MELANIE PHILLIPS ON BRITAIN AND ISLAMISM

Melanie Phillips, Londistan (American edition) (New York, London: Encounter Books.; 2006; pp. 190, 191).

The cultural deformities of moral relativism and victim culture that have done such damage in Britain are present in American society too.

At present, they are locked in conflict with traditional values in America’s culture wars.

But it doesn’t take too much imagination to envisage that, if a different administration were installed in the White House, Britain’s already calamitous slide into cultural defeatism might boost similar forces at play in the United States.

Britain is the global leader of English-speaking culture.

It was Britain that first developed the Western ideas of the rule of law, democracy and liberal ideals, and exported them to other countries.

Now Britain is leading the rout of those values, allowing its culture to become vulnerable to the predations of militant Islam. If British society goes down under this twin assault, the impact will be incalculable – not just for the military defense of the West against radical Islamism, but for the very continuation of Western civilization itself.

The West is under threat from an enemy that has shrewdly observed the decadence and disarray in Europe, where Western civilization first began. And the greatest of all is in Britain . . . . Whether it will finally pull itself together and stop sleepwalking into cultural oblivion is a question on which the future of the West may now depend.

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