Programming note: Please join Steyn this evening circa 7pm North American Eastern/12 midnight British Summer Time for another nightly episode of his current Tale for Our Time, Sapper's Bulldog Drummond.
~I have been hors de combat in recent days, so the so-called "news" has mostly escaped me. In the UK, Two-Tier Keir seems more relaxed than one might perhaps have expected about letting the country slip into civil war in the first month of his ministry. In France, the height of sport is apparently watching an Arab bloke punch the lights out of a European woman, which one doesn't really need to pay Olympic prices to see: as my late friend Kathy Shaidle observed, when the Canadian Islamic Congress announced it had made a contribution to a women's shelter, Islam's main contribution to women's shelters is the women.
And in America CNN's whitey-white experts explain with straight faces why the actual black men at a black barbershop are wrong to be sceptical if not downright dismissive about the purported blackness of the high-caste Brahmin Montreal-schoolgirl British subject now taking the lead in US presidential polling.
All these stories testify to one degree or another to the increasing dishonesty of public discourse in the west: men are women; high-caste Brahmins are African-American; and the frenzied stabber of multiple English girls is a Welsh boyo who likes rugby and male voice choirs. In support of that last official lie, the Starmtroopers are proposing even more restraints on free speech - which will ensure even more riots, on the fairly elementary logic that, if one can no longer discuss certain subjects honestly or even at all, all one can do is lob Molotov cocktails through windows.
So, having no interest in being throttled by the ever more constricted narrative, I followed very little of the "news" this last week - save for a speech given by Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, at the Bálványos Free Summer University and Student Camp, held every year in Băile Tușnad, which is the smallest town in Romania by population and is located in Eastern Transylvania. So it didn't get a lot of coverage on CNN or the BBC.
But, even if Mr Orbán had delivered it at Yankee Stadium or the Royal Albert Hall, I doubt it would have been played big in the anglo media. It is a remarkable and profound address, and one cannot imagine it being uttered by any of the supposed "leaders" of the west - Macron, Starmer, Trudeau, the German bloke or the pantomime horse with two rear ends nominally presiding in Washington - even though it's highly relevant to the world we will be condemned to live in in just a few years.
So I thought - in this interlude between assassination attempts, candidate defenestrations and whatever's next in America's uniquely unique "peaceful transfer of power" - I'd bring you some of what the PM said. If you'd rather just read the whole thing for yourself, you can find it here. But let's start with the big takeaway, because it's the background to everything else that's going on. As Mr Orbán puts it:
Dear Friends, Dear Summer Camp,
We are in a change, a change is coming, that has not been seen for five hundred years. This has not been apparent to us because in the last 150 years there have been great changes in and around us, but in these changes the dominant world power has always been in the West. And our starting point is that the changes we are seeing now are likely to follow this Western logic. By contrast, this is a new situation.
In the past, change was Western: the Habsburgs rose and then fell; Spain was up, and it became the centre of power; it fell, and the English rose; the First World War finished off the monarchies; the British were replaced by the Americans as world leaders; then the Russo–American Cold War was won by the Americans.
But all these developments remained within our Western logic. This is not the case now, however, and this is what we must face up to; because the Western world is not challenged from within the Western world, and so the logic of change has been disrupted. What I am talking about, and what we are facing, is actually a global system change. And this is a process that is coming from Asia. To put it succinctly and primitively, for the next many decades – or perhaps centuries, because the previous world system was in place for five hundred years – the dominant centre of the world will be in Asia: China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and I could go on. They have already created their forms, their platforms, there is this BRICS formation in which they are already present. And there is the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, in which these countries are building the new world economy.
Hold it there for a moment. How many American or British voters have heard of the "Shanghai Cooperation Organisation"? China's in it, and India, Iran, Russia, the 'stans... It's the largest "regional organisation" on the planet, covering forty per cent of world population and a third of global GDP. Do you remember when the Ukraine war launched? We were told that the world was united against Russian aggression. In fact, North America and the EU were, more or less, united, which comes to about fifteen per cent of the "international community". But the rest of the planet was most definitely not on board. One consequence of the last two years has been to strengthen and to make both more appealing and inevitable China's position as the alternative to US "global leadership".
Back to Mr Orbán:
I think that this is an inevitable process, because Asia has the demographic advantage, it has the technological advantage in ever more areas, it has the capital advantage, and it is bringing its military power up to equilibrium with that of the West. Asia will have – or perhaps already has – the most money, the largest financial funds, the largest companies in the world, the best universities, the best research institutes, and the largest stock exchanges. It will have – or already has – the most advanced space research and the most advanced medical science.
He does not mention their greatest advantage: They are not nuts, and are not raising their children to be even nuttier. What kind of rational political system would select its leaders on the basis that it's time for an Indian-Jamaican-Quebecker to shatter the glass ceiling? Whether it's the Olympic opening or Joe Biden wandering up the steps of an empty 'plane that has just dropped off the Russian hostages and waiting for it to take him off somewhere, we insist on communicating to the world in symbolism and sub-text the same unrelenting message: we're over.
The point about that Paris travesty is not that it was a celebration of decadence, but that it was an utterly exhausted decadence: I've been around the theatre since I was a teenager, and some of this stuff might conceivably have been "edgy" and "transgressive" in the Seventies, but there's nothing "edgy" and "transgressive" about pissing on the Last Supper when you live in a country where priests and schoolteachers are beheaded by Muslims. Anyone opened a book on when the first great French vineyard will be torched and razed? Or will the self-liquidation of the nations that built the modern world be left entirely to (Chinese) historians?
More from the PM:
In addition, we in the West – even the Russians – have been well shepherded into this new entity that is taking shape. The question is whether or not the process is reversible – and if not, when it became irreversible. I think it happened in 2001, when we in the West decided to invite China to join the World Trade Organisation – better known as the WTO. Since then this process has been almost unstoppable and irreversible.
He's not wrong there, is he? The American "right" decided to transfer the superpower's economy to China and enable the Politburo to develop the first economically viable form of Communism. Oh, to be sure, the Chamber of Commerce Republicans told us it would just be the cheap-o T-shirts and sneakers and other crap, and we in the west would be "the knowledge economy". Yet somehow Peking wound up in charge of all the "knowledge economy", too.
I was thinking I'd heard some of this stuff before, and trying to remember who from - Mitch McConnell? Theresa May? Jacques Chirac?
Er, no, it turns out to be me! Over and over (including in a bestselling book) for a decade-and-a-half:
I'm trying to frame it the way the rest of the world sees it. The French intellectual class thinks that a two-century Anglo-American dominance is coming to an end - in other words, a particular view of the world that began - not to intrude on personal grief with the French - but began at the Battle of Trafalgar and has continued for basically two centuries since.
The Chinese take a broader view and think that half-a-millennium of European dominance is coming to an end and the world is reverting to a natural Asiatic view of things.
I said those words in February 2012 on C-SPAN, which is pretty mainstream and respectable. So back then I may even have entertained expectations that some or other president or prime minister might address what the Hungarian PM calls a once-every-half-millennium "global system change". Because you'd think something that happens only once every five hundred years would be sufficient to get the attention of even the west's worthless politico-media class.
But no: in Washington as in London as in Paris, it's trannifelarious bollocks all the way over the cliff.
The PM is right: five hundred years of Euro-American global dominance is coming to an end. What's even more remarkable is that in the dying west most of its citizens are entirely unaware of that stark and definitive fact. If you read the alleged "centre-right" Spectator, the oldest English-language magazine on earth, the most important topic appears to be whether a man called Robert Jenrick becomes the next Conservative leader.
Will he make any difference to anything? Or will he be just like all the other "conservative" leaders since that C-SPAN clip? How can we "change course" when our political discourse does not even acknowledge the course? And when our political discourse is conducted in the bland fatuities embodied in the following. In America, every single listener to NPR thinks the ability to talk like the lady below is what it means to be "articulate" and "intelligent" - and they vote accordingly:
Reporter: Will you work with the GOP on the border issue?
— The Investigative Examiners (@TruthorConseq12) July 27, 2024
Harris: (I'm still trying to figure out this response!) pic.twitter.com/YUfcThaOb9
More from Viktor Orbán's speech tomorrow.
~We thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly few months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
We had a very lively weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's Topical Take on the US Government plea-bargaining with the godfathers of Gitmo. On Saturday Mark Steyn on the Town luxuriated in summer songs, and for his weekend movie date Rick McGinnis picked Albert Finney in Tony Richardson's adaptation of Tom Jones. Steyn's Song of the Week opted for the very last song Oscar Hammerstein ever wrote, and our marquee presentation was our continuing Tale for Our Time, Bulldog Drummond, which is proving very popular with listeners. Click for Part Twenty-Two, Part Twenty-Three and Part Twenty-Four. Part Twenty-Five airs tonight.
If you were too busy thinking about the work you're thinking about beginning in order that it will be going to be ongoing, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the ongoing and indeed foregoing as a new week begins.
