ON THE WEB - Marc Sidwell's review of Mark Steyn's America Alone for the Social Affairs Unit

Mark Steyn should not write off Europe just because she has a nasty temperature - Marc Sidwell explains why: America Alone - Mark Steyn

America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It
by Mark Steyn
Pp. 224. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2006Hardback, $27.95

Is demography destiny? Mark Steyn, columnist to the world, certainly thinks so. In America Alone, he lays out a bleak future for European dhimmitude - fortunately brightened by Steyn's trademark wit. He points out our collapsing birth-rates, despite (and perhaps because of) generous welfare systems that rely on a successor generation to pick up the tab. He sets this alongside comparatively high birth-rates among Muslims and increased Muslim immigration to Europe as our politicians attempt to make up the welfare deficit. Shake it together with multiculti paralysis before twenty-first century Islamism and, suggests Steyn, you have a cocktail mixed by Molotov, the kind already being tossed around in the French banlieues.

However, Steyn's argument seems to have been given a remarkably easy ride up the bestseller charts. As his book starts to attract attention in the UK, where its predictions are a matter of vital interest rather a wry joke on a distant and reluctant ally, Steyn can expect a more searching reception. Johann Hari has already attempted a takedown of the book's thesis for the New Statesman, one of the few occasions I recall a critic engaging with Steyn on the data.

So how seriously should British conservatives take America Alone? Is it time to buy a one-way ticket to Colorado, or will Europe, the western motherland, refuse to be bundled into a burqa?

Read the whole article on the Social Affairs Unit's website, here
Also remember the interview Mark Steyn gave to The New Culture Forum last november,
Mark Steyn talks to The New Culture Forum

IN THE PAPERS / The first of two major exhibitions celebrates Blake, the anti-slavery artist. But was he really? asks Laura Cumming in The Guardian

Of human bondage

Mind-Forg'd Madness: William Blake and Slavery
Ferens Gallery, Hull; until 20 May, then Glasgow and Manchester

Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom from orthodox religion, the right to roam, the right to go without clothes - William Blake, who represents them all, is art's original free spirit. He is against mind-forg'd manacles and the tyranny of Reason. He is against dark, satanic mills and conventional marriage. He may be a libertarian or he may be a hippy, but even those who can't summon one of his proverbial images to mind - God in his chariot of fire, Newton doing his maths at the bottom of the ink-blue sea - know that Blake, in life as in art, is a freedom-loving idealist.

Laura Cumming's article continues here

Did you see it? What did you think?

300—the most civilised film in decades, writes Marc Sidwell

Frank Miller’s bold and bloody reinvention of the Battle of Thermopylae hits British cinema screens this week, fresh from two record-breaking weekends at the American box office. Certificate 15 (‘R’-rated in America) this is a violent and at times sexy film aimed at a youth market. From its takings, the producers did not mistake their fan base.

The film is an unrelenting, two hour epic remythologising the historical record. Frank Miller’s graphic style is brought to vivid life thanks to groundbreaking use of blue screen technology, supplemented by influences from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. For those whose stance is instinctively ironic and cynical, the straightforward heroism celebrated here will be disconcerting. For those who know the value of sacrifice and the price of freedom, the experience is thrilling. This is a modern film that reconnects with the essence of Western civilisation.

For what makes this film exceptional are the classical foundations upon which it draws – the American scholar, Victor Davis Hanson, was a consultant – and the resonance they evidently have with a fresh generation of westerners, officially unschooled in Herodotus and Homer. If our education system has given up on the value of a classical education, the runaway success of 300 proves that the values of the mass of the West remain those of Ancient Greece, even in the Age of Barbie. Freedom, Beauty, Excellence and Reason are all celebrated here—four exceptional touchstones of the West that come to us from tiny Greece, thanks to the resistance of the Spartans.

One of Miller’s sources was an essay by William Golding, ‘The Hot Gates’ – a literal translation of Thermopylae. Golding reminds us of simple historical fact: ‘A little of Leonidas lies in the fact that I can go where I like and write what I like’. When the freedoms to write what we like and go where we like are once more under threat, it is no surprise that Thermopylae should return to inspire us. The West, for all our forgetfulness, is one civilisation, stretching back two and a half thousand years to the shining example of Greece. The last time the Spartan epic was re-enacted, it served to stiffen sinews in the Cold War.

300 reminds us too that for all the current misperception of America as global bully, the West is in truth the eternal underdog. In a world always ready to fall back into tyranny and superstition, only the Greeks and their inheritors know the value and the power of individual human beings. When we are set free, we can bring down giants, but we always play David to the world’s Goliath. Refusing to kneel before the Persian horde, Gerard Butler’s Leonidas and his buffed-up men are an army of Michelangelo’s Davids. They are simultaneously the progenitors and inheritors of the best of the West. Their reception in 2007 is proof that ordinary westerners retain a sense of their civilisation and its essential values. Our elite gatekeepers may find the unofficial western motto—freedom or death; war is not the worst of evils—hard to grasp. 300 shows that everyone else gets it. There is hope for us yet.

'300' reviewed on Culture Clash

Based on Frank Millar’s graphic novel, which was itself inspired by the film The 300 Spartans, 300 tells the story of the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, in which King Leonidas, played by Gerard Butler, leads his men in a stand for freedom against Xerxes and the mighty Persian army. The film, which like Millar’s Sin City, is shot as a kind of hybrid between real action and animation, has been accused by expatriate Iranians of being ‘irresponsible’, a distortion, and ‘an assault on its culture and tradition.’

With Peter Whittle to discuss these are Dolan Cummings of Spiked Online, Dawn French of the New Criterion magazine, Andrew Haydon, critic for Culturewars, and Marc Sidwell of the Henry Jackson Society.

Watch a clip


and the full programme here