it's important to call out this type of shit for what it is, i.e. Nazi-style racist hatemongering against a certain group of people (the enemies of a noble race, whether "Aryans" or Americans) purely on account of their unlike-us-ness.
