Our Godless and Dangerous Times

Eccentrics and extremists have always been around. Whether they rise to prominence depends upon them having a large audience. Adolf Hitler and Sir Oswald Mosley shared an extreme form of aggressive nationalism. One took off, the other didn’t. The nineteen-thirties Germans were nationalists to their boot heels. The nineteen-thirties Britons mixed their more sensible nationalism with large doses of common sense and scepticism. It’s the quality of the populace and their cultural norms that count in the end result.

Islamic fanatics threaten, as Churchill put it, because of the “the fanatical frenzy [and] fearful fatalistic apathy” which Islam inculcates. It is easy to whip up significant numbers into mobs, for example, as we saw across the world, including in Australia for goodness sake, when that poorly made 14-minute video surfaced in 2012 of Mohammed’s life. Obama, Hillary and Susan Rice were deceptive, it didn’t cause the attack on America’s embassy in Benghazi,…