political commentary

any people in Europe and America have become fatalists. They exist in one of two possible quantum states: either something is too insignificant to worry about, or it's such a big problem that worrying would be pointless. What the two states have in common is they provide an excuse never to worry about anything.

For them, everything is relative. Conservatives and libertarians share a general belief that there are fixed principles of right and wrong. For many others, the world is a glorious multicultural festival of fifty or a hundred different shades of gray.

To avoid worrying, they have also largely dispensed with the concept of right and wrong. But if there is no right and wrong, there is also no truth. If truth is only a function of power, then only might makes right. If you believe that, and if you believe using force is always wrong, as so many claim to do, then you will always lose.

A sense of right and wrong is a person's guide to action. Without it, one can only drift along and do whatever feels good. Que será, será. So there comes a time when it's necessary to take forceful action: some type of body language that makes your point of view crystal clear using actions instead of words. But this would require recognizing that there's a problem with the dispossessed groups, and recognizing a problem means you have to do something about it. And that's what Europeans don't like to do. They, like us, are paralyzed.

The great Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, in her last book, Oriana Fallaci intervista se stessa / L'Apocalisse, compared this to a cancer: treat it while it's small, while the cost is minimal, before it's too late.

She knew what she was talking about. She died of cancer less than two years after writing that. As I write this, the French are standing in front of Notre Dame, holding hands, having their minute of silence. But their response, or lack of it, to Charlie Hebdo will be significant. This is not just another case of Muslims gone berserk. The Charlie Hebdo massacre cuts at the heart of what makes Western culture worth emulating: its creativity and its freedom of speech. The freedom to express ideas is what gave us our science, our philosophy, and our culture. It may be fashionable to sneer, but the world has never seen anything as spectacular, and that makes it worth preserving. A red line has been drawn for us.

The French could find a way to integrate the Muslim immigrants in the banlieues, demolish the culture of apartheid the Muslims have created for themselves, and maybe even look at the possibility of curtailing immigration; or they could treat the killings like another case of workplace violence, put the murderers on trial (update: not an option in this case), and go back to criticizing their countrymen for being Islamophobes. The course they choose will inform the rest of us whether Europe will finally start to recognize the significance of what they're about to lose.

There's no mystery which course they will choose. The BBC is already wringing their hands, worried about a “backlash.” The Telegraph is warning its readers to beware of the Islamophobes. So Europe's problems will grow until they become so big they can't be fixed without terrible consequences. On that day, its fatalists will probably say: it was inevitable. No one predicted it, and no would have ever thought this could happen.

No one, that is, except all those courageous voices they ignored, like that of Oriana Fallaci and the hundreds of others, including those cartoonists, whose ideas and warnings they dismissed. The wilfully blind fight most those who would make them see.

So, go ahead and publish your cartoons in defiance, if your insurance company will let you. But maybe Rumsfeld had it right after all: if you really want to solve the problem, sooner or later someone's going to have to drain the swamp.