The Call of
Duty—and Destiny
TheAmericanConservative.com
In one of the great
epics of Western literature, the hero, confronted by
numerous and powerful enemies, temporarily gives in
to weakness and self-pity. “I wish,” he sighs, “none
of this had happened.” The hero’s wise adviser
responds, “So do all who live to see such times, but
that is not for them to decide.” The old man
continues, “There are other forces at work in this
world … besides the will of evil.” Some events, he
adds, are “meant” to be, “And that is an encouraging
thought.”
Indeed it is.
Perhaps, today, we are meant to live in these times.
Perhaps right here, right now, we are meant to be
tested. Maybe we are meant to have faith that other
forces are at work in this world, that we are meant
to rediscover our strength and our survival skills.
And so the
question: can we, the people of the West, be brought
to failure despite our enormous cultural and
spiritual legacy? Three thousand years of history
look down upon us: does this generation wish to be
remembered for not having had the strength to look
danger squarely in the eye? For having failed to
harness our latent strength in our own defense?
With apologies to the
frankenfood-fearers and polar bear-sentimentalizers,
the biggest danger we face is the Clash of
Civilizations, especially as we rub against the
“bloody borders” of Islam.
What if, in the coming
century, we lose that clash—and the source of our
civilization? What if Muslims take over Europe? What
if “Eurabia” indeed comes to pass? Would Islamic
invaders demolish the Vatican, as the Taliban
dynamited Afghanistan’s Buddhas of Bamyan in 2001?
Or would they settle merely for stripping the great
cathedrals of Europe of all their Christian
adornment, rendering them into mosques? And what if
the surviving non-Muslim population of Europe is
reduced to subservient “dhimmitude”?
It could happen. Many think
it will. In July 2004, Princeton historian Bernard
Lewis told Germany’s Die Welt
that Europe would be Islamic
by the end of this century, “at the very latest.”
Other observers, too, have spoken out: Melanie
Phillips in Londonistan, Bruce Bawer in
While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying
the West from Within, and Mark Steyn in
America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
Admittedly, these writers share a mostly
neoconservative perspective, but such can’t be said
for Patrick Buchanan, author of the book that
out-Spenglers Spengler, The Death of the West:
How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions
Imperil Our Country and Civilization.
On the other side of the
great divide, militant Muslims are feeling the wind
at their backs. Last November, Abu Ayyub al-Masri,
leader of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, released an
audiotape in which he vowed, “We will not rest from
our jihaduntil
we are under the olive trees of the Roman
Empire”—which is to say, much of Europe. This
August, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
traveling to Afghanistan, declared, “There is no way
for salvation of mankind but rule of Islam over
mankind.” To be sure, there’s no shortage of
Christians who speak this way, but none of them are
currently heads of state.
If demography is the author
of destiny, then the danger of Europe falling within
dar al-Islamis
real. And in addition to the teeming Muslim lumpen
already within the gates, plenty more are coming.
According to United Nations data, the population of
the Arab world will increase from 321 million in
2004 to 598 million in 2050. Are those swarming
masses really going to hang back in Egypt and Yemen
when Europe beckons? And of course, over the
horizon, just past Araby, abide the Muslim
multitudes of Central Asia and Africa, where tens of
millions more would love to make the secular hajj
to, say, Rome or Berlin.
In other words, if present
trends continue, the green flag of Islam—bearing the
shahada,
the declaration of faith, “There is no god but God;
Muhammad is the Messenger of God”—could be
fluttering above Athens and Rotterdam in the
lifespan of a youngster today. If so, then the glory
of Europe as the hub of Greco-Roman and Christian
civilization would be extinguished forever.
If this Muslimization
befalls Europe, the consequences would be
catastrophic for Americans as well. Although some
neoconservatives, bitter at Old European “surrender
monkeys,” might be quietly pleased at the prospect,
the fact is that a Salafist Surge into the heart of
Europe—destroying the civilization that bequeathed
to us Aesop and Aristotle, Voltaire and the
Victorians—would be a psychic wound that would never
heal, not across the great sward of America, not
even in the carpeted think-warrens of the American
Enterprise Institute. A dolorous bell would toll for
all of us, scattered as we might be in the European
Diaspora.
So for better ideas, we
might turn to J.R.R. Tolkien. The
medievalist-turned-novelist, best-known for The
Hobbit
and The Lord of the Rings,
has been admired by readers and moviegoers alike for
his fantastic flights. Yet we might make special
note of his underlying political, even strategic,
perspective. Amid all his swords and sorcery, we
perhaps have neglected Tolkien’s ultimate point:
some things are worth fighting for—and other things
are not worth fighting for; indeed, it is a tragic
mistake even to try.
In his subtle way, Tolkien
argues for a vision of individual and collective
self-preservation that embraces a realistic view of
human nature, including its limitations, even as it
accepts difference and diversity. Moreover, Tolkien
counsels robust self-defense in one’s own area—the
homeland, which he calls the Shire—even as he
advocates an overall modesty of heroic ambition. All
in all, that’s not a bad approach for true
conservatives, who appreciate the value of lumpy
hodgepodge as opposed to artificially imposed
universalisms.
So with Tolkien in mind, we
might speak of the “Shire Strategy.” It’s simple:
the Shire is ours, we want to keep it, and so we
must defend it. Yet by the same principle, since
others have their homelands and their rights, we
should leave them alone, as long as they leave us
alone. Live and let live. That’s not
world-historical, merely practical. For us, after
our recent spasm of universalism—the dogmatically
narcissistic view that everyone, everywhere wants to
be like us—it’s time for a healthy respite, moving
toward an each-to-his-own particularism.
Tolkien comes to the
particular through the peculiar, creating his
Bosch-like wonderland of exotic beings: Elves, Orcs,
Trolls, Wargs, Werewolves, Ents, Eastlings,
Southrons. To audiences relentlessly tutored in the
PC pieties of skin-deep multiculturalism, Tolkien
offers a different sort of diversity—of genuine
difference, with no pretense of similarity, let
alone universal equality. In his world, it is
perfectly natural that all creatures great and
small—the Hobbits are indeed small, around three
feet high—have their own place in the great chain of
being.
So the Hobbits, low down on
that chain, mind their own business. One of their
aphorisms is the need to avoid “trouble too big for
you.” Indeed, even Hobbits are subdivided into
different breeds, each with its own traits. Frodo,
for instance, is a Fallohide, not to be confused
with a Harfoot or a Stoor. Tolkien wasn’t describing
a clash of civilizations—he was setting forth an
abundance of civilizations, each blooming and
buzzing and doing its own thing.
In addition to the innate
differences, Tolkien added a layer of tragic
complexity: the enticement of power. Some races in
Middle Earth were given Rings of Power—19 in all,
symbolizing technological might but also a metaphor
for hubristic overreach: “Three Rings for
Elven-kings under the sky / Seven for the
Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone / Nine for
Mortal Men doomed to die.” One notes immediately
that the Hobbits, along with other categories of
being, have received no rings. Again, Tolkien’s
world doesn’t pretend to be fair; we get what we are
given, by the design (or maybe for the amusement) of
greater powers. Only one threat endangers this
yeasty diversity—the flowing tide of overweening
universalism, emblemized by Sauron, who seeks to
conquer the whole wide world, and everyone and
everything in it
Of all the men and mice in
Tolkien’s bestiary, the Hobbits are his favorite.
Jolly good peasants that they are, Hobbits never
hunger for martial fabulation or Riefenstahlian
dramatization; their nature is to accomplish their
mission first and brag about it only afterward. And
the Hobbits’ biggest mission, of course, is the
destruction of the One Ring. In Tolkien’s tale,
there aren’t 19 Rings, as thought, but actually 20,
and that 20th Ring, the One Ring, or Ruling Ring, is
most to be feared. Loaded as it is with Wagnerian
overtones, the One Ring is Tolkien’s symbol of evil,
or, more precisely, it symbolizes temptation, which
leads to evil. Even the dreaded Sauron is but a
slave to his ambition to acquire the One Ring—and if
Sauron can get it, then all hope for freedom and
difference will be lost under his world-flattening
tyranny.
Happily, unique among
sentient beings, the Hobbits seem relatively immune
to Ringed seduction. Hobbits like to smoke and
drink, but all grander forms of world-girdling
intoxication are lost on these simple folk. Hobbits
just want their Shire to return to normalcy.
Enter Frodo, hero Hobbit.
Tolkien, who served as a second lieutenant in the
Lancashire Fusiliers during the Great War, modeled
Frodo, admiringly, after the Tommies—the grunt
infantrymen—who fought alongside him. Neither a
defeatist nor a militarist, Tolkien admired those
men who were simultaneously stoic and heroic. In the
words of medieval historian Norman Cantor, “Frodo is
not physically powerful, and his judgment is
sometimes erratic. He wants not to bring about the
golden era but to get rid of the Ring, to place it
beyond the powers of evil; not to transform the
world but to bring peace and quiet to the Shire.”
Because of their innate modestly, only Hobbits have
the hope of resisting the sorcery of the Ring. Frodo
volunteers to carry the Ring to the lip of a
volcano, Mt. Doom, there to cast it down and destroy
it once and for all.
And even for Frodo, the
task is not easy; he’s that lonely epic hero who
wishes that none of this had happened. But as the
wise Gandalf tells him, it was meant to happen And
so it goes: events unfold to a successful but still
bittersweet conclusion.
Indeed, the greatest desire
for power, Ring-lust, is felt by men, not the lesser
beings. And so when our heroes are confronted by two
dangers—the danger from Sauron’s encroaching army,
hunting for the Ring, and the infinitely direr
prospect that Sauron might gain the Ring—it is a
mostly virtuous man, Boromir, who is most sorely
tempted. Don’t destroy the Ring, Boromir insists;
use the Ring to repel Sauron: “Take it and go forth
to victory!” In other words, use the Ring to
guarantee triumph. But that’s Tolkien’s point:
absolute power is always tempting—and always
corrupting.
The good are good only as
long as they resist temptation. A wise Elf, Elrond,
answers Boromir: “We cannot use the Ruling Ring …
the very desire of it corrupts the heart.” That is,
a good man who uses the Ring automatically becomes a
bad man, who would “set himself on Sauron’s throne,
and yet another Dark Lord would appear.” And so the
varied group convened by Elrond—Elves, Dwarves, Men,
and Hobbits—agrees to an arduous plan. The Council
of Elrond will fight Sauron’s army through
“conventional” means, while a smaller team, the
Fellowship of the Ring, chiefly Frodo, crosses into
enemy territory in hopes of destroying the sinister
golden band. But as Tolkien makes clear, the Ring
threatens to overwhelm everyone, and everything,
with temptation.
Tolkien died in 1973.
During his lifetime, and ever since, critics and
pundits have put their own spin on his work. He was
writing, it was said, about the totalitarian
temptation. About the lure of fascism. Or maybe
about the Circean song of communism. Or perhaps it
was all a jeremiad aimed at industrialization. Each
of these was, of course, a universalism, and so each
was, in its way, antithetical to the natural
variegation that Tolkien so treasured.
The author himself abjured
simplistic allegorical explanation, perhaps in part
to keep his multiple audiences happy. In the ’60s,
for instance, the Hobbits were celebrated as
proto-hippies, inspiring jokes about what might be
tamped into their smoking pipes; the whole oeuvre
was seen as a druggy trip. But Tolkien once
confided, “The Lord of the Ringsis
of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic
work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in
the revision.” That is, Catholic in the sense that
reality and history are complicated, that the world
is rich in majesty and mystery, that human nature is
but a poor vessel. In his world, the Shire is
Christendom, and Christendom is the Shire.
Yet more than three decades
after Tolkien’s death, new universalisms—new
all-encompassing ideologies—have gained prominence,
vexing, once again, tradition and difference
throughout the world. One such universalism is
capitalist globalism. In the late ’80s, Francis
Fukuyama published his legendarily misguided piece
“The End of History?” suggesting that the West had
found The Answer. Madeleine Albright expressed
similar hubris when she declared that America was
“the indispensable nation.” And Thomas Friedman has
since argued that everyone has to submit to “golden
handcuffs,” managed by planetary financiers, even as
the wondrous force of capitalism “flattens” the
world. But of course, it took Paul Wolfowitz to
bring Rousseau to life in another century: Uncle Sam
would force people to be free. And how are these
bright bold visions working out, in the wake of
9/11, in a world that includes IEDs, Hamas,
Hezbollah, and Al-Jazeera?
Defending—and
Redefining—the Shire
Underneath his
neo-medievalism, Tolkien preached realism. He wrote,
“It will not do to leave a live dragon out of your
plans if you live near one.” That is, the dragon,
red in tooth and crescent, is lurking. It cannot be
ignored.
Nor can we ignore the
painful reality of a genuine fifth column in the
West. This summer, Gordon Brown’s government
concluded that 1 in 11 British Muslims—almost
150,000 people living in the United
Kingdom—“proactively” supports terrorism, with still
more rated as passive supporters. And this spring, a
Pew Center survey found that 13 percent of American
Muslims, as well as 26 percent aged 18-29, were bold
enough to tell a pollster that suicide bombing was
“sometimes” justified. These Muslim infiltrators, of
course, have potential access to weapons of mass
destruction.
So what to do? Call the
ACLU? The United Nations?
That won’t work. Just as
the Roman Empire’s dream of universal dominion once
collapsed, leaving the peoples of Europe to create
new institutions for their own survival, so, today,
any thought that the United Nations could save us
from ruin has evaporated. The Blue Helmets have
fallen, and they can’t get up.
At the same time, at a
level just below the UN, the vision of an
ever-expanding European Union, to include all the
states touching the Mediterranean, has happily
collapsed. Now it seems certain that even Turkey
will never be admitted. Increasingly, people see
that in a world of transnational terrorism, the key
issue is not figuring out a common agricultural
policy that unites Denmark and Cyprus, but rather a
common survival policy for Europa, from the Pillars
of Hercules to the Ural Mountains.
So we must look to older
models for hope and survival—models more faithful,
more fighting, more fertile. A case in point is
France. To be sure, on the Mars-Venus continuum,
most Americans regard the French as hopelessly
Venus, but they were Mars in the past. Perhaps their
most virtuous Martian was Charles Martel, King of
the Franks, who defeated the Muslim invaders at the
Battle of Tours in AD 732. In the words of the
contemporaneous chronicler, Isidore of Beja, “In the
shock of the battle the men of the North seemed like
a sea that cannot be moved. Firmly they stood, one
close to another, forming as it were a bulwark of
ice; and with great blows of their swords, they
hewed down the Arabs.” The defeat of the Muslims was
one of the “Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World,”
according to 19th-century historian Sir Edward
Shepherd Creasy, because it saved the West from
destruction.
The French have remembered
“Charles the Hammer” ever since, even naming
warships after him. Indeed, across 2,000 years, from
Vercingetorix to Charlemagne (Martel’s grandson) to
Napoleon, the French have showed plenty of fight,
and usually much skill. That’s why there’s still a
France. And now, despite their recent failures and
cupidities, the French are showing renewed
determination, as in the election of Nicolas
Sarkozy, a man who based his campaign on restoring
border security, as well as law and order, to his
beleaguered nation.
Meanwhile, as European
birthrates plummet, the continent faces the prospect
of demographic desiccation. Yet surely a
civilization-saving alternative to imported
Muslimization must be found. One option, bringing in
Eastern Europeans to Western Europe, is probably
less than desirable because those Eastern Europeans
are needed where they are, to defend Russia and
Ukraine against the New Tatars further east. A
better solution would be to bring the poorer
children of Europe—from countries such as
Argentina—home to Europe, allowing the New World to
help rescue the Old World.
But we need bigger and
broader ideas as well, to replace the doddering
vision of international law as the antidote to
terrorism.
The Revival of Christendom
Two years ago, the
Eurocrats in Brussels drafted a 300-page EU
constitution that consciously omitted reference to
Europe’s specifically Christian heritage. The voters
of France, as well as Holland, rejected that secular
document.
Maybe there’s a lesson
here. The people of Europe might not be so eager,
after all, to declare that they are “united in
diversity.” What does that phrase mean, anyway? How
about trying to find something that unites Europeans
in unity? How about a revival of Christendom as a
concept—as a political concept? A revival, or at
least a remembrance, of Europe’s cultural heritage
could be the healing force that Europe needs.
After all, it worked in the
past. In the words of the 19th-century French
historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, the
victory of Christianity marked “the end of ancient
society”—and all the petty divisions that went with
it. Fustel de Coulanges continues, “Man felt that he
had other obligations besides that of living and
dying for the city. Christianity distinguished the
private from the public virtues. By giving less
honor to the latter, it elevated the former; it
placed God, the family, the human individual above
country, the neighbor above the city.”
As history proves, a larger
communion can be built on such sentiments. In the
9th century, Alcuin of York declared that the
crowning of Charlemagne as the first Holy Roman
Emperor would bring forth a new Imperium
Christianum.
Ten centuries later, Hilaire Belloc asserted, “The
Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.” Indeed,
during those many centuries, Europe enjoyed a pretty
good run. Only in the last century—the century of
atheists, psychiatrists, and National Socialists—has
Europe’s survivability come into question. Today,
the Christian author Os Guiness puts the issue
plainly: “A Europe cut off from its spiritual roots
cannot survive.”
Some will smile at the
thought that Christianity might be part of the
solution to the problems of the Third Millennium.
Admittedly, there’s an element of faith in the idea
of trying to revive the idea of Christian unity. But
Christendom is the Shire Strategy, applied.
To keep the peace, we must
separate our civilizations. We must start with a
political principle, that the West shall stay the
West, while the East can do as it wishes on its side
of the frontier, and only on its side. The classical
political maxim cuius regio, eius religio(“whose
region, his religion”) makes sense. To be sure, it
has been unfashionable to talk this way in the West,
but Muslims are avidly applying it as they set about
martyring the remaining Christian populations of
Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt. So we of the West can
build walls, as needed, and as physically imposing
as need be. Going further, we can finally recognize
the need for an energy-independence embargo, so that
we no longer finance those who wish to conquer or
kill us.
For obvious reasons,
strategic as well as moral, the Western political
alliance must be bigger than just a few relatively
friendly countries along the other side of the
Atlantic. It should include, most pressingly,
Russia. Vladimir Putin might think of himself as a
rival, even a foe, of the United States, but he
knows he faces a mortal enemy in Islam; it’s the
Chechens who are killing his soldiers. So as Russia
enjoys its own Christian revival, a reconciliation
with mostly Christian America is possible.
Immediately, America should renew the spirit of
Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative
speech, in which the Gipper called for including
Moscow inside the protective shield. So instead of
building missile-defense sites in Eastern Europe,
dividing Europe from Russia, the United States
should put those sites in Russia’s southern reaches,
to face the real enemy, which is Iran and the rest
of nuclear Islam. Even Putin has suggested this
defensive placement, perhaps because down deep, he,
too, understands that the Christian West should be
unified, not divided.
But what of Christians
elsewhere in the world? What, for example, of Latin
America—which includes the likes of Fidel Castro and
Hugo Chavez? And even more urgently, what of Africa,
where Christians are suffering from many
afflictions, including the inexorable Muslim
advance, pushing south past the 10th parallel into
the Christian populations of countries including
Nigeria, Sudan, and Ethiopia? How to withstand these
many challenges?
The answer: through
political co-operation. In Tolkien’s world, it was
the Council of Elrond. Perhaps in our world, it
could be Council of the West.
It’s been done before. In
AD 325, Constantine the Great convened the Council
of Nicaea, drawing together quarrelsome bishops from
across Europe to hammer out the basic doctrines of
the church. Constantine was the first Christian
Roman Emperor, although he concerned himself more
with geopolitics than theological minutiae. “It is
my desire,” he told this first ecumenical
convocation, “that you should meet together in a
general council … and to know you are resolved to be
in common harmony together.” The council was a
success, producing the Nicene Creed, which united
European faith for centuries to come.
But today, how to find a
new unity that reaches across oceans and continents,
to include the likes of Putin and Chavez? Answer:
with great difficulty, not all at once, and with no
certainty of success.
And what of other hard
cases? What of Africa? The Christian countries of
Africa are part of the Shire Strategy and need to be
embraced with tough love. The immediate mission is
to delineate a Christian Zone and a Muslim Zone,
dividing countries if need be. All Christians, and
all Muslims, have a stake in minimizing conflict;
the obvious way is by separating the combatants. So
a wall should go up between the warring faiths, and
then a bigger wall, until the flashpoint risk of
civilization clash goes away. Then, and only then,
might we hope to find workable solutions within the
Christian Zone.
Some will insist that this
neo-Constantinian vision of muscular political
Christendom is implausible—or inimical to world
peace. But in fact, whether we like it or not, the
world is forming into blocs. Samuel Huntington was
right about “the clash of civilizations”—but with
political skill, we can keep clashes from becoming
larger wars.
No matter what we say or
do, the blocs of Hindus, Chinese, and Japanese are
all going their separate cultural ways,
rediscovering their own unique heritages. And Islam,
of course, is at odds with all of its neighbors. In
his book a decade ago, Huntington, mindful of the
indirect danger posed by American universalism, was
even more mindful of the direct danger posed by
Muslims: “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its
innards,” he writes. “Muslim bellicosity and
violence are late-twentieth century facts which
neither Muslims nor non-Muslims can deny.” That’s
bad news, but there’s a silver lining: if
Westerners, Russians, Africans, Hindus, and Chinese
all feel threatened by Islam—and they all do—there’s
plenty of opportunity for a larger encircling
alliance, with an eye toward feasible strategies of
containment, even quarantine. But not conquest, not
occupation, not “liberation.” So the big question is
whether or not Christians will continue to be
divided into four blocs, as they are at present:
Western, Russian, African, Latin. Can four smaller
Christian blocs really become one big bloc? One
Christendom? Perhaps—borrowing once again from
Tolkien—such unification was meant to happen.
That is an encouraging
thought: a Council of the West, bringing all the
historically Christians countries of the world into
one communion.
The Rescue of Israel
But what of Israel? If East
is East and West is West, what of the Jewish state,
which sits in the East? After all, the entire Middle
Eastern region is looking more and more Mordor-like.
Tolkien described that terrible wasteland: “High
mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of
earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an
obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed
in the reluctant light.” Not much hope there, at
least for Westerners. Whatever possessed us to think
we could make Muslims into our own image? Was it a
Ring that lured us?
We can make two points:
first, Israel must survive, and second, on its
current course, Israel will likely not survive.
In recent years, Israel
finds its strategic situation worsening. It is
increasingly confronted, not by incompetent tinhorn
dictators but by determined Muslim jihadists, many
of whom live in the Palestinian territories, some of
whom live within Israel itself. Meanwhile, Iran
proceeds with its nuclear program, while Pakistan,
just a heartbeat away from Taliban-ification,
already has its nukes in place, ready for export
should the right fatwabe
uttered. And the Russians and the Chinese, empowered
and lured by high energy prices, have their own
designs on the region, which include no good tidings
for Jews.
Unfortunately, if we look
forthrightly into the future, we can see blood and
fire ahead for Israel. Aside from the
civilization-jolting moral tragedy of a Second
Holocaust—a phrase used freely, albeit not lightly,
by such Jewish observers as Philip Roth and Ron
Rosenbaum—there would be the physical devastation of
the Holy Land. How would Christians recover from the
demolition of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in
Jerusalem? How would Diasporic Jews absorb the
Temple Mount’s obliteration? And how, for that
matter, would Muslims react to the detonation of the
Noble Sanctuary, which sits atop that mount?
Any destruction of Israel
would be accompanied, one way or another, by the
destruction of much of the Middle East. If Masada
came again to Zion, it would likely also be a
Strangelovian doomsday for tens or hundreds of
millions in the Middle East. And it might mean the
annihilation as well of other Muslim religious
sites, from Qum and Karbala to, yes, Mecca and
Medina.
Some say that the solution
to Middle Eastern problems is some sort of
pre-emptive strike: get Them before they get Us.
That, of course, is exactly the sort of bewitching
that Tolkien warned most strongly against—the frenzy
to solve a problem through one hubristic stroke, to
grab the One Ring of power for oneself, even if that
grabbing guarantees one’s own fall into darkness.
A better vision is needed.
The Council of the West must do its duty, to
Christians, to Jews, and to the need of the world
for peace. Having agreed that Israel must survive,
within the protective ambit of Christendom, the
council could engage Muslims—who are, themselves, in
the process of restoring the Caliphate—in a grand
summit. Only then, when West meets East, in
diplomatic twain, might a chance exist for an
enduring settlement. When all Christians, and all
Muslims, are brought to the bargaining table, they
all become stakeholders in a pacific outcome.
This summit of
civilizations would be difficult and expensive, even
heartbreaking. It might take a hundred years. But
let us begin because the reward could be great:
blessed are the peacemakers.
The Knights of the West
With great effort, the West
could unite around the Shire Strategy, seeking to
secure and protect all our Christendom, spanning
oceans and continents. But it won’t be easy. It will
take more than diplomacy—it will take strength.
This Shire is ours now, but
the way things are going, it won’t be ours
permanently. So we must vow to defend the Shire,
always. In the last of the “Rings” films, Aragorn
the Strider proclaims, in full St. Crispin’s Day
mode, “A day may come when the courage of Men fails,
when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of
fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of
wolves and shattered shields when the Age of Men
comes crashing down, but it is not this day! This
day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good
earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!”
We in the West will always
need warriors. We must have chevaliers sans peur
et sans reproche—“Knights
without fear and without reproach”—to safeguard our
marches and protect our homes. Men such as Leonidas,
whose Immortal 300 held off the Persians at
Thermopylae in 480 BC, long enough for other Greeks
to rally and save the nascent West. Or Aetius, the
last noble Roman, who defeated Attila the Hun,
Scourge of God, at Chalons in AD 451. Or Don Juan of
Austria, who led the Holy League to naval victory
over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571. Or Jon Sobieski,
whose Polish cavalry rescued Vienna from the Turks
in 1683.
These are not just legends,
not just fictional characters—they were real. And if
we dutifully honor those heroes, as heroic Men of
the West and of Christendom, we will be rewarded
with more such heroic men.
Future epics await us.
Future Knights of the West, ready to defend
Christendom, are waiting to be born, waiting for the
call of duty. If we bring them forth with faith and
wisdom and confidence, then also will come new
heroes and new legends.
Maybe it was meant to be.
And that is an encouraging thought.
James P. Pinkerton is a
columnist for
Newsday
and a fellow at the New America Foundation in
Washington, D.C. He served in the White House under
Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.