Welcome to this week's episode of my ongoing audio adaptation of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. As I write, Iran's hospitals are full of dead bodies and the regime is charging families a $7,000 administration fee before it will release their loved ones for burial. Yesterday I noted the parallels between this week's events and those of forty-seven Januaries ago. Last night the still-just-about Supreme Leader reminded us of a key difference: Ayatollah Khamenei and his Islamic Revolutionary Guard are doing what the Shah and his men were, in the end, not willing to do - slaughter large numbers of their countrymen on whatever scale is necessary. The BBC's Persian service reports that at just one hospital in Rasht there are the bodies of seventy dead protestors. Others say that the weekend death toll already numbers two thousand.
For most holiday-from-history present-tense types in the post-war west, Iran was the regime that forced us to consider the question of Islam. Hitherto, even "Palestine" was presented in racial terms: Arabs vs Israelis. But, first with the Shah's overthrow, then the embassy hostages, next the Rushdie fatwa, on and on for almost half-a-century, the mullahs made it about Islam, and its boundless ambition. Before the regime began its weekend bloodbath, Elon Musk activated his Starlink system so that Iran's disabling of the Internet will not prevent images from hundreds of towns leaking out to the world. This one is inspirational:
This photo of a young Iranian woman lighting her cigarette with a burning picture of the Ayatollah is next level flex.
It encapsulates the situation perfectly. Powerful and unforgettable.
God bless the citizens of Iran rising up against this oppressive Islamist leftist regime. pic.twitter.com/ahNLcNCFXu
— Caroline Di Russo (@CaroDiRusso) January 9, 2026
[UPDATE! Per The Times of India, there are conflicting reports as to whether "Viral Smoking Girl" is in Iran or Canada or is even of the Iranian persuasion. It's almost as if you can't trust anything you see on the Internet. As someone who once dated a smokin' Persian hottie, I am especially susceptible.]
The implosion and collapse of the mullahs would be a huge psychological setback for Islamic imperialism. Whether it would come too late for much of the west is another matter.
Which brings us to today's episode of our ongoing audio adaptation of my boffo bestseller:
Timothy Garton Ash is an Oxford professor who directs its European Studies Center, the sort of chap National Public Radio call in when they need an 'expert' on the EU. Very reasonable fellow, so reasonable that in 2003 he was attacking yours truly in every leading European newspaper for promoting 'anti-Europeanism in the United States'.
Yet, after scoffing at my Euro-predictions for many years, he seems to have accepted them. The only difference between us is that he thinks it's a good thing.
I'm not kidding. He does. This is how he put it - twenty sodding years ago, so you can't say you weren't warned:
'The populations of Europe are aging fast, so more immigrants will be needed to support the pensioners, and these will largely be Muslim immigrants. For this increasingly Muslim Europe to define itself against Islam would be ridiculous and suicidal... Let's imagine, for a moment, Europe in 2025 at its possible best. A political, economic, and security community of some forty free countries and 650 million people, embracing all the lands in which the two world wars began, and producing, still, a large part of the wealth of the world. A further 650 million people, born in the most explosive parts of the early twenty-first-century globe, but now living in a great arc of partnership with this European Union, from Marrakesh, via Cairo, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Tbilisi, all the way to Vladivostok. That would not be nothing.'
To which I remarked:
No, indeed. It would certainly be something, but quite what he declines to say. And that's what Garton Ash sees as the Continent's 'possible best' – a giant Euro-Muslim 'arc of partnership'. Faced with a choice between correcting course or drifting irrevocably into Eurabia, Garton Ash has chosen consciously to embrace the latter. He will not be the last.
Garton Ash's line is a good summation of the course the European political class has set: Steyn-type demographic wankery is a conspiracy theory ...but it's too late to do anything about it ...so a Euro-Muslim "arc of partnership" is the 2025 future "at its possible best".
And here we are, with all his fellow members of the political class apparently signed on - from the leftie Starmer to the far-right fascist racist Farage, who in his own "arc of partnership" has just picked a Muslim woman as his London mayoral candidate. There isn't really a lot of left vs right about any of this: Sir Paul Marshall, the bloke who owns almost all so-called "conservative" institutions in the UK (The Spectator, Unherd, half of GB News, Jordan Peterson's ARC), is also the chap who introduced Farage to Zia Yusuf, who instantly became Nigel's anointed successor. Everyone seems to be on board with the Garton Ash plan. Which is why we are now in the last fifteen years (if that) of anything recognisable as "the western world". To his credir, Garton Ash said it out loud at a time few others did.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Nineteen of America Alone simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
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To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to America Alone but to over seventy-five cracking audio adventures in Tales for Our Time. Please join me next weekend for Part Twenty of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
