Will the West be complicit in its own destruction?

That is the question raised by the documentary film, The Fight of Our Lives: Defeating the Ideological War against the West.  The 2018 film was recently screened at the Anthem Film Festival, held at Freedomfest, an annual gathering of conservatives and libertarians in Las Vegas.

The film is directed by Gloria Z. Greenfield, her latest in a series of four documentaries, and boasts an impressive array of expert commentators, including Niall Ferguson, Melanie Phillips, Victor Davis Hanson, Alan Dershowitz, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

The film opens with a stern warning from Niall Ferguson, a historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution:

Civilizations, empires, great powers can fall apart very fast. Collapse can come suddenly, like a thief in the night. And we should be very wary of assuming that our civilization, the civilization of the early 21st century West, will oblige us by declining gradually.

British journalist and author Melanie Philips lays out the key theme of the film:

I think there are two threats facing the West and they are linked. There is the threat from within and the threat from without. And the threat from without is made much more threatening by the threat from within. The threat from within comes from people who want to undermine and destroy the basis of Western civilization, the basis of Western society.

The "threat from within" is the embrace of destructive ideas, particularly moral relativism, postmodernism, and cultural Marxism, all of which are promoted vigorously at the universities.

The "threat from without" is Islamic extremism, which is making increasing inroads in Europe and, to a lesser extent, the United States.

Militant political correctness has left the West ideologically defenseless, the film argues.  Cultural Marxism infects the citadels of society — the universities, media, and churches — with a kind of intellectual masochism.  "The sins of mankind," argues historian Victor Davis Hanson, become solely the sins of Western society.  "We are not good because we are not perfect."

In a regime of moral relativism, it becomes impossible to tell the truth about radical Islam, because truth itself is not a value.  The Left-Muslim alliance, which seems absurd on its face, is in fact well established in Western politics.  In the cultural Marxist worldview, Muslims are part of the vanguard of the oppressed, notwithstanding the fact that Islamic social views on such matters as feminism and gay rights are at odds with the cultural Left.

Toward the end of the film, Niall Ferguson warns of the dangers of unfettered, unregulated immigration.  Ferguson notes that, by some estimates, the Muslim population in the U.S. is growing faster than the Muslim population of any European country.

"This should not pose a problem," he said, "but it will if we allow multiculturalism to dictate that assimilation and integration are optional."

His comments, of course, can't help but bring to mind the contretemps involving Rep. llhan Omar.  In a recent column, John Zmirak, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration, asked: "Why is a bigoted Sunni Muslim with the narrow worldview of a Somali tribesman, who scapegoats the Jews for the chaos in her home country, serving in the U.S. Congress?"  The answer, he concluded, is that "she represents a whole constituency of people who think just like her, who now live in Minnesota," thanks to policies undertaken by Obama to import such people into the country for the sake of "diversity."

You cannot understand the phenomenon of Omar without dealing with the issue of, as Ferguson put it, "unfettered and unregulated" immigration.

This is an important film that should be viewed and shared, particularly since its message is silenced in academia and the mainstream press.  The DVD may be ordered on its website, which also lists the dates and locations of upcoming screenings.  The film is also available to Amazon Prime subscribers.

You can follow Nicholas J. Kaster on Twitter.