February 19, 2007
Steyn backs off
Confronted with the charge of endorsing genocide, it seems that Mark Steyn is running away from his own words as fast as he can.
Good. I hope he's sincere, and merely wrote something that was easy to misinterpret. (More than once: for example, "even if you’re hot for a new Holocaust, demography tells. There are no Hitlers to hand." Does that sound to you like someone recoiling in moral horror?)
Since Steyn posted his ... ummmm ... clarification, his fans (and Instapundit's) have been writing to denounce me for poor reading comprehension. But here's a sample email that came in this morning, suggesting that even if he wasn't trying to promote genocide, he was succeeding:
The problem is that Mark Steyn is discussing survival, and you're discussing destruction. In this case, you can't have one without the other. You don't like the calculus but that doesn't mean that it's wrong, just very disagreeable.How else does Europe survive as a "Western" Judeo-Christian concept?
Answer — It doesn't. Demographics is hard science, and feelings are soft anti-power. Hard Science always wins this struggle.
Even if Steyn is not totally sincere — even if he was indulging in a little bit of pornography-of-violence for his Islamophobe readers, like the one quoted above — I'm glad he regards the charge of supporting genocide as something he needs to deny. Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. It's when the tribute stops coming in that we all need to worry.
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