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Premen Addy

THE most formidable aspect of India's national debt, some would argue, is cricket captain, Saurav Ganguly who, apropos of the country's archetypal civil servant, is a missile that does not work and cannot be fired. The Indian cricket board may be a school for scoundrels where money-changers have perfected the fine art of short-changing a long suffering public, but such maladies pale before the troubles that threaten to engulf the West.

Mr Pat Buchanan, once a US presidential candidate, has worked diligently in his post-campaigning hours to produce a voluminous warning between covers entitled The Death of the West. Almost a century ago, a more erudite and turgid German doomsayer, Oswald Splenger, produced a morbid tome called The Decline of the West. The former Austrian corporal, Adolf Hitler, outlined a programme to arrest this decline in Mein Kampf; and it was no surprise to see a photograph of the shaggy, inspirational German philosopher in the beaming company of his Austrian admirer.

Much water has since flowed down the Rhine. The Third Reich has passed ingloriously into history. The fall of France in 1940 was the high point of Nazi hubris. Auschwitz and Buchenwald and the other death camps were the enduring marks of German shame, and Hitler's Goetterdaemmerung under the hammer blows of Zhukov's advancing legions the inevitable nemesis that ended the barbarian guard's delusive fantasy.

What impact Mr Buchanan's book will have is at present difficult to predict. Its warning, however, is dire. From the US in the Western hemisphere to the Russian lands in the Far East and the European continent that lies in-between, hordes of aliens are knocking at the gates, most with ill intent. Falling birth rates and massive immigration, principally from the Muslim West Asia, Pakistan, Indonesia and Africa combined with a loss of will refracted through the myopia of political correctness portend the extinction of Europe and Western civilisation.

In the Russian Far East, the Russian population is sparse as China's continues relentlessly to multiply. It is territory that China has long coveted and is determined to have. Demographic trends point to the fulfilment of a primordial Chinese dream. Western Europe, says Mr Buchanan, is already home to large communities of Islamic immigrants who, in due course, will subvert the democratic process for their own immediate ends and those of the long-term global goals of militant Islam.

In his native America, Mr Buchanan perceives the slow retreat of the old Anglo-Saxon and continental European communities in the face of the Hispanic tide from Mexico. By the middle of this century, he proclaims, the US will be transformed into a Third World nation in terms of the ethnic origin of the majority of its people. Mr Buchanan dwells on the conspiratorial media silence on the explosive black crime rate in American and British inner cities and the official obfuscations in Washington and London on the numbers of illegal immigrants entering their respective countries. Yet, he also acknowledges Europe's need of skilled immigrant labour to keep its national economies buoyant, and a similar requirement for the well-being of America.

A high standard of living for an ageing population without the support system of immigrant labour would presumably be the ideal solution to Mr Buchanan's list of woes, but how to achieve it? He is not foolish enough to suggest compulsory procreation for the indigenous community and the ingenuity of an alternative eludes him. We are back where we started squaring the circle.

We would err grievously to dismiss this thesis as the demented projection of the right-wing lunatic fringe. Right-wing Mr Buchanan may be. Lunatic he most assuredly is not. Nor is he a paid-up member of the fringe. The flaws in his argument arise most from sins of omission and some from sins of commission, but he has presented a case that the liberal mainstream and radical Left need to address. Failure to do so will leave the stage open to the first far Right demagogue who comes along. And there will be not one but many who will seek to bend the public ear to their message of exclusion and hate.

Professor Samuel Huntingdon's book, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order appeared a little ahead of its time. It was treated with respect, even where there was disagreement, by those prepared to see and hear and be convinced, but it was greeted by howls of abuse and derision by the inquisitorial sections of the radical chic fraternity, who have long proclaimed their copyright to all the correct answers unto the last palpable falsehood.

September 11 has fractured the monolith of liberal orthodoxy. The men who attacked the Twin Towers and their fellow conspirators were neither poor nor disadvantaged but well-heeled and educated. The British Muslim volunteers who fought alongside the Taliban and the al-Qaeda came not from the slums and council estates of the inner-cities but from owner-occupied terraced dwellings; they were well-schooled and skilled in their professions.

Omar Sheikh, the Pakistani awaiting deportation to the US for the kidnapping of the Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, and for his earlier role in the abduction of American and British backpackers in India, went to a public school and gained admission into the London School of Economics. The unfailing explanation of poverty and social oppression for each and every felony has clearly had its day. Scratching the soil like chickens will no longer do. The glacial certainties of Cold War ideology have given way to the turbulent conflicts of tribe and nation and religious faith. The accepted moral verities are under challenge, and traditional standards of social behaviour are buckling under the pressure.

London and most other British cities were once havens of tranquility. American visitors to these shores marvelled at the security they enjoyed in contrast to fraught experiences at home. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York is credited with bringing peace to the streets of New York as street crime in London reaches an explosive dimension.

The causes are both complex and simple. Poverty and deprivation have their place, so too do poor state schooling and the lack of responsible parenting and a spreading inertia about juvenile indiscipline and violence. There is growing indifference about voting, which reflects the increasing disenchantment with politics and politicians generally. Tolerance has degenerated into licence.

The culture of violence is indivisible. You cannot condemn the mugger who waylays the senior citizen and ignore the hot-gospelling cleric who calls upon the young in his flock to buy a Kalashnikov rifle and shoot the unbeliever. But that is what has been happening in certain areas of the British capital. Mullahs from foreign climes have made it their public business to preach hatred and extol violence in the name of righteousness. Leaflets have been circulated, tracts published disseminating obscenities against Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and Christians. As Christian belief systems weaken in Britain and the West such outbursts are received with a touch of amused condescension, but this is no longer a laughing matter.

Mr Pat Buchanan's book has appeared at the moment when its sales are guaranteed. Public anxiety has led to a visible stiffening of government resolve. After months of inaction, the authorities moved to arrest Shaikh Faisal, a Jamaican convert whose speeches and blood-curdling tapes, which sell at £2 a copy, exhort his followers to kill Jews. At one mosque, he is recorded as saying against a background of laughter in the audience, "How did the Jews get back at Hitler? They sent him back the gas bill".

The Shaikh had gone an obscenity too far. There was a hue and cry, with Left-wing anti-fascist organisations joining the chorus of denunciation and calls for the man's prosecution. He has been arrested and is due to appear before magistrates on charges of incitement to murder. About time too.

The authorities have awoken to the danger that faces the country. Al-Qaeda sleepers abound as they do elsewhere in Europe. The intelligence agencies seek desperately to track down the network and its present leadership, but the task is proving anything but easy, as they confessed to a team of Financial Times reporters working on an in-depth exposure of the al-Qaeda trail. The two-page piece, bulging with information, comment and careful analysis, deserves worldwide scrutiny and attention.

This new freemasonry of international thuggees confronts us all, as the Financial Times report makes abundantly clear. The principal actors are named as are their locations. Pakistan keeps cropping up, so too do Pakistani activists as the al-Qaeda regroups for the next phase in the war against America and its friends and associates. Take 21-year-old British-born Hassan Butt, now based in Islamabad. He has helped in the recruitment and training of jehadis for the war in Afghanistan. He tells how his "main work is political work against the illegitimate government of Pakistan. We are working politically towards an Islamic government in Pakistan which will then facilitate a real jehad — with nuclear weapons".

Which brings us back to Mr Buchanan and his predicted apocalypse. Militant Islam and its numerous seedbeds, which includes Pakistan most of all, were armed and succoured by the US in the service of the `free world'. The Monster is turning on its creator Dr Frankenstein. Perhaps that is an exaggeration, but it is no hyperbole.

Like Mark Twain's reported demise, the announced death of the West may prove a trifle premature. The West may surprise itself and the world by its capacity to face the challenge from within and without. It has the human and technological resources, and will surely rediscover its elusive will.

(The author, a visiting tutor in Modern Asian History at Kellog College, Oxford, is editor of the London-based India Weekly.)

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