Link back to commentI've said I wouldn't continue to respond to Peter and his dire 'warnings about Islam' but that was before I read today the passage below from chapter one of The Great Gatsby. It's so brilliantly apposite I could not resist passing it on. I'm not saying Peter is identical with Tom Buchanan, far from it, my point is that there is a long lineage to his "civilisational challenge" mode of thought.
“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom [Buchanan] violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?”
“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we ——”
“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”
“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.
“You ought to live in California —” began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.
“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and ——” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. “— And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization — oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”
There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more."
The historian Pankaj Mishra states in his London Review of Books article "Watch This Man" that:
"Scott Fitzgerald based Goddard, at least partly, on Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, the author of the bestseller The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920)...Hysteria about ‘white civilisation’ gripped America after Europe’s self-mutilation in the First World War... He also invested early in Islamophobia, arguing in The New World of Islam (1921) that Muslims posed a sinister threat to a hopelessly fractious and confused West."
And here's Peter:
"The quest for Islamic conquest has been going on for 1400 years. The Crusades, for example, often portrayed as pure unprovoked Western Christian villainy (and there were, of course, some awful atrocities) without reference to that all important historical context that they were preceded by four centuries of unremitting Islamic conquest that subjugated the Arabian peninsula and then what used to be the centre of gravity of the Christian world, the Middle East and North Africa, vanquishing the Zoroastrian empire in Persia, extending later into Europe with the conquest of Spain, the Balkans and – most bloody of all – the Indian subcontinent. The Crusades were a belated and limited pushback.
If these processes are allowed to roll on unimpeded, we are likely to see a transformation in European civilization that is profound, irrevocable and very much for the worse. This must serve as a warning for other nations, such as Australia and United States, that are much less affected at this time."