In The Twain Begin to Meet, Carroll begins by citing Rudyard Kipling's famous "East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." He ends by welcoming what he describes as "the power of Europe's new hope -- the twain meeting at last."
In between, he observes that "Europe became 'Europe' in the first place only in response to a challenge from Islam. . . . [I]t was the external contest with Islam that gave Europe its internal cohesion. The psychological mechanism is basic: Group identity follows from group threat."
True then, true today. So what is Carroll's response? Utter defeatism: "The East-West battle is unwinnable. The old structures of mind must be dismantled." And again, he concludes by welcoming the notion of "the twain meeting at last."
Can he really? Note that Carroll's discussion is entirely values-free. Leaving aside the explicitly religious aspects of the Christian-Islam divide, what of the more secular values that each culture represents? Does Carroll truly believe that he personally, and by extension the good editorial board of the Boston Globe, the denizens of the Massachusetts Commonwealth, the citizens of the USA and those of the West at large would be better off living in a society in which the West's liberal values of tolerance, individual freedom, human rights, equality of the sexes and representative democracy are compromised with those of Sharia?
Carroll is not merely the prophet of defeat. He represents a decadent western cultural elite that no longer believes in the rightness of its cause. When those "twains" come together, what would possibly make Carroll think that the passionate, ardent, believing East would stop half-way when confronted with the kind of flaccid, cynical representatives of Western culture of which he is emblematic?
Carroll's is not merely the way to Eurabia - it is the path to the obliteration of Western civilization.
Finkelstein recently returned from Iraq. Contact him at mark@gunhill.net
