Sigrid’s Dream, or Fear and Loathing in Post-Christian Europe

Originally posted at The Festering Swamp on June 7, 2007

As promised in my plant rights post on Monday, here is my entry from eleven months ago about radical Islam in post-Christian Europe. The Force of Reason was the second of three books Oriana Fallaci wrote about the crisis of Islamofascism facing Europe. I hope that the third book, Oriana Fallaci Interviews Herself, will be translated into English and published soon. The late Ms. Fallaci was a writer of rare conviction and insight. – Mike LaRoche

Rarely have I had the pleasure of reading a work of non-fiction that is a true tour-de-force. The infrequency of such occasions made reading Oriana Fallaci's The Force of Reason all the more satisfying. With the expertise of a samurai wielding a katana, Fallaci exposes the moral vacuousness, hypocrisy, and sheer lack of common sense that underlies much of Europe's accomodationist attitudes and laws toward the growing Islamofascist menace on the continent.

According to Fallaci, such attitudes are borne not just from self-deception, but from a revolutionary impulse in European politics that manifested itself in very extreme forms (National Socialism, Fascism, and Communism) during the early twentieth century. During this time, a significant exemplar of such extremism was the Nazi historian Sigrid Hunke (1913-1999). A native of Kiel, Hunke spent much of the 1930s working toward a doctorate in history, which she earned in 1937 by completing a dissertation in which she extolled Adolf Hitler as "the best model that History has ever offered to Germany."

Hunke's support for National Socialism went beyond words. During the early 1940s, Hunke and her sister joined the Germanistischer Wissenschafteinsatz – the German Sciences Service of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the purpose of which was to oversee the Germanization of northern Europe. During that time, Hunke became involved Nazi outreach efforts to the Arab world, an alliance Hitler viewed as necessary for succeeding against the corrupt scourge of Anglo-American imperialism.

Hunke's association with Arab extremism did not cease with the end of World War II. More than a dozen years after emerging from the Nuremberg trials unscathed, Hunke published Allahs Sonne über dem Abendland (Allah's Sun over the Occident), in which she celebrated the essential role that Arabic and Islamic culture played in "saving" Europe from what she believed to be the greatest impediments to its civilizational advancement: Judaism and Christianity.

Hunke was not a Muslim herself – she was a self-described pagan – but she believed in Christianity's moral inferiority, blaming it for the so-called "Dark Ages" and crediting the Islamic world for rescuing medieval Europe from a supposed abyss of Judeo-Christian barbarism. In the Middle East, Hunke found an eager audience for her historical theories, so eager that in 1967 she was sent by the German government on a cultural tour of several Arab countries wherein she gave lectures extolling the virtues of Muslim civilization.

Presently, many far left academics are unwittingly carrying on Hunke's factually challenged and politically motivated assumptions about Islam and the West. Like Hunke, they are quick to praise the virtues of the Muslim world while seeing very little to admire about their own culture. Of this, Fallaci writes:

In the days of the Soviet Union there was Popov…Popov was a first name or a surname or a nickname or an invention. But the Soviets and the Italian servants of the Soviets used to tell us that he had invented everything.

Well: with the hopefully-unaware-disciples of Sigrid Hunke, it's quite the same. Only difference, their Popovs are called Muhammad or Ahmad or Mustafa or Rashid. And instead of belonging to the Soviet Union, instead of representing the superiority of Communism, they belong to the past of Islam and represent the superiority of Islam.

Stories are fabricated, embarrassing episodes are overlooked, and the relationships of significant historical figures (such as the philosopher Averroes, persecuted by religious authorities for spreading heterodoxy) to Islam are willfully distorted to reflect a friendlier image of the Islamic faith.

All of which begs this question: what drives or has driven so many European intellectuals on the far left to view Islam with the starry-eyed reverence accorded to it by a Nazi like Hunke? Above all, it must be understood that National Socialism, Fascism, and Communism are revolutionary ideologies that operate from a set of shared assumptions concerning traditional European culture:

1. said culture (religious and secular) is unjust and unresponsive to the needs of the masses,
   
2. traditional cultural institutions (the monarchy and the church) are the chief barriers to needed social change, and
   
3. widespread acceptance of Islam in Europe can be used to break down said repressive cultural mores and institutions, paving the way for the establishment of a truly revolutionary society.
   

It is also convenient that modern-day Muslims are portrayed (erroneously) as being historically victimized by the imperialist West. By fighting on behalf of allegedly oppressed Muslims, many on the left believe a larger cause of social justice is being fulfilled, even if it results in a de facto alliance of well-meaning leftists and murderous Islamic extremists.

Those who seek to portray a sanitized historical and contemporary image of Islam may believe that they are serving the cause of peace by altering (or even eliminating) uncomfortable facts. They are not. By substituting honest, critical inquiry for political propaganda, open discourse is rendered inert, ignorance prevails, and the very fear and loathing that is supposed to be curtailed instead grows ever stronger.