I'll put up
a warning for those who perhaps would prefer to read no further.
This post will probably be accounted, as has been the book, as “Islamophobic.” So be it. As, I believe, may be inferred from my long-ago post
commemorating the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 11
September 2001 [link],
I have some pretty strong views regarding how pathetically weak has
been our reaction as a civilization to what became obvious that day
is a ongoing war between two largely incompatible cultures. It is a
conflict that we have little hope of surviving without recognizing
the reality of the situation. After the initial shock of that day
wore off, and our subsequent national rallying petered out into
partisan bickering, our chances have diminished, and continue to do
so at an alarming rate. I wish it were not so.
I have
known and consider to be friends individual Muslims who do not seem
to share the hatred of western civilization and non-Muslims in
general that motivates the jihadists, and would like to believe the
pathetically weak protestations that Islam is “the religion of
peace,” but the deafening silence of such protestations within the
Islamic parts of the world, and the hypocritical double standard
whereby Muslims demand tolerance – indeed, special privileges –
for themselves from us in our homelands while so blatantly denying
the same for non-Muslims in their own, coupled with the violence
which they continue to send our way, makes their claims sickly
ludicrous. And the more I have learned of Islam in the past dozen
years, the more I am convinced that so-called “peaceable” Muslims
are the ones who are outside of the mainstream and departing from the
standards and traditions established by Muhammad and maintained by
the jihadists. The Muslims I’ve known are themselves likely
considered apostate and just as hated by the jihadists as are kafirs
– non-believers. Just this past weekend we've had graphic
re-emphasis of the jihadists’ evil intent in the horrific attack on
a shopping mall in Kenya, in which the attackers reportedly
specifically called out non-Muslims for massacre [link]
– news which ironically preempted from the news cycle a
suicide-bombing which killed scores of Christian worshipers in Pakistan
[link].
That those incidents occurred “over there” is only illusory
comfort for the willfully ignorant given that similar efforts are
actively being made “over here” and indeed are successful in more
cases than our government is willing to admit – Fort Hood? –
“workplace violence”? Give
me a break [link].
How long?, How many
terrorist attacks is it going to take?, before we learn that the jihadists mean exactly what they say when they proclaim their intent to
subjugate or destroy us?
A couple of
weeks ago I came across a news item (not this one, but link)
concerning Christian villagers in Syria and Egypt being forced to pay
the Islamic “religious tax,” which had attached to it a comment
recommending a near-future military science fiction novel by Tom Kratman,
Caliphate.
Finding it available from Baen Free eBooks (link),
I downloaded it. It's compelling reading, set a hundred years in the
future when current demographic trends have Islamicized Europe and
the world is in a hundred-years-plus-old religious war – the very
same one we as a civilization seem bent on not acknowledging. A
hundred years hence, it's an ugly world, polarized into essentially
two camps – broadly speaking, the semi-fascist American Empire and
its allies such as the United Kingdom and Australia versus
the Caliphate of Europe and Western North Africa. A good part of the
rest of the globe – mainly the present Middle East, the historical
homeland of Islam – is a desolate wasteland, ruined in a massive
retaliatory strike after coordinated jihadist nuclear-suitcase
strikes on 11 September 2015 left Boston, Kansas City, Los Angeles,
and London glowing craters – and several misfires resulted in
essentially “dirty bombs” contaminating other cities such as New
York, Houston, and Washington. There are a scattering of other
powers as well, such as a restored Socialist Tsardom in Russia, the
restored Celestial Kingdom of the Han (China), and the Boer Free
State of southern Africa, which warily contemplate and despise both
the American Empire and the European Caliphate. (The geography is
largely laid out at 15% ff., Location 848 ff. Of 5910) In interlude
chapters which constitute a parallel narrative featuring Gabrielle
von Minden, the German great-grandmother of two of the main story's
central characters, we follow the events leading up to that day,
beginning with the Europeans' culturally suicidal reaction to the US
invasion of Iraq in 2002, and leading from it, as Gabi slowly – and far too late – comes to recognize the reality of the
situation, the inexorable slide of European civilization into
darkness, which comes all too quickly, by the mid 2020s.
In the main
narrative, the early-21st-century character's early-22nd-century descendants are introduced as children, Petra and
Hans, ripped away from their Christian parents as payment of the
jizya,
the pretty much arbitrary religious “tax” on kafirs
living in the hell of dhimmi-tude
(ironically enough, “protection”) that has become the lot of the
few remaining European Christians. Separated, Petra becomes a slave
at age nine– initially fortunate to be bought as a “sister” to
a young Muslim girl, Besma (who, along with her father, seem to be
the only kindhearted Muslims in the story – Gabi's lover, and
father of her child, Mahmoud, doesn't really count, because he is
only nominally Muslim before converting to the Christianity which
Gabi despises), but then through the machinations of an “evil
stepmother” cast out into the brutal life of a brothel sex-slave.
In this passage and similar ones scattered all too frequently through
the book, Kratman is sickeningly explicit – not that the
gang-rape of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl can be anything but
sickening. Possibly the author could have toned it down a bit – as
it is, the description verges on pornographic. But I'm not sure he
should have; its brutality achieves his intended effect of showcasing
the abominable evil Petra is henceforth subjected to, again and
again. (Without comment, I simply refer the reader to this link to be equally sickened by “real-world” events....) Petra's
brother, Hans – a few years older – is conscripted into the
janissary
corps of the Caliphate, tortured into submission to Islam, and
trained as a slave-soldier – until assigned to oversee the
crucifixion of a Christian priest he is shocked back to the faith of
his youth – secretly, of course, but from that moment longing for a
chance to strike a blow against the Caliphate.
Their
stories eventually converge with that of the third latter-day
protagonist, John Hamilton, an American soldier whom we follow from
training through cleaning Muslim insurgents out of the Philippines,
eventually into service as a secret agent infiltrating the Caliphate
to destroy a highly secret bioweapon and extract the trio of venal,
renegade western scientists who have developed it. Many supporting
characters are introduced along the way, of course, in a gripping
narrative that rushes to a climactic chase across Lake Constance into
the safety of Switzerland, a nominally neutral but embattled island
of western Christendom in the sea of European Islam.
On a
certain level, this is an engrossing futuristic adventure novel.
Technological advances have produced military science-fiction staples
such as the exoskeletoid battle suits and, more arcanely, surgically
implanted “chips” which allow the recipient to be tele-operated
by a remote controller. The main characters (more than just the
three stressed above) are developed in sufficient depth that when, as
is inevitable given the nature of the story which does, after all,
depict a brutal war from the level of the battlefield to that of
civilizations in contention, some of them do not make it out alive,
you feel
their deaths and know that the survivors will be affected for the
rest of their lives.
But, far
more importantly, it is a horrific but all-too-realistic imagining of
what our own future might be if we do not open our eyes. The
jihadists are frankly open about what their intentions are – to
infiltrate and transform, subjugate or destroy all who do not submit
to their way of life. And it is a cautionary tale not just for
Europe, which seems demographically well on its way toward disaster
much as depicted herein and driven home by an extensive author's
afterword examining the demographic trends and their possible
outcomes. The vision of America's future is pretty bleak as
well, expressed very effectively in an extensive discourse that makes
up the last section of Part One of this story, presented as excerpts
from a history of the previous century to bridge the gap between the
early 21st
and early 22nd
century time frames, entitled Empire
Rising (at 43% ff., Location
2575 ff. Of 5910) As a brief aside, this where the story broke down
somewhat for me, because the two decades after 2015 are depicted as an almost cartoonish
caricature of a nation's descent into fascism. That
impression is reinforced by the rather transparent naming of the
demagogue elected President in 2016 on the “Wake Up, America”
Party as “Pat Buckman.” Near the end of this section, however,
there appears the following assessment of the legacy of the 21st
century, reflecting the culmination of trends that are already
apparent: “an empire we [America] don't want, yet can't get rid of, the enmity of most
of the world, a crushing military burden, and damage to our
traditional civil liberties that has yet to be fully undone and may
never be” (at 47%, Location
2783 of 5910). Nevertheless, as commented by one character regarding
this assessment, “the
difference between us and the people we are fighting is that we have
a chance to get better on our own . . . and they don't and never
will” (at 47%, Location 2802
of 5910).
Thanks for
reading.
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