THE SUICIDE OF THE WEST AND HOW WE ARE FEEDING THE CROCODILES.

The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Yeats (1919).

“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”

Winston Churchill (1940)

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Protestors on Vancouver streets shouting death to Canada, shots fired at Jewish schools in Toronto, Palestinian thugs burning cars in Montreal, Muslim activists doing their prayers on the Westminster lawn in England (the mosques were being renovated?); the police in Peterborough, Canada going to people’s doors and harassing them about a Facebook post, the British PM and his supporters enacting legislation that lets paedophiles out early and gives suspended sentences to immigrant rapists, a British MP getting support from the PM when he calls for blasphemy laws in Britain, a British state that sees fit to jail or threatens jail for those who complain about their neighbourhood being covered in Palestinian flags.

Back in Canada, Khalistani thugs attack Hindus in Brampton; the federal government turns a blind eye to a movement that is responsible for the worst act of terrorism in Canada’s history - Air India Flight 182, 307 lost.

The ruling Liberals allow a violent separatist movement to use Canada as its base, with the government more interested in Sikh votes than peace and order. Violence on the street is fine for the government; ethnic vote farming efforts are more important to them.

In Montreal, a Palestinian advocate is allowed to threaten Jews with the Final Solution while doing the Hitler salute. But later, it is the Jewish rabbi and the Jewish journalist who are forced off the streets, or in journalist Ezra Levant’s case, arrested.

In Canada, everyone is equal before the law, but violent Muslim demonstrators are more equal than others.

But while cars are burning at the Palais de Congres in Montreal and violent Palestinian mobs are smashing windows, PM Trudeau frolics at a Taylor Swift concert, making the nation cringe as he makes death metal hand signs and swaps friendship bracelets. Of course, leaving early wouldn’t have led him to break up the mobs, but it would have signalled that he cared about his constituents and was willing to make a personal sacrifice to support them. For God’s sake, when Churchhill stayed in the City of London during the German raids, he wasn’t maintaining a machine gun turret, but his presence strengthened a nation.

But Trudeau is always there, weak and effeminate, to say that anti-Semitism is unacceptable, though always eager to say, “and so is Islamophobia,” making sure that moral equivalence is established. Earth to Trudeau - if you let something happen without consequences, you have deemed it acceptable.

Many sympathetic souls, born in the West, couched in its comforts, still make a common bond with those who don’t hide their intentions; they support the butcher of St. Petersburg, they sell their souls to those who crush democracy in Hong Kong, and express solidarity with those who dream of a global Islamic caliphate.

Is it just the actions? Actions like the story of the nine-year-old boy who police in England harassed for saying “retard,” though the police had no trunk with screaming anti-semites who threatened both shoppers and police in a Toronto shopping mall. In Quebec, the government is happy to aid the depressed by pre-booking a state-assisted suicide MAID. Now, MAID is the fifth leading cause of death in Canada.

We see academics who think that changing phrasing and talking about something like ‘minor-attracted persons’ will help them normalise immorality. Of course, that couldn’t happen, sceptics say; well, who would have put money on a bet in 2000 that the 2024 New York Times would rebrand females as ‘non-trans females?’

Research by Ipsos and Pew shows that about 70% of Americans, 73% of the French, and similar numbers in Canada and England see their democracy in peril. It is not social contagion or an attack of cultural nerves; it is real.

If the soul of a culture is its values, what is happening to the West? In 1964, James Burnham wrote Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism, and he argued that liberalism undermines the will to defend the values that made the West strong. Douglas Murray’s 2017 book, “The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam” shares thematic similarities with Suicide of the West. In 2018, Jonah Goldberg wrote Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy. It examined contemporary challenges like tribalism, populism, and the rejection of Enlightenment values, which Goldberg argues are eroding the foundations of Western democracy.

It is not the similarity in titles that makes them relevant. It is the pervading feeling that they could have been written yesterday.

How have we become so unmoored¹ from our Western values, dislodged from the foundation of the West?

Does it matter?

Of course, we may not yet be under siege, but we have our enemies; we know this because they tell us of their intentions.

Of course, every Muslim is not the enemy, but the West has enemies - they are not all wearing keffiyehs on the streets or doing off-the-cuff rants on TikTok; they are too clever for this; they have a playbook.

Amongst many, they include the CCP, the Kremlin, the Iranian Axis of Evil, and the Palestinian Brotherhood.

Still, our greatest enemy, our greatest crisis in the West, is our disconnection with our fundamental historical values. We have said that we can be moral with secularism, that though unmoored, the rough seas will not lead us onto the cruel rocks that line the shore.

But the rocks seem to be getting closer.

The frightening scenes coming from Europe, not merely of the aggressive attempts at Islamization, not simply of the confidence of Islamist fanatics in the face of a passive West, but the most troubling is the reaction, the criminalising of dissent, the hope that if we accommodate and flatter our citizens and aspiring citizens that hate us, that they will let go of their dreams of sharia law. And it’s not just the odd one; 40% of Muslims in Denmark and 32% in England support sharia law in their new countries.

Many say the noble spirit of multiculturalism will surely allow value systems, as opposed to each other as oil and water, to blend into a pleasant and diluted mix.

However, even as the aspiring authoritarians in Europe and their beaming Trudeau-loving fellow travellers in Canada criminalise dissent when citizens criticise the state, society seems angrier and more divided.

The authoritarians in China, Iran and Russia must be euphoric as they see our politicians, full of vanity and conceit, preaching at us that we must wait on the crocodiles, not take away their food. Surely, these beasts will have their hunger satiated and walk away contented. Surely, utopia beckons.

Our domestic aspiring authoritarians tell us that if we just let them clear the pathway of all the excesses of free speech, they will show us the way.

But we have already dipped our toes into the waters of criminalising dissent and are moving to go ankle-deep, and it does not seem well received.

Of course, random videos on social media or Substack don’t give us statistical certainty. But even on suppression of free speech, whether it is the police arresting and charging, or just showing up at one’s door, or even a human rights department that, in my case, takes the complaint of a man who says he has hurt feelings at Hamas being called Nazis.

However, he is himself a proud anti-semite, publically calling for the extermination of Israel and referring to Hamas as being ‘noble warriors’ - and weaponising their authority. After over a year of harassment and threats interspersed between vast moments of silence and shunning, they are now simply trying to end a 15-year university teaching career as expeditiously and quietly as possible.

At the same time, my union, headed by an unashamed anti-semite Fred Hahn, refuses to offer anything but the minimum of aid. They have fed the crocodiles well.

My accusers were clever; they backwards engineered a human rights complaint to include all the appropriate language; he and co-accusers emptied their clip: violence = words, harassment = hurt feelings, racist = anyone after you have run out of rhetorical ammunition and reason, Islamophobia = a distraction from anti-semitism and a fancy pathologised variant of “shut up and don’t mention anything about Islam or I’ll play the victim”, and emotional safety = the expectation that no one ever may say anything you disagree with and makes you feel bad.

I don’t recall Mohammed using such methodologies. He was more, especially at the end, more of a do what I say or shuffle off this mortal coil type of fellow.

And yes, you have other horrid cases, like in England, where they arrest a 67-year-old retiree for an intemperate Facebook post. Indeed, as Konstantin Kisin notes, in Russia, during the last year, 400 were arrested for violating the fascist Russian speech dictates on not criticising the savage war in Ukraine, but in England, over 3300 were arrested for social media posts.

No, that doesn’t mean we win.

While the conventional tags of left and right seem less accurate (where right-wingers urge appeasement, for example), the problem of authoritarianism tends to drive on the left side of the road. Now, it is not just that they disagree with you; they believe you should not be able to speak, and if you dare, they believe you should be punished.

In Canada, where the left drives on the right side of the road, David Suzuki, the famous environmentalist with multiple homes and a huge carbon footprint, recommends jail for those who deny global warming; the NDP’s Charlie Angus proposes to criminalise anyone who promotes fossil fuels.

Yes, segments of the modern left have surely shifted toward a more authoritarian approach to ideological dissent, moving beyond mere disagreement to advocating punitive measures against those who express alternative or politically incorrect opinions.

What is the source of this new authoritarianism?