Throughout the Lockdown and the Permanent Abnormal that followed, the lights stayed on at SteynOnline, even as they flickered and dimmed elsewhere. The Mark Steyn Club is well into its eighth year, and we're very proud that this website now offers more free content than at any time in our twenty-two-year history. But we also provide some premium extras especially for our Steyn Club members, such as these nightly serialisations of classic fiction and our new weekly audio show.
Which brings us to our current tale, a satire by G K Chesterton set in an England where Islam is on the ascendant and liberty is headed in the opposite direction. My remarks yesterday about the author's accidental prescience prompted a bit of pushback from readers. Montana Steyn Clubber Nick Turner:
Mark,
I used to settle for random librivox recordings as I work, but your rich narrations are a significant upgrade. Much appreciated. Chesterton is my favorite. But I am not convinced that the use of Islam was purely for satirical flourish. While his optimism about a Church able to come back from the dead means ultimately victory, he does see Islam as a force which had not been dealt with. From The New Jerusalem:
'The Moslem had been checked, but he had not been checked enough. The whole story of what was called the Eastern Question, and three-quarters of the wars of the modern world, were due to the fact that he was not checked enough.'
And to his purpose, I have fancied that Father Brown is a poetic Latin check to the Modernist Holmes. Later in the same book he says:
'There is a strong bias against the Christians and in favour of the Moslems and the Jews in most of the Victorian historical works, especially historical novels. And most people of modern, or rather of very recent times got all their notions of history from dipping into historical novels.'
And it's more clear in Belloc, who also wrote a satire involving Islam, of the capitalist. The Mercy of Allah but expressed serious concern about Islam in his conclusion to The Crusades:
'We are divided in the face of a Mohammedan world, divided in every way...and that division cannot be remedied because the cement which once held our civilization together, the Christian cement has crumbled.'
Keep up the good work,
Nick Turner
That's true, Nick. I suppose what I was referring to was that Chesterton's prescience was enabled by the one thing he did not foresee - that in England, Europe, North America and Australia a duplicitous political class would import millions upon millions of Mohammedans who would, beginning in the cities, demographically overwhelm the native population. Guys like Sir Keir Stürmer, Jacinda Trudeau, Macron and the rest are just following the logic of the arithmetic.
In tonight's episode of The Flying Inn, our poet cum Member of Parliament is astonished to find he has attracted the attention of the authorities:
He did not wake out of this boisterous reverie of the white road and the wind till a motor horn had first hooted and then howled, till the ground had shaken with the shock of a stoppage, and till a human hand fell heavily and tightly on his shoulder. He looked up and saw the complete costume of a Police Inspector...
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Seventeen of The Flying Inn simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
If you prefer our video attractions, you might like to check out today's tribute to our late friend Russell Malone, over in our Song of the Week department.
Membership in The Mark Steyn Club is not for everyone, but, if you've a pal who enjoys classic fiction, we'd love to welcome him or her to our ranks via the birthday present that lasts all year: A gift membership in the Steyn Club, which comes with access to our entire archive of Tales for Our Time, including Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Time Machine and many more. For more details on our special Gift Membership, see here. And please join me tomorrow evening for Part Eighteen of The Flying Inn.
