Mark Steyn has been reading Sun Tzu, and has discovered that the principles of war apply just as handily to the written word as to battle. He's put his newfound knowledge to good use. In his book America Alone and in subsequent public remarks, he's suggested that genocide is (dare we say) the final solution to the spread of Muslims in Europe...but he's couched the suggestion in so much rhetorical fluff that his critics have had a hard time deciding what to attack. Creating confusion, as Sun Tzu teaches us, is the key to a good defense. So instead of saying "I wish we could dig up a new Hitler to take care of these dirty Muslims", Steyn says simply that modern demographics make a second holocaust unfeasible, and that "There are no Hitlers to hand." What a shame. He also predicts that Europe "will learn" from its Balkan neighbors and adopt the philosophy "if you can't out-breed 'em, cull 'em." Again, he uses folksy slang to make a chilling point: ethnic cleansing works. 

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Steyn is so comfortable with wholesale slaughter; the man does write obituaries for a living, and while this worthy profession must be carried out by someone, I can't help but wonder whether it's given Steyn an unhealthy flippancy toward death. Strange things must happen to your psychology when you are handed a stack of money every time a notable person kicks the bucket. Steyn's career in the death-writeup business has been so successful that he's putting out a book of his collected obits. In an homage to post-punk band My Chemical Romance that is made all the more amusing because it is (I can only assume) unconscious, it is entitled Mark Steyn's Passing Parade. The ghosts of Vincent Price and Edward Gorey are coming to the release party. 

Despite the intimidating combination of morbidity and circular rhetoric in Steyn's work, Mark Kleiman and Andrew Sullivan have made two impressive attempts to critique it. Sullivan is taken aback by the fact that Steyn's biggest issue with genocide is that "it won't accomplish much". No humanitarian horror, no caveat; it will simply be ineffective. (Remember Steyn's observation about those pesky demographics; there are just too many Muslims to make packing them all into ovens an option.) Sullivan is so bewildered by this cold-eyed prediction that he ends his critique in a way I have never seen him end a piece before: simply, "Damn." 

Kleiman goes further, and unpacks the clever wording with which Steyn seems to weasel out of his vision of an Islam-free Europe by pointing out that this is a theme Steyn comes back to again and again, not just in America Alone, but in public interviews. Remarking on Steyn's Hitler comment, Kleiman says "Damn!" When two eloquent people are left speechless, is there really anything else to say?

Realizing that his critics had him on the run--no one likes genocide, at least not when it's phrased so bluntly--Steyn attempted to distance himself from his 'damning' remarks by writing, with something oddly like sorrow, that "neo-Fascism will be ineffectual and merely a temporary blip in the remorseless transformation of the Continent." This is not so much a retraction as a new iteration of his observation that a second holocaust "won't accomplish much." In an update of his critique, Kleiman blows this statement out of the water in one of the most salient, well-realized moral observations I've read in recent years: "I'm glad he regards the charge of supporting genocide as something he needs to deny. Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. It's when the tribute stops coming that we all need to worry."

Damn.