HSBC
The refugee crisis has been turning Europe upside down.
In light of an ongoing influx of migrants and recent security threats, there has been an increased possibility that the Schengen agreement — which allows free movement across a wide swathe of Europe — would be suspended.
Some governments have already introduced temporary controls at their borders, including Hungary at its short border with Slovenia and France at its borders with several countries following the Paris terrorist attacks.
Most recently, Greece was given three months starting in mid-February to tighten its border controls — or else the EU would reintroduce border controls "at all or at specific parts of their internal borders as a matter of last resort."
HSBC's Chief European Economist Karen Ward and her team argued in a recent note to clients they aren't exactly sold on the idea of suspending the Schengen agreement, as it wouldn't aid either refugees or the EU economy.
Ward writes:
Reinstating national borders would not resolve the problem in our view. Indeed it might be the
route towards the worst possible outcome in which a large number of migrants still arrive,
but they are not able to travel to where their chance of employment is greatest and are forced
to live 'underground' without any possibility of officially integrating into society and labor
markets. Economics and government tax receipts will not truly benefit and national disconten
t could rise even further.
As for the rest of the EU economy, she writes that if the Schengen agreement were suspended, "this would harm trade in an already weak economic environment and, once again, raise questions about Europe’s capacity for deeper integration."
Although suspending Schengen doesn't mean that businesses and workers can't move around Europe at all (there would be passport and vehicle checks at borders), the following charts shared by Ward suggest that its suspension could still have a noticeable impact on EU trade and tourism.
The first chart shows exports of Germany to France against those with Austria, another country that shares a large land border but was not part of the original Schengen agreement.
There's a notable acceleration with France relative to Austria in the years immediately following 1985, when the agreement was first signed, observes Ward:
HSBC
Similarly, here we have exports from France to Germany against those of Spain, another big neighbor that wasn't part of the original Schengen agreement. Interestingly, once the Schengen agreement was expanded in 1997, the difference became less stark:
HSBC
"Although it is hard to draw strong conclusions, or indeed quantify the precise effect, our view is that dismantling Schengen would have a notable impact on EU trade," writes Ward.
"And this at a time when the Eurozone economy is already sluggish."
However, the notable exception to Ward's argument is the UK, which has preformed well in trade with the EU (until recently). Moreover, Ward cites the Mastercard Global Cities Index data which says that London is the most visited city in the world, suggesting that the visa requirement isn't a huge deterrent.
Still, there is also the potential ideological impact from the potential Schengen suspension.
In other words, how this could affect the EU's understanding of "European-ness."
Again, here's Ward:
"For some Schengen is symbolic of the benefits of Europe — according to the latest Eurobarometer the free movement of people is the second most appreciated concrete achievement of the EU ... so an argument could be made that this is a further step away from closer integration and a sense of being 'European.'"
Ultimately, the crux of the issue here is whether or not the EU can be incentivized to work as a cohesive unit, rather than as individual states, argues Ward.
"The lack of political and fiscal union posed a threat to EU’s greatest endeavor –monetary union – at the time of the Greek crisis," she wrote.
"The same issue now also challenges Schengen free trade, and raises further questions about whether Europe really has the capacity for deeper integration."
http://www.voanews.com/
Migrant Spending Splits German Government
Berlin's Tempelhof-Schoeneberg district, Germany, Feb. 26, 2016.
February 28, 2016 11:07 AM
FRANKFURT, GERMANY— Germany's leading
Social Democrats on Sunday attacked the conservative finance minister
for being too thrifty in dealing with the migrant crisis, as the rift
widened in the governing coalition over how to cope with an influx of
refugees.
The bitter criticism came after finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble labeled Social Democrat proposals for wider social spending on housing and public services to complement the integration of migrants as "pitiful."
Stephan Weil, the Social Democrat premier of the state of Lower Saxony, hit back on Sunday, calling for a bigger social services budget in order not to alienate ordinary Germans as the country accommodates over one million migrants.
"The finance minister obviously just doesn't get it," Weil told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.
Pointing to the high cost of integrating migrants, Weil said "We cannot create the impression that this is happening at the expense of the weaker members of our society."
He added that spending on schools and childcare would strengthen the "solidarity of our society."
Heiko Maas, Justice Minister and a Social Democrat, was similarly critical and made a renewed call for more spending.
"What's more important? The people in the country or balancing the budget?"
Christine Lambrecht, a prominent Social Democrat lawmaker, also disparaged Schaeuble. "After months of big talk and doing nothing, he is worried that he will have to open his wallet," she said.
Schaeuble, a long-standing proponent of prudence, wants to prevent Germany spending more than its earns and is unlikely to be easily moved.
If spending were to spiral, it could further weaken German Chancellor Angela Merkel's fading support.
Merkel has seen her ratings plummet due to her handling of migrants. She is facing the biggest test of her decade in office as she struggles to secure a Europe-wide plan for dealing with the migrants.
Politicians from the German state of Bavaria's Christian Social Union, the sister party to Merkel's CDU, have also been critical of her stance but for different reasons. They want the introduction of a limit to the number of migrants, similar to that imposed in Austria.
Austria, the last stop on the way to Germany for hundreds of thousands of migrants, recently imposed restrictions on its borders, setting off a domino effect in Europe in limiting the flow of people, and leaving hundreds stranded in Greece.
Merkel has warned about the consequences for Europe of border closures. But a poor showing by the Christian Democrats in state elections in March would pressure her to reverse course.
Her conservatives are nervous as they lose ground to the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, whose hardline stance on refugees could bring it big gains in all three German states.
Germany attracted 1.1 million asylum seekers last year, leading to calls from across the political spectrum for a change in its handling of refugees coming to Europe to escape war and poverty in Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The United Nations warned Tuesday that Europe is near a
"self-induced humanitarian crisis" because governments are imposing
border restrictions and failing to work together as migrants continue to
reach the continent.
Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency, said more than 130,000 people have crossed the Mediterranean this year, most of them reaching Greece. The two-month total is near the figure for the first six months of last year.
Some 24,000 refugees and migrants are in need of accommodation in Greece, with around 8,500 of them massed next to the border with Macedonia.
Macedonian police fired tear gas to push back refugees trying to cross the border from Greece on Monday in the latest clashes between people seeking to move through Europe and governments trying to control the flow of people into their territory.
The UNHCR urged Greece and Balkan countries to quickly act in order to prevent a disaster.
Edwards said European nations pledged last year to accept more than 66,000 refugees who reached Greece, but that so far only 325 relocations have taken place. He said Greece cannot manage the situation by itself.
European Council President Donald Tusk is visiting Austria on Tuesday as part of a five-nation trip to work on how to handle the migrant crisis.
Germany: No plan that abandons Greece
Austria has held firm to its policy to cap the number of migrants it allows into the country. That, in combination with measures set up by others further south along the migration route, has led to bottlenecks at borders. Those restrictions have drawn sharp criticism from human rights groups, the United Nations and others in the EU, particularly Germany.
"When one country defines its limit, another must suffer," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Monday. "That is not my Europe."
She said an EU solution cannot be done in a way that abandons Greece, where more than 100,000 migrants have already arrived this year.
Tusk will finish his tour in Greece after stops in Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia. Next week the EU will have a summit with Turkey, a country it has pressured to help stop the flow of migrants from the Middle East into Europe.
Also Tuesday, crews in Calais, France continued dismantling part of a sprawling camp as a group of migrants protested and police kept watch. The site has served as a home to migrants hoping to make their way in Britain. It had grown to house an estimated 6,000 people in December and has since dropped to about 4,000 people.
'A challenge for all of us'
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday the refugee crisis is a problem for the entire world, and that nothing would help stem the flow of people more than ending the war in Syria.
"It is a global challenge and it is not somebody else's problem," he said. "It's a test of all of us."
Kerry said the ultimate goal of diplomats like himself is to make sure people can live peacefully in their own country and not feel the need to go somewhere else.
He highlighted the "unbelievable burden" shouldered by Turkey and other Syrian neighbors Jordan and Lebanon. Together, they are currently hosting nearly 4.5 million Syrian refugees. But their struggle to provide for such a big influx has led many people to seek a better life in Europe where governments have been wary of admitting too many newcomers.
Struggling with limited resources to house migrants itself, Macedonia had briefly closed its border last week, only to re-open it but with much stricter controls, allowing only a few hundred people to pass through over the weekend - not enough to alleviate the constant influx of new arrivals as thousands come to the Greek mainland by ferries and immediately head north.
The bitter criticism came after finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble labeled Social Democrat proposals for wider social spending on housing and public services to complement the integration of migrants as "pitiful."
Stephan Weil, the Social Democrat premier of the state of Lower Saxony, hit back on Sunday, calling for a bigger social services budget in order not to alienate ordinary Germans as the country accommodates over one million migrants.
"The finance minister obviously just doesn't get it," Weil told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.
Pointing to the high cost of integrating migrants, Weil said "We cannot create the impression that this is happening at the expense of the weaker members of our society."
He added that spending on schools and childcare would strengthen the "solidarity of our society."
Heiko Maas, Justice Minister and a Social Democrat, was similarly critical and made a renewed call for more spending.
"What's more important? The people in the country or balancing the budget?"
Christine Lambrecht, a prominent Social Democrat lawmaker, also disparaged Schaeuble. "After months of big talk and doing nothing, he is worried that he will have to open his wallet," she said.
Schaeuble, a long-standing proponent of prudence, wants to prevent Germany spending more than its earns and is unlikely to be easily moved.
If spending were to spiral, it could further weaken German Chancellor Angela Merkel's fading support.
Merkel has seen her ratings plummet due to her handling of migrants. She is facing the biggest test of her decade in office as she struggles to secure a Europe-wide plan for dealing with the migrants.
Politicians from the German state of Bavaria's Christian Social Union, the sister party to Merkel's CDU, have also been critical of her stance but for different reasons. They want the introduction of a limit to the number of migrants, similar to that imposed in Austria.
Austria, the last stop on the way to Germany for hundreds of thousands of migrants, recently imposed restrictions on its borders, setting off a domino effect in Europe in limiting the flow of people, and leaving hundreds stranded in Greece.
Merkel has warned about the consequences for Europe of border closures. But a poor showing by the Christian Democrats in state elections in March would pressure her to reverse course.
Her conservatives are nervous as they lose ground to the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, whose hardline stance on refugees could bring it big gains in all three German states.
Germany attracted 1.1 million asylum seekers last year, leading to calls from across the political spectrum for a change in its handling of refugees coming to Europe to escape war and poverty in Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
UN: Europe Facing 'Self-Induced Humanitarian Crisis'
illegally, walk between
the two lines of the protective fence
along the border line, near
southern Macedonia's town of
Gevgelija, Monday, Feb. 29, 2016.
Last updated on: March 01, 2016 7:30 AM
Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency, said more than 130,000 people have crossed the Mediterranean this year, most of them reaching Greece. The two-month total is near the figure for the first six months of last year.
Some 24,000 refugees and migrants are in need of accommodation in Greece, with around 8,500 of them massed next to the border with Macedonia.
Macedonian police fired tear gas to push back refugees trying to cross the border from Greece on Monday in the latest clashes between people seeking to move through Europe and governments trying to control the flow of people into their territory.
The UNHCR urged Greece and Balkan countries to quickly act in order to prevent a disaster.
Edwards said European nations pledged last year to accept more than 66,000 refugees who reached Greece, but that so far only 325 relocations have taken place. He said Greece cannot manage the situation by itself.
European Council President Donald Tusk is visiting Austria on Tuesday as part of a five-nation trip to work on how to handle the migrant crisis.
the town of
Gevgelija, Feb. 25, 2016. Merkel has said an EU
solution cannot be done
in a way that abandons Greece.
Austria has held firm to its policy to cap the number of migrants it allows into the country. That, in combination with measures set up by others further south along the migration route, has led to bottlenecks at borders. Those restrictions have drawn sharp criticism from human rights groups, the United Nations and others in the EU, particularly Germany.
"When one country defines its limit, another must suffer," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Monday. "That is not my Europe."
She said an EU solution cannot be done in a way that abandons Greece, where more than 100,000 migrants have already arrived this year.
Tusk will finish his tour in Greece after stops in Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia. Next week the EU will have a summit with Turkey, a country it has pressured to help stop the flow of migrants from the Middle East into Europe.
Also Tuesday, crews in Calais, France continued dismantling part of a sprawling camp as a group of migrants protested and police kept watch. The site has served as a home to migrants hoping to make their way in Britain. It had grown to house an estimated 6,000 people in December and has since dropped to about 4,000 people.
Macedonian
police used tear gas to dispearse refugees trying
to break the gate to
enter Macedonia, Feb. 29, 2016.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday the refugee crisis is a problem for the entire world, and that nothing would help stem the flow of people more than ending the war in Syria.
"It is a global challenge and it is not somebody else's problem," he said. "It's a test of all of us."
Kerry said the ultimate goal of diplomats like himself is to make sure people can live peacefully in their own country and not feel the need to go somewhere else.
He highlighted the "unbelievable burden" shouldered by Turkey and other Syrian neighbors Jordan and Lebanon. Together, they are currently hosting nearly 4.5 million Syrian refugees. But their struggle to provide for such a big influx has led many people to seek a better life in Europe where governments have been wary of admitting too many newcomers.
Struggling with limited resources to house migrants itself, Macedonia had briefly closed its border last week, only to re-open it but with much stricter controls, allowing only a few hundred people to pass through over the weekend - not enough to alleviate the constant influx of new arrivals as thousands come to the Greek mainland by ferries and immediately head north.
http://www.voanews.com/
UN: Refugee Crisis in Europe Could Explode into Violence
Last updated on: March 01, 2016 3:58 PM
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND—
The United Nations refugee agency
warns Europe is on the verge of an explosive self-induced humanitarian
crisis, which could spiral out of control and result in widespread
violence.
The agency reports the number of refugees and migrants in Greece in need of shelter has soared to 24,000. This, it says, includes around 8,500 people stranded near the border with Macedonia. It says the crowded conditions are leading to shortages of food, shelter, water and sanitation.
Vincent Cochetel is UNHCR's refugee crisis in Europe coordinator. He says the congestion at border crossings along the Balkan migratory route is leading to frustration among the migrants and refugees.
“They do not understand that they can no longer move onward, that they have to queue; they have to go through the relocation process - for those eligible for relocation and it is not everybody. So, there is a lot of frustration building up, which may lead to acts of violence,” said Cochetel.
A peaceful protest Monday near the Macedonian border turned violent
as police threw tear gas canisters to force refugees and migrants away
from the razor-wire fence.
Nearly 132,000 people, half of them women and children, have made the perilous Mediterranean Sea crossing this year, exceeding the total for the first half of 2015. Almost all have landed in Greece.
UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards says the European Union must absolutely go through with the plan it approved last year for an equitable relocation of refugees among its 28 members.
“It should concern everyone that despite commitments to relocate 66,400 refugees from Greece, states have so far pledged only 1,539 spaces, and only 325 actual relocations have occurred,” he said.
The UNHCR says Greece must urgently increase its ability to accommodate and support the masses of people arriving and that more resources, and better coordination among EU member states, are critical.
German
Chancellor Angela Merkel said Europe’s discord over refugees threatens
the euro, raising the stakes as European Union leaders prepare for their
next emergency meeting to stem the crisis.
“If we disintegrate into small countries again, a common currency will be very difficult,” Merkel said at a party rally late Monday in the western German town of Volkmarsen. “What we are seeing in recent days, with certain countries going their own way to the detriment of another country like Greece -- that isn’t the European way.”
Televised scenes of migrants being tear-gassed by Macedonian police at the Greek border are underscoring the humanitarian crisis as the rush to close borders bottles up refugees on the EU’s southeastern frontier. With nations along the so-called Balkans route blocking refugees from heading north from Greece, Merkel warned other EU nations on Sunday against allowing “chaos” to develop in a country that already “has many problems.”
Leaders
of the EU’s 28 governments plan to meet Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet
Davutoglu next Monday in Brussels to try to complete an agreement to
limit the influx of people crossing the Aegean Sea to Greece. Croatian
Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic, whose country lies on the Balkans
route, meets Merkel for talks in Berlin later Tuesday.
Latest polling suggests a possible turnaround Merkel’s approval ratings, which have slid since about 1 million refugees arrived in Germany last year. While 59 percent of Germans say they are unhappy with Merkel’s open-door policy, backing for her work as chancellor more broadly rose to 54 percent in late February from 46 percent at the start of the month, according to the poll for broadcaster ARD.
Merkel is taking her message to voters in three German states that go to the polls on March 13, including a campaign rally in the southern city of Freiburg later Tuesday. The contests in Baden-Wuerttemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt are partly a test of her refugee policy, with polls suggesting a decline in support for her Christian Democratic Union since last fall and gains for the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party, or AfD.
Polls in Baden-Wuerttemberg, where Freiburg is located, show the CDU running neck-in-neck with the state’s governing Green Party, which ousted the CDU from power five years ago in a region that’s home to companies including carmakers Daimler AG and Porsche SE.
- See more at: http://americanfreepress.net/using-mass-migration-to-commit-genocide/#sthash.wudRV9SF.dpuf
The agency reports the number of refugees and migrants in Greece in need of shelter has soared to 24,000. This, it says, includes around 8,500 people stranded near the border with Macedonia. It says the crowded conditions are leading to shortages of food, shelter, water and sanitation.
Vincent Cochetel is UNHCR's refugee crisis in Europe coordinator. He says the congestion at border crossings along the Balkan migratory route is leading to frustration among the migrants and refugees.
“They do not understand that they can no longer move onward, that they have to queue; they have to go through the relocation process - for those eligible for relocation and it is not everybody. So, there is a lot of frustration building up, which may lead to acts of violence,” said Cochetel.
in Athens, Greece, March 1, 2016.
Nearly 132,000 people, half of them women and children, have made the perilous Mediterranean Sea crossing this year, exceeding the total for the first half of 2015. Almost all have landed in Greece.
UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards says the European Union must absolutely go through with the plan it approved last year for an equitable relocation of refugees among its 28 members.
“It should concern everyone that despite commitments to relocate 66,400 refugees from Greece, states have so far pledged only 1,539 spaces, and only 325 actual relocations have occurred,” he said.
The UNHCR says Greece must urgently increase its ability to accommodate and support the masses of people arriving and that more resources, and better coordination among EU member states, are critical.
http://www.bloomberg.com/
Merkel Says Euro Is at Risk If Europe Crumbles in Refugee Crisis
March 1, 2016 — 4:05 AM CST
Arne Delfs - German chancellor sounds warning as next EU summit looms
- Takes message to thr
“If we disintegrate into small countries again, a common currency will be very difficult,” Merkel said at a party rally late Monday in the western German town of Volkmarsen. “What we are seeing in recent days, with certain countries going their own way to the detriment of another country like Greece -- that isn’t the European way.”
Televised scenes of migrants being tear-gassed by Macedonian police at the Greek border are underscoring the humanitarian crisis as the rush to close borders bottles up refugees on the EU’s southeastern frontier. With nations along the so-called Balkans route blocking refugees from heading north from Greece, Merkel warned other EU nations on Sunday against allowing “chaos” to develop in a country that already “has many problems.”
Latest polling suggests a possible turnaround Merkel’s approval ratings, which have slid since about 1 million refugees arrived in Germany last year. While 59 percent of Germans say they are unhappy with Merkel’s open-door policy, backing for her work as chancellor more broadly rose to 54 percent in late February from 46 percent at the start of the month, according to the poll for broadcaster ARD.
Merkel is taking her message to voters in three German states that go to the polls on March 13, including a campaign rally in the southern city of Freiburg later Tuesday. The contests in Baden-Wuerttemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt are partly a test of her refugee policy, with polls suggesting a decline in support for her Christian Democratic Union since last fall and gains for the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party, or AfD.
Polls in Baden-Wuerttemberg, where Freiburg is located, show the CDU running neck-in-neck with the state’s governing Green Party, which ousted the CDU from power five years ago in a region that’s home to companies including carmakers Daimler AG and Porsche SE.
A Suicidal Collapse of Western Civilization?
My
background is basically European -- and more specifically, Western
European. I have lived and worked in many of those countries, and I
know most of the major cities intimately -- from Stockholm in the north,
Newcastle, London, Paris, The Hague, Munich, Vienna, to Rome and Erice,
Sicily in the south. I have also spent several months in Moscow and in
Jerusalem as a guest of academic institutions.
Economic Suicide
The ongoing economic suicide of Europe is based on a faulty understanding of the climate issue by most Western politicians and on their extreme policy response, based on emotion rather than logic and science. The major European economies have reacted irrationally to contrived, unjustified fear of imagined global-warming disasters
Perhaps I should explain that the climate has not been warming for the past 18 years -- and even if it had been warming, it would be no disaster. The EU wants to cut emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, a natural plant-fertilizer, by 40% within 15 years -- by 2030. This insane drive to replace energy sources from fossil fuels that release plant-friendly CO2 into the atmosphere has led to greatly increased costs of energy. As is well understood, such actions not only hurt economic growth, but they increase poverty levels and therefore threaten the social fabric of these nations.
There are some exceptions. of course: France and Belgium rely heavily on nuclear energy; Austria and Norway rely heavily on hydro. Poland has actively resisted the general trend to demonize CO2, but the UK and Germany, which has been the power-house of European economic growth, are severely threatened by their insistence on installing wind and solar energy. The latter is especially inappropriate to the Continent and to Great Britain.
The pity of it all is that these economic sacrifices in Western Europe will hardly affect the level of atmospheric CO2 -- which is controlled globally by huge emissions from China -- and soon also from India.
Unfortunately, during the past few years, and even during the White House administration of George W. Bush, the United States has tended to move in the same direction -- and energy costs have gone up markedly.
The regulatory burdens created by the EPA’s “War on Coal,” by holding up permits for pipelines and for exploration-production of fuels on Federal lands, etc, are imposing real costs on US households, which are the equivalent of a large energy tax -- except that none of these increased costs flow into the US Treasury.
Cultural, plus even more dangerous Demographic Suicide,
But it is cultural suicide, which adds to economic suicide and spells doom for the future of Western Europe. I have in mind here the heavy immigration from Islamic nations -- with most immigrants unwilling to adjust to the prevailing culture of the host country.
Examples are rampant. In Great Britain, the dangerous immigration has come mostly from Pakistan and Bangladesh, Islamic successors to the British rule over India; Hindu immigrants present no special problem. In Southern Europe, the Low Countries, and most of Scandinavia, much of the immigration has been from Somalia and North Africa. France has experienced massive immigration from North Africa and other African French-speaking former colonies.
In many of these nations now, these immigrant communities have formed enclaves that the native inhabitants can no longer enter safely; even the police have great difficulty controlling law and order in these enclaves. Examples exist in cities like Birmingham, Amsterdam, Malmo (Sweden), Paris and Marseille. Germany seems slightly better off, with immigrants from Turkey making some effort to become good Germans. Of course, the aim of many in these enclaves is to take over the host country -- using available democratic means -- and institute Sharia (Islamic law).
It is clear that these immigrants are taking advantage of the democratic nature of the host nations and their willingness to grant asylum status and lavish economic subsidies to any who declare themselves as refugees. A prime example is Sweden, where multi-culturalism runs wild and is supported by the government-subsidized and beholden media. So far, no real revolt yet -- except for some grumbling from the indigenous population (whom the compliant media denounce as “racists.”)
Least affected have been the Slavic nations, which were formerly under Soviet domination. Perhaps because of their delayed economic development, they have not been as attractive a destination for immigrants. Ironically, these East-Europeans may yet save Western civilization.
The United States faces a rather special situation. There is much immigration, mostly illegal, from south of the border. But these Latino immigrants are not Islamic; they share similar cultural values with native-born Americans -- and most are making an effort to adapt to the prevailing culture. The main danger is one of national security. With porous borders, potential terrorists can easily slip into the United States and create mayhem.
A peculiar problem exists in Israel, which has experienced illegal Islamic (!) immigration, mainly from Sudan and Eritrea. We are told that some southern suburbs of Tel Aviv now resemble a Third-World nation. Efforts are underway to deport these illegal immigrants; but standing in the way is Israel’s Supreme Court, a group of unelected liberal lawyers, who personally oppose the Parliament-passed law of deportation -- certainly an anomalous situation by US standards.
Russia has experienced problems of its own, mainly from Islamic provinces in the Caucasus. The suppression of the Chechen revolt has caused a violent reaction, leading to major terror acts, even in Moscow.
Exacerbating the Islamic “conquest“ of Western Europe is the fact that the indigenous people -- from Swedes to Spaniards -- are not reproducing themselves. Whatever the cause may be, the number of children per family is well below the replacement level of 2.11; in some countries it is as low as 1.30. The statistics are frightening -- as seen in records of births, welfare rolls, and school attendance. By mid-century, parts of Europe will have a Moslem majority -- and even before then it will be too late to rectify the situation.
What of the future?
With ongoing internal battles within Islamic groups, it is not easy to predict the future. In Syria, some 200,000 have been killed and millions have been turned into refugees. The rise of the “Islamic State” in the last few months promises a brutal suppression of any who hold even a slightly different Islamic view. Their announced goal is to set up a theocratic Caliphate in any lands that have ever been under Islamic rule -- including most of the Balkans, Andalus-Spain, and of course Israel.
At the battle of Tours in 732, Charles Martell stopped the advance into France of Moslem armies from the Iberian peninsula. In 1571, in the great naval battle of Lepanto, off Greece, a Spanish-Italian fleet defeated the Turks. In their farthest advance into Central Europe, a Turkish army besieged Vienna in 1683. Christian forces, under the command of King John Sobieski of Poland, defeated the invaders decisively and saved Western civilization.
Americans have twice saved Europe in the 20th century and may soon be forced to defend Europe again against a new threat. The first assault on Western European civilization came from Nazi Germany and its allies; it took a bloody World-War-II (1939-1945) to defeat them. Certainly, without US intervention, Western Europe, and even Britain, might now be part of a German-ruled dictatorship, a sort of involuntary European Union. It is doubtful also whether the Soviet Union could have withstood Hitler’s onslaught without the active material assistance of the United States.
The second threat to Europe came from the post-1945 Soviet Union; it was dominated by the specter of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. The “Warsaw Pact” encompassed even a large part of Germany. This “Cold-War” threat was neutralized thanks to the steadfastness of the United States -- but also by the internal economic problems brought about by the planned economy of the Soviet empire.
The new threat of course is Islamo-Fascism and its aim to introduce Sharia -- in at least those parts of Europe that had been Muslim lands in the past, but aiming really at all of Europe -- and eventually the rest of the world. This new threat uses a method of warfare that is different from the past and more insidious. Terrorism has come into its own, partly based on large Islamic populations in Western Europe.
Coupled with this external threat is the internal one from Islamic fanatics, many of them born in Europe -- and even from converts. We have seen this happen in Spain, and more recently in Britain. Their methods have been crude and their weapons have been primitive; but with nuclear proliferation and with the possibility of chemical and biological warfare, these threats have to be taken very seriously.
Fighting these threats takes resources for surveillance, intelligence, sundry military expenditures, and weapons, both offensive and defensive. Resilience requires above all a strong economy. And one cannot have a strong economy without adequate energy resources – which gets us back to the issue of climate fears.
The problem now is that while the threat of terrorism is growing, so is the suicidal drive to limit the use of energy and thereby also economic growth. This internal threat is particularly strong in Europe and has been called, quite properly, eco-Bolshevism. It would have all the earmarks of the failed Soviet system, with government involvement in every facet of the economy and with energy restrictions reducing economic growth.
There is no question that the policies being discussed now in Europe and in the United States would be extremely costly, would force industrial cutbacks and of course massive job losses. All of these exacerbate social tension in nations that have a large number of immigrants, who traditionally have the highest unemployment levels.
Will the US step up again and save Europe? Doubtful
One may ask: Is there any way to stop this steamroller? There’s probably little hope that such an initiative can come from Europe; it may have to come from the United States. Somehow we would have to convince European leaders that their policies, based on global-warming fears, are mistaken. That job may prove to be very difficult -- unless there is a drastic change in current US policy. But it is something that has to be done if we want Europe to survive economically, as an ally against the threat of Islamo-Fascism.
I don’t believe that the US is prepared to save Europe; just listen to our Secretary of State: Speaking in Boston on Oct 9, John Kerry pronounced that climate change, if left unaddressed, will result in the end of times: “Life as you know it on Earth ends,” Kerry said. Last February, Kerry claimed that climate change was the world’s “most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” Not nuclear bombs in the hands of the terrorist-sponsoring regime of Iran -- or in the hands of ISIS or al Qaeda; not Ebola or some fearsome epidemic of a lethal disease. According to Kerry, climate change is the real number-one national-security threat.
US media, academia, and other opinion-makers are chiming in. In her latest work of science-fiction, Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes, co-author of the mendacious Merchants of Doubt, imagines a future world devastated by climate change. She generously gives the West another 80 years -- well beyond her own life span, of course. But she totally ignores the dangers of rising Islamo-Fascism and of demography. Just listen:
The year is 2393, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought and -- finally -- the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093, when the disintegration of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet led to mass migration and a complete reshuffling of the global order. Writing from the Second People's Republic of China on the 300th anniversary of the Great Collapse, a senior scholar presents a gripping and deeply disturbing account of how the children of the Enlightenment -- the political and economic elites of the so-called advanced industrial societies -- failed to act, and so brought about the collapse of Western civilization.
So don’t look to the US to come to the rescue of a doomed Western Europe. It is unlikely that our children or grandchildren will be fortunate enough to experience the charms of great cities like London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Rome – or what’s left of them.
S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project. His specialty is atmospheric and space physics. An expert in remote sensing and satellites, he served as the founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service and, more recently, as vice chair of the US National Advisory Committee on Oceans & Atmosphere. He is a senior fellow of the Heartland Institute and the Independent Institute. He co-authored the NY Times best-seller Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 years. In 2007, he founded and has since chaired the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change), which has released several scientific reports [See www.NIPCCreport.org]. For recent writings, see http://www.americanthinker.com/s_fred_singer/ and also Google Scholar
Economic Suicide
The ongoing economic suicide of Europe is based on a faulty understanding of the climate issue by most Western politicians and on their extreme policy response, based on emotion rather than logic and science. The major European economies have reacted irrationally to contrived, unjustified fear of imagined global-warming disasters
Perhaps I should explain that the climate has not been warming for the past 18 years -- and even if it had been warming, it would be no disaster. The EU wants to cut emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, a natural plant-fertilizer, by 40% within 15 years -- by 2030. This insane drive to replace energy sources from fossil fuels that release plant-friendly CO2 into the atmosphere has led to greatly increased costs of energy. As is well understood, such actions not only hurt economic growth, but they increase poverty levels and therefore threaten the social fabric of these nations.
There are some exceptions. of course: France and Belgium rely heavily on nuclear energy; Austria and Norway rely heavily on hydro. Poland has actively resisted the general trend to demonize CO2, but the UK and Germany, which has been the power-house of European economic growth, are severely threatened by their insistence on installing wind and solar energy. The latter is especially inappropriate to the Continent and to Great Britain.
The pity of it all is that these economic sacrifices in Western Europe will hardly affect the level of atmospheric CO2 -- which is controlled globally by huge emissions from China -- and soon also from India.
Unfortunately, during the past few years, and even during the White House administration of George W. Bush, the United States has tended to move in the same direction -- and energy costs have gone up markedly.
The regulatory burdens created by the EPA’s “War on Coal,” by holding up permits for pipelines and for exploration-production of fuels on Federal lands, etc, are imposing real costs on US households, which are the equivalent of a large energy tax -- except that none of these increased costs flow into the US Treasury.
Cultural, plus even more dangerous Demographic Suicide,
But it is cultural suicide, which adds to economic suicide and spells doom for the future of Western Europe. I have in mind here the heavy immigration from Islamic nations -- with most immigrants unwilling to adjust to the prevailing culture of the host country.
Examples are rampant. In Great Britain, the dangerous immigration has come mostly from Pakistan and Bangladesh, Islamic successors to the British rule over India; Hindu immigrants present no special problem. In Southern Europe, the Low Countries, and most of Scandinavia, much of the immigration has been from Somalia and North Africa. France has experienced massive immigration from North Africa and other African French-speaking former colonies.
In many of these nations now, these immigrant communities have formed enclaves that the native inhabitants can no longer enter safely; even the police have great difficulty controlling law and order in these enclaves. Examples exist in cities like Birmingham, Amsterdam, Malmo (Sweden), Paris and Marseille. Germany seems slightly better off, with immigrants from Turkey making some effort to become good Germans. Of course, the aim of many in these enclaves is to take over the host country -- using available democratic means -- and institute Sharia (Islamic law).
It is clear that these immigrants are taking advantage of the democratic nature of the host nations and their willingness to grant asylum status and lavish economic subsidies to any who declare themselves as refugees. A prime example is Sweden, where multi-culturalism runs wild and is supported by the government-subsidized and beholden media. So far, no real revolt yet -- except for some grumbling from the indigenous population (whom the compliant media denounce as “racists.”)
Least affected have been the Slavic nations, which were formerly under Soviet domination. Perhaps because of their delayed economic development, they have not been as attractive a destination for immigrants. Ironically, these East-Europeans may yet save Western civilization.
The United States faces a rather special situation. There is much immigration, mostly illegal, from south of the border. But these Latino immigrants are not Islamic; they share similar cultural values with native-born Americans -- and most are making an effort to adapt to the prevailing culture. The main danger is one of national security. With porous borders, potential terrorists can easily slip into the United States and create mayhem.
A peculiar problem exists in Israel, which has experienced illegal Islamic (!) immigration, mainly from Sudan and Eritrea. We are told that some southern suburbs of Tel Aviv now resemble a Third-World nation. Efforts are underway to deport these illegal immigrants; but standing in the way is Israel’s Supreme Court, a group of unelected liberal lawyers, who personally oppose the Parliament-passed law of deportation -- certainly an anomalous situation by US standards.
Russia has experienced problems of its own, mainly from Islamic provinces in the Caucasus. The suppression of the Chechen revolt has caused a violent reaction, leading to major terror acts, even in Moscow.
Exacerbating the Islamic “conquest“ of Western Europe is the fact that the indigenous people -- from Swedes to Spaniards -- are not reproducing themselves. Whatever the cause may be, the number of children per family is well below the replacement level of 2.11; in some countries it is as low as 1.30. The statistics are frightening -- as seen in records of births, welfare rolls, and school attendance. By mid-century, parts of Europe will have a Moslem majority -- and even before then it will be too late to rectify the situation.
What of the future?
With ongoing internal battles within Islamic groups, it is not easy to predict the future. In Syria, some 200,000 have been killed and millions have been turned into refugees. The rise of the “Islamic State” in the last few months promises a brutal suppression of any who hold even a slightly different Islamic view. Their announced goal is to set up a theocratic Caliphate in any lands that have ever been under Islamic rule -- including most of the Balkans, Andalus-Spain, and of course Israel.
At the battle of Tours in 732, Charles Martell stopped the advance into France of Moslem armies from the Iberian peninsula. In 1571, in the great naval battle of Lepanto, off Greece, a Spanish-Italian fleet defeated the Turks. In their farthest advance into Central Europe, a Turkish army besieged Vienna in 1683. Christian forces, under the command of King John Sobieski of Poland, defeated the invaders decisively and saved Western civilization.
Americans have twice saved Europe in the 20th century and may soon be forced to defend Europe again against a new threat. The first assault on Western European civilization came from Nazi Germany and its allies; it took a bloody World-War-II (1939-1945) to defeat them. Certainly, without US intervention, Western Europe, and even Britain, might now be part of a German-ruled dictatorship, a sort of involuntary European Union. It is doubtful also whether the Soviet Union could have withstood Hitler’s onslaught without the active material assistance of the United States.
The second threat to Europe came from the post-1945 Soviet Union; it was dominated by the specter of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. The “Warsaw Pact” encompassed even a large part of Germany. This “Cold-War” threat was neutralized thanks to the steadfastness of the United States -- but also by the internal economic problems brought about by the planned economy of the Soviet empire.
The new threat of course is Islamo-Fascism and its aim to introduce Sharia -- in at least those parts of Europe that had been Muslim lands in the past, but aiming really at all of Europe -- and eventually the rest of the world. This new threat uses a method of warfare that is different from the past and more insidious. Terrorism has come into its own, partly based on large Islamic populations in Western Europe.
Coupled with this external threat is the internal one from Islamic fanatics, many of them born in Europe -- and even from converts. We have seen this happen in Spain, and more recently in Britain. Their methods have been crude and their weapons have been primitive; but with nuclear proliferation and with the possibility of chemical and biological warfare, these threats have to be taken very seriously.
Fighting these threats takes resources for surveillance, intelligence, sundry military expenditures, and weapons, both offensive and defensive. Resilience requires above all a strong economy. And one cannot have a strong economy without adequate energy resources – which gets us back to the issue of climate fears.
The problem now is that while the threat of terrorism is growing, so is the suicidal drive to limit the use of energy and thereby also economic growth. This internal threat is particularly strong in Europe and has been called, quite properly, eco-Bolshevism. It would have all the earmarks of the failed Soviet system, with government involvement in every facet of the economy and with energy restrictions reducing economic growth.
There is no question that the policies being discussed now in Europe and in the United States would be extremely costly, would force industrial cutbacks and of course massive job losses. All of these exacerbate social tension in nations that have a large number of immigrants, who traditionally have the highest unemployment levels.
Will the US step up again and save Europe? Doubtful
One may ask: Is there any way to stop this steamroller? There’s probably little hope that such an initiative can come from Europe; it may have to come from the United States. Somehow we would have to convince European leaders that their policies, based on global-warming fears, are mistaken. That job may prove to be very difficult -- unless there is a drastic change in current US policy. But it is something that has to be done if we want Europe to survive economically, as an ally against the threat of Islamo-Fascism.
I don’t believe that the US is prepared to save Europe; just listen to our Secretary of State: Speaking in Boston on Oct 9, John Kerry pronounced that climate change, if left unaddressed, will result in the end of times: “Life as you know it on Earth ends,” Kerry said. Last February, Kerry claimed that climate change was the world’s “most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” Not nuclear bombs in the hands of the terrorist-sponsoring regime of Iran -- or in the hands of ISIS or al Qaeda; not Ebola or some fearsome epidemic of a lethal disease. According to Kerry, climate change is the real number-one national-security threat.
US media, academia, and other opinion-makers are chiming in. In her latest work of science-fiction, Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes, co-author of the mendacious Merchants of Doubt, imagines a future world devastated by climate change. She generously gives the West another 80 years -- well beyond her own life span, of course. But she totally ignores the dangers of rising Islamo-Fascism and of demography. Just listen:
The year is 2393, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought and -- finally -- the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093, when the disintegration of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet led to mass migration and a complete reshuffling of the global order. Writing from the Second People's Republic of China on the 300th anniversary of the Great Collapse, a senior scholar presents a gripping and deeply disturbing account of how the children of the Enlightenment -- the political and economic elites of the so-called advanced industrial societies -- failed to act, and so brought about the collapse of Western civilization.
So don’t look to the US to come to the rescue of a doomed Western Europe. It is unlikely that our children or grandchildren will be fortunate enough to experience the charms of great cities like London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Rome – or what’s left of them.
S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project. His specialty is atmospheric and space physics. An expert in remote sensing and satellites, he served as the founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service and, more recently, as vice chair of the US National Advisory Committee on Oceans & Atmosphere. He is a senior fellow of the Heartland Institute and the Independent Institute. He co-authored the NY Times best-seller Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 years. In 2007, he founded and has since chaired the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change), which has released several scientific reports [See www.NIPCCreport.org]. For recent writings, see http://www.americanthinker.com/s_fred_singer/ and also Google Scholar
http://thefederalist.com
Does Immigration Mean The End Of Western Civilization?
In
1973, French novelist Jean Raspail wrote a prophetic book predicting
Western Civilization would be threatened by mass immigration.
Europe
is more than a year into the largest migrant crisis since the Second
World War. More than a million have made their way to Germany alone over
the past year. Some are refugees and asylum-seekers from Syria and
Iraq, but it now appears that a significant number, as much as 60
percent, are economic migrants from North Africa, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, simply seeking better prospects in Europe.
The European Union, thanks to its common border policy, is
overwhelmed and paralyzed—that border union has proven to be only as
strong as its weakest member. Once inside the EU, migrants can travel to
whichever country seems most welcoming inside the 26-state Schengen area. Some countries, in defiance of EU rules, have imposed unilateral border controls and asylum caps
as thousands more arrive daily from Turkey and elsewhere. EU leaders
recently agreed to an emergency measure that allows Great Britain to
restrict welfare benefits for EU migrants even as a so-called “Brexit,”
or a British exit from the EU, looms as a real possibility.
Europeans leaders are of course trying to downplay the severity of
the crisis even as its disruptive effects become impossible to ignore.
On New Year’s Eve in cities across Germany, gangs of Arab and North
African men, some of whom were later discovered to be asylum-seekers,
robbed and sexually assaulted scores of women. Before police had
completed their investigation, the European Commission declared
there was “no link” between the migrant crisis and the attacks, the
incidents were merely “a matter of public order.” Fearing a xenophobic
backlash, the commission proclaimed itself “the voice of reason.”
Late Measures Are Cold Comfort
Such talk has been common in Europe over the past year. But it’s cold comfort for a growing number of Europeans who have waning confidence that their governments are able or willing to stop the flow of migrants. One February poll found 58 percent of Germans want border controls to keep out migrants even if it hurts the economy, and more than half don’t believe it will be possible to integrate migrants into German society. Across the continent, political leaders are losing popular support.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s approval rate is at a four-year low,
with only 46 percent of Germans supporting her (from a high of 75
percent in April 2015). François Hollande could become the first sitting
French president to face a primary challenge from within his own party as it becomes clear he could lose a 2017 contest to the right-wing National Front’s Marine Le Pen over the migrant crisis.
The problem for Europe’s leaders, as Douglas Murray wrote recently in The Spectator, is that voters simply don’t believe they will do anything:
Now there are the usual attempts to crowd-please from certain politicians and officials who are talking about how they might have to deport these people. But they won’t, will they? Does anybody honestly believe that the Swedish authorities are currently preparing to deport 80,000 fake asylum seekers from their country?
[…] Given that it has taken in more than a million people in the last twelve months, is Germany now going to deport as many as three quarters of a million fake asylum seekers from its territory? Of course not. They will not even attempt it. Everybody in Europe knows that. And everybody following events and weighing up their chances from outside Europe knows that.
A Prophetic, Apocalyptic Tale
All of this calls to mind a 1973 novel by French writer Jean Raspail—The Camp of the Saints, an apocalyptic tale about the collapse of European civilization. Much of it could be lifted from the news coming out of Europe. In the book, one million impoverished Indians make their way by boat from the Ganges to the shores of southern France with no intention of adopting French ways; they come simply to claim for themselves what Europeans have and they do not.
At the heart of the novel is a moral question: Is the West willing to defend itself?
Unwilling to turn away the Ganges fleet for what they claim is
universal brotherhood and compassion—but is in fact Western guilt—the
government and all the country’s major institutions agree the migrants
must be welcomed as a matter of moral duty and penance for France’s past
sins. When the armada finally makes landfall, French society breaks
down, exhausted and acquiescent, passively colonized by an unarmed army
of castaways.
At the heart of the novel is a moral question: Is the West willing to
defend itself? Denounced upon publication four decades ago as a racist,
xenophobic fantasy, Raspail’s book now seems vaguely prophetic—not
because of what it tells us about refugees from the Third World but
because of what it reveals about European civilization.
The circumstances of today’s migrants are certainly different than
Raspail’s Indians, but the feckless response of European leaders are
eerily similar to those in the novel. When news of the Ganges fleet—a
hundred derelict ships each with a thousand wretched passengers—reaches
France, government officials call a press conference to express their
solidarity.
“Far be it from us to pass judgment,” one choked up minister says.
“Far better to think of these poor, homeless souls as citizens of the
world, in search of their promised land.” Calling for an international
commission to provide the fleet with food and supplies, the minister
cautions that, “Whatever qualms some of us may have about the outcome of
an affair unparalleled in its desperation, we are duty-bound to keep
them to ourselves, and to say for all to hear: ‘These men are my
brothers!’”
How Civilizations Die
When The Camp of the Saints first appeared in English in 1975, a review for The New York Times declared that “reading Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints is like being trapped at a cocktail party with a normal-looking fellow who suddenly starts a perfervid racist diatribe.”
Only a reader looking for an easy way to dismiss his larger thesis would find racism or fascism at the heart of the novel.
Time magazine ran a review under the headline, “Poor White
Trash,” and said it read like it had “come off a mimeograph machine in
some dank cellar.” Others called it a “fascist fantasy,” a “jerry-built
nightmare,” and a “flood of bilious exacerbation from France.” As
recently as September of last year, Rod Dreher echoed these sentiments, calling it “a repulsive book” that endorses “white supremacy.”
But in fact, Raspail has nothing much to say about race. Only a
reader looking for an easy way to dismiss his larger thesis would find
racism or fascism at the heart of the novel. The Indians of the Ganges
fleet are a rather obvious stand-in for impoverished migrants from what
is today politely called the “developing” world, and Raspail is not
primarily concerned with them but with France and European civilization
at large. In the introduction to a 1985 reprint, Raspail explains that
he chose as his migrant antagonists Indians, and not the nearby North
Africans and Arabs, because of a “refusal to enter the false debate
about racism and anti-racism in French daily life.”
Careful readers have understood this. When National Review covered The Camp of the Saints
upon its first publication in English, in 1975, reviewer Jeffery Hart
argued the racism label was inapt. “Raspail is not really writing about
race—he is writing about civilization, and in particular the
civilization of the West,” wrote Hart. “He is stating an obvious but
outrageous truth. Civilization involves particular forms of being. It is
not an amorphous mass.”
Raspail’s story, that is, is not about white supremacy but about how
civilizations die. His argument is that they die of neglect. To properly
speak of culture is to describe something alive, but the French society
sketched out in The Camp of the Saints has lost its will to
live, and therefore its ability to defend itself from those who seek to
conquer it. No one cares enough to water the garden, and it withers.
What Migrants Believe Matters
To use a contemporary term, we might say that Raspail rejects multiculturalism—not as a preference, but as a possibility. In the long term, Europe can either prefer its own civilization and culture, and defend it, or capitulate to another. But it cannot, as the novel tells it, absorb masses of unassimilated members of another culture and expect to survive. It will be changed forever, and the change will be in the direction of the immigrants’ way of life, and away from that of the native-born. This is a difficult truth to accept in our egalitarian age.
All men are created equal. But we know from hard
experience that this is not a ‘universal value.’ It is not indigenous
to all the world’s cultures.
But Raspail demands an answer. Even Dreher, though repulsed, admits
that the novel poses serious questions, “even if Raspail answers them in
a way that provokes disgust, and that Christians, at least, will find
unacceptable.” Perhaps not all Christians. After all, much of what
Christianity has bequeathed to the West is clarity about human nature.
The fragile thing the American Founders built is based after all on a
rigorous acceptance of a Christian view of human nature: All men are
created equal. But we know from hard experience that this is not a
“universal value.” It is not indigenous to all the world’s cultures.
European leaders don’t want to admit this, but it can’t be denied:
What migrants believe has a great deal to do with whether and how they
will assimilate. Europe, of all places, should know this. The EU has
decades of experience with unassimilated Muslim migrants—entire
communities and neighborhoods spanning two and three generations, the
most recent of which are arguably less assimilated than their parents.
In most EU countries they form an isolated underclass with very few ties
or allegiance to their host country.
The Immigration Marriage Problem
In 2009, Christopher Caldwell wrote a brilliant, disquieting book about what this seething Muslim population portends for Europe. The marital behavior of Muslim immigrants gets special attention, in part because it demonstrates the depth of the cultural problem. Caldwell puts it bluntly: “In a lot of European countries, marriage is not just an aspect of the immigration problem; it is the immigration problem.”
‘They don’t necessarily want a European life. They may want a Third World life at a European standard of living.’
That’s because many Muslim immigrants don’t marry Europeans or even
European-born “westernized” Muslims; they import spouses, often underage
girls, from their ethnic homelands. In Germany, half of ethnically
Turkish Germans seek spouses in Turkey. In Denmark, a large majority of
Turks and Pakistanis do the same—and not just immigrants, but also
second and third-generation descendants of immigrants. In France,
family-related immigration makes up 78 percent of permanent legal
immigration. Perhaps this wouldn’t be a problem if all these spouses
were assimilating, but they’re not.
Such trends refute the empty platitudes of European leaders such as
former president of the Italian Senate Marcello Pera, who said that any
migration from place A to place B showed the superiority of B. That
Muslims are migrating to Europe en masse but rejecting Europeans as
suitable spouses, “shows that you can migrate to a place while being
hostile to it, or at least while holding it in no special regard,”
writes Caldwell. “Yes, immigrants ‘just want a better life,’ as the
cliché goes. But they don’t necessarily want a European life. They may
want a Third World life at a European standard of living.”
A Fundamental Clash of Cultures
In the face of such a large-scale choice not to assimilate, European governments have found themselves powerless to act without compromising the rights of the entire populations. Consider the Danish marriage law. In the wake of the 2004 murder of Theo Van Gogh, the Netherlands passed a law requiring civics examinations and language tests on anyone seeking to marry a Dutch citizen. Germany passed a similar law. “What makes the measure defensible against EU human rights laws is that it is race, religion, and ethnicity-blind,” writes Caldwell. “It achieves this race blindness by stripping rights wantonly from all citizens, rather than targeting the problem it seeks to address.”
Because Europeans believe, or at least claim to believe, their values
are universal and not tied to any particular culture, they are forced
to be disingenuous about the need for such laws in the first place.
Caldwell quotes former British cabinet member George Walden musing on
what he’d do about Islam in Britain were he still in office. His lines
could have come verbatim from a character in The Camp of the Saints:
I’d be so alarmed by the situation I’d do everything possible to suggest it was under control. It’s up to politicians to play mood music in a crisis, and up to the people to understand that there’s little else governments can do. The last thing they can say is that we face a threat to which we can see no end because it’s based on a fundamental clash of cultures. On the IRA we told the truth; on the Islamic problem, we lie.
Raspail, who today is 90 years old, would likely not be surprised at
this because he understands the problem is not a matter of policy or
politics. It’s something deeper. “The West is empty,” he wrote in that
1985 introduction, “even if it has not yet become really aware of it. An
extraordinarily inventive civilization, surely the only one capable of
meeting the challenges of the third millennium, the West has no soul
left.”
Lose Your Culture, Lose Your Soul
Once you get beyond the handwringing about racism and fascism, Raspail’s polemical—at times frantic—novel is really about this collective loss of soul. A culture is in the end a way of life, even an identity. When one grows to love all the particular customs and traditions of one’s culture, it can be very much like loving a person. It is something unique in the world, and it belongs to you.
The Camp of the Saints opens with a portrait of someone like
this, an old professor who dearly loves his country and his culture. He
is the last person in his village the night before the Ganges fleet
makes landfall. Everyone else has long since fled, but he will not go.
He lives in a house built by his ancestors in 1673 and occupied by his
family in an unbroken line since then. On that last night, he prepares
for himself a great feast, carefully laying it all out on a massive
table.
While the old man sat there, eating and drinking, savoring swallow after swallow, he set his eyes wandering over the spacious room. A time-consuming task, since his glance stopped to linger on everything it touched, and since every confrontation was a new act of love. Now and then his eyes would fill with tears, but they were tears of joy. Each object in this house proclaimed the dignity of those who had lived here—their discretion, their propriety, their reserve, their taste for those solid traditions that one generation can pass on to the next, so long as it still takes pride in itself. And the old man’s soul was in everything, too. In the fine old bindings, the rustic benches, the Virgin carved in wood, the big cane chairs, the hexagonal tiles, the beams in the ceiling, the ivory crucifix with its sprig of dried boxwood, and a hundred other things as well.
The book ends as it begins, with a sense of deep personal loss. The
narrator is writing from Switzerland, the last European country to
capitulate to the migrant invaders. He sits alone, the night before the
borders are to be opened, “slowly repeating, over and over, the
melancholy words of an old prince Bibesco, trying to drum them into my
head: ‘The fall of Constantinople is a personal misfortune that happened
to all of us only last week.’”
(Editor’s
note: In a generation or two, the US will ask itself: “Who lost
Europe?” Here is the speech of Geert Wilders, Chairman of the Party for
Freedom the Netherlands, at the Four Seasons in New York, introducing an
Alliance of Patriots and announcing the Facing Jihad Conference in
Jerusalem.)
Dear friends,
Thank you very much for inviting me.
I come to America with a mission. All is not well in the old world. There is a tremendous danger looming, and it is very difficult to be optimistic. We might be in the final stages of the Islamization of Europe. This not only is a clear and present danger to the future of Europe itself; it is a threat to America and the sheer survival of the West. The United States is the last bastion of Western civilization, facing an Islamic Europe.
First, I will describe the situation on the ground in Europe. Then, I will say a few things about Islam. To close, I will tell you about a meeting in Jerusalem.
The Europe you know is changing.
You have probably seen the landmarks. But in all of these cities,
sometimes a few blocks away from your tourist destination, there is
another world. It is the world of the parallel society created by Muslim
mass-migration.
All throughout Europe, a new reality is rising: entire Muslim neighborhoods where very few indigenous people reside or are even seen. And if they are, they might regret it. This goes for the police as well. It’s the world of head scarves, where women walk around in figureless tents, with baby strollers and a group of children. Their husbands, or slaveholders if you prefer, walk three steps ahead. With mosques on many street corners. The shops have signs you and I cannot read. You will be hard-pressed to find any economic activity. These are Muslim ghettos controlled by religious fanatics. These are Muslim neighborhoods, and they are mushrooming in every city across Europe. These are the building-blocks for territorial control of increasingly larger portions of Europe , street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city.
There are now thousands of mosques throughout Europe . With larger congregations than there are in churches. And in every European city, there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region. Clearly, the signal is: we rule.
Many European cities are already one-quarter Muslim: just take Amsterdam , Marseille, and Malmo in Sweden. In many cities, the majority of the under-18 population is Muslim. Paris is now surrounded by a ring of Muslim neighborhoods. Mohammed is the most popular name among boys in many cities.
In some elementary schools in Amsterdam, the farm can no longer be
mentioned because that would also mean mentioning the pig, and that
would be an insult to Muslims.
Many state schools in Belgium and Denmark only serve halal food to all pupils. In once-tolerant Amsterdam, gays are beaten up almost exclusively by Muslims. Non-Muslim women routinely hear ‘whore, whore.’ Satellite dishes are not pointed to local TV stations, but to stations in the country of origin.
In France, schoolteachers are advised to avoid authors deemed offensive to Muslims, including Voltaire and Diderot; the same is increasingly true of Darwin. The history of the Holocaust can no longer be taught because of Muslim sensitivity.
In England, sharia courts are now officially part of the British legal system. Many neighborhoods in France are no-go areas for women without head scarves. Last week, a man almost died after being beaten up by Muslims in Brussels because he was drinking during the Ramadan.
Jews are fleeing France in record numbers, on the run for the worst wave of anti-Semitism since World War II. French is now commonly spoken on the streets of Tel Aviv and Netanya, Israel. I could go on forever with stories like this. Stories about Islamization.
San Diego University recently calculated that a staggering 25 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim just 12 years from now. Bernhard Lewis has predicted a Muslim majority by the end of this century.
Now these are just numbers. And the numbers would not be threatening if the Muslim immigrants had a strong desire to assimilate. But there are few signs of that. The Pew Research Center reported that half of French Muslims see their loyalty to Islam as greater than their loyalty to France. One-third of French Muslims do not object to suicide attacks. The British Centre for Social Cohesion reported that one-third of British Muslim students are in favor of a worldwide caliphate. Muslims demand what they call ‘respect’. And this is how we give them respect. We have Muslim official state holidays.
The Christian-Democratic attorney general is willing to accept sharia in the Netherlands if there is a Muslim majority. We have cabinet members with passports from Morocco and Turkey.
Muslim demands are supported by unlawful behavior, ranging from petty crimes and random violence, for example, against ambulance workers and bus drivers, to small-scale riots. Paris has seen its uprising in the low-income suburbs, the banlieus. I call the perpetrators ‘settlers’ because that is what they are. They do not come to integrate into our societies; they come to integrate our society into their Dar-al-Islam. Therefore, they are settlers.
Much of this street violence I mentioned is directed exclusively against non-Muslims, forcing many native people to leave their neighborhoods, their cities, their countries. Moreover, Muslims are now a swing vote not to be ignored.
The second thing you need to know is the importance of Mohammed the prophet. His behavior is an example to all Muslims and cannot be criticized. Now, if Mohammed had been a man of peace, let us say like Ghandi and Mother Theresa wrapped in one, there would be no problem. But Mohammed was a warlord, a mass murderer, a pedophile, and had several marriages – at the same time. Islamic tradition tells us how he fought in battles, how he had his enemies murdered and even had prisoners of war executed. Mohammed himself slaughtered the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza. If it is good for Islam, it is good. If it is bad for Islam, it is bad.
Let no one fool you about Islam being a religion. Sure, it has a god, and a here-after, and 72 virgins. But in its essence, Islam is a political ideology. It is a system that lays down detailed rules for society and the life of every person. Islam wants to dictate every aspect of life. Islam means ‘submission’. Islam is not compatible with freedom and democracy because what it strives for is sharia. If you want to compare Islam to anything, compare it to communism or national-socialism; these are all totalitarian ideologies.
Now you know why Winston Churchill called Islam ‘the most retrograde force in the world’, and why he compared Mein Kampf to the Quran. The public has wholeheartedly accepted the Palestinian narrative, and sees Israel as the aggressor. I have lived in this country and visited it dozens of times. I support Israel, first, because it is the Jewish homeland after two thousand years of exile up to and including Auschwitz , second because it is a democracy, and third because Israel is our first line of defense.
This tiny country is situated on the fault line of jihad, frustrating Islam’s territorial advance. Israel is facing the front lines of Jihad, like Kashmir, Kosovo, the Philippines, Southern Thailand, Darfur in Sudan, Lebanon, and Aceh in Indonesia . Israel is simply in the way, the same way West-Berlin was during the Cold War.
The war against Israel is not a war against Israel. It is a war against the West. It is Jihad. Israel is simply receiving the blows that are meant for all of us. If there would have been no Israel, Islamic imperialism would have found other venues to release its energy and its desire for conquest. Thanks to Israeli parents who send their children to the army and lay awake at night, parents in Europe and America can sleep well and dream, unaware of the dangers looming.
Many in Europe argue in favor of abandoning Israel in order to address the grievances of our Muslim minorities. But if Israel were, God forbid, to go down, it would not bring any solace to the West. It would not mean our Muslim minorities would all of a sudden change their behavior and accept our values. On the contrary, the end of Israel would give enormous encouragement to the forces of Islam. They would, and rightly so, see the demise of Israel as proof that the West is weak, and doomed.
The end of Israel would not mean the end of our problems with Islam, but only the beginning. It would mean the start of the final battle for world domination. If they can get Israel, they can get everything. So-called journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of Islamization as a ‘right-wing extremists’ or ‘racists’. In my country, the Netherlands, 60 percent of the population now sees the mass immigration of Muslims as the number one policy mistake since World War II. And another 60 percent sees Islam as the biggest threat.
Yet there is a greater danger than terrorist attacks, the scenario of America as the last man standing. The lights may go out in Europe faster than you can imagine. An Islamic Europe means a Europe without freedom and democracy, an economic wasteland, an intellectual nightmare, and a loss of military might for America – as its allies will turn into enemies, enemies with atomic bombs. With an Islamic Europe, it would be up to America alone to preserve the heritage of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem.
Dear friends, liberty is the most precious of gifts. My generation never had to fight for this freedom; it was offered to us on a silver platter, by people who fought for it with their lives. All throughout Europe, American cemeteries remind us of the young boys who never made it home, and whose memory we cherish. My generation does not own this freedom; we are merely its custodians. We can only hand over this hard-won liberty to Europe’s children in the same state in which it was offered to us. We cannot strike a deal with mullahs and imams. Future generations would never forgive us. We cannot squander our liberties. We simply do not have the right to do so.
We have to take the necessary action now to stop this Islamic stupidity from destroying the free world that we know.
The views expressed in this opinion article are solely those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by WesternJournalism.com.
The terrorist assault on the French satirical magazine Charlie
Hebdo on Jan. 7 may have been organized by al Qaeda’s affiliate in
Yemen. But the attack, along with another at a Paris kosher market days
later, was carried out by French Muslims descended from recent waves of
North African and West African immigration. Well before the attacks,
which left 17 dead, the French were discussing the possibility that
tensions with the country’s own Muslim community were leading France
toward some kind of armed confrontation.
Consider Éric Zemmour, a slashing television debater and a gifted polemicist. His history of the collapse of France’s postwar political order, “Le suicide français,” was No. 1 on the best-seller lists for several weeks this fall. “Today, our elites think it’s France that needs to change to suit Islam, and not the other way around,” Mr. Zemmour said on a late-night talk show in October, “and I think that with this system, we’re headed toward civil war.”
More recently, Michel Houellebecq published “Submission,” a novel set in the near future. In it, the re-election of France’s current president, François Hollande, has drawn recruits to a shadowy group proclaiming its European identity. “Sooner or later, civil war between Muslims and the rest of the population is inevitable,” a sympathizer explains. “They draw the conclusion that the sooner this war begins, the better chance they’ll have of winning it.” Published, as it happened, on the morning of the attacks, Mr. Houellebecq’s novel replaced Mr. Zemmour’s at the top of the best-seller list, where it remains.
Two days after the Charlie Hebdo killings, there was a disturbing indication on Le Monde’s website of how French people were thinking. One item about the killing vastly outpaced all others in popularity. The reactions of Europe’s leaders was shared about 5,000 times, tales of Muslim schoolchildren with mixed feelings about 6,000, a detailed account of the Charlie Hebdo editorial meeting ended by the attack, 9,000. Topping them all, shared 28,000 times, was a story about reprisals: “Mosques become targets, French Muslims uneasy.” Those clicks are the sound of French fear that something larger may be under way.
France’s problem has elements of a military threat, a religious
conflict and a violent civil-rights movement. It is not unique. Every
country of Western Europe has a version. For a half-century, millions of
immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa have arrived, lured by
work, welfare, marriage and a refuge from war. There are about 20
million Muslims in Europe, with some 5 million of them in France,
according to the demographer Michèle Tribalat. That amounts to roughly
8% of the population of France, compared with about 5% of both the U.K.
and Germany.
Such a migration is not something that Europeans would have countenanced at any other moment in their generally xenophobic history, and the politicians who permitted it to happen were not lucky. The movement coincided with a collapse in European birthrates, which lent the immigration an unstoppable momentum, and with the rise of modern political Islam, which gave the diaspora a radical edge.
Just why Europe has had such trouble can be partially understood by
contrasting it with the U.S. Europe’s welfare states are more developed
and, until recently, more open to noncitizens, so illegal or
“underground” immigration has been low. But employment rates have been
low, too. If Americans have traditionally considered immigrants the
hardest-working segment of their population, Europeans have had the
opposite stereotype. In the early 1970s, 2 million of the 3 million
foreigners in Germany were in the labor force; by the turn of this
century, 2 million of 7.5 million were.
Europe was not just disoriented by the trauma of World War II. It was also demoralized and paralyzed by the memory of Nazism and the continuing dismantling of colonialism. Leaders felt that they lacked the moral standing to address problems that were as plain as the noses on their faces—just as U.S. leaders ducked certain racial issues in the wake of desegregation.
Europeans drew the wrong lessons from the American civil-rights movement. In the U.S., there was race and there was immigration. They were separate matters that could (at least until recently) be disentangled by people of good faith. In Europe, the two problems have long been inseparable. Voters who worried about immigration were widely accused of racism, or later of “Islamophobia.”
In France, antiracism set itself squarely against freedom of speech. The passage of the 1990 Gayssot Law, which punished denial of the Holocaust, was a watershed. Activist lobbies sought to expand such protections by limiting discussion of a variety of historical events—the slave trade, colonialism, foreign genocides. This was backed up by institutional muscle. In the 1980s, President François Mitterrand’s Socialist party created a nongovernmental organization called SOS Racisme to rally minority voters and to hound those who worked against their interests.
Older bodies such as the communist-inspired Movement against Racism and for Friendship Among the Peoples made a specialty of threatening (and sometimes carrying out) lawsuits against European intellectuals for the slightest trespasses against political correctness: the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci for her post-9/11 lament “The Rage and the Pride,” the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut for doubting that the 2005 riots in France’s suburban ghettos were due to unemployment, the Russia scholar Hélène Carrère d’Encausse for speculating about the role of polygamy in the problems of West African immigrants.
Speech codes have done little to facilitate entry into the workforce for immigrants and their children or to reduce crime. But they have intimidated European voting publics, insulated politicians from criticism and turned certain crucial matters into taboos. Immigrant and ethnic issues have become tightly bound to the issue of building the multinational European Union, which has removed vast areas of policy from voter accountability. “Anti-European” sentiments continue to rise.
So impressed were the Europeans with their own generosity that they
failed to notice that the population of second- and third-generation
immigrants was growing bigger, stronger, more unified and less inclined
to take moral instruction. This is partly a demographic problem. Since
the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western Europe has had some of the lowest
birthrates of any civilization on record. Without immigration, Europe’s
population would fall by a hundred million by midcentury, according to
U.N. estimates.
When mass immigration began, Europeans did not give much thought to the influence of Islam. In the 1960s, there might have been worries that a North African was, say, a Nasserite Arab nationalist, but not that he was a would-be jihadist. Too many Europeans forgot that people carry a long past within them—and that, even when they do not, they sometimes wish to. Materialistic, acquisitive, averse to God and family, Europe’s culture appeared cold, dead and unsatisfying to many Muslims. It failed to satisfy a lot of non-Muslims too, but until they ran out of borrowed money with the 2008 crash, they could avoid facing it squarely.
Europeans didn’t know enough about the cultural background of Muslims to browbeat them the same way they did the native-born. Muslims felt none of the historic guilt over fascism and colonialism that so affected non-Muslim Europeans. They had a freedom of political action that Europeans lacked.
As European politics grew duller and the stakes lower, many political romantics looked enviously at the aspirations of the Muslim poor, particularly regarding Palestine. You could see a hint of this last weekend in the BBC journalist who interrupted a mourning Frenchwoman, distraught about the targeting of Jews for murder at a kosher supermarket, to say that “the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands.”
In a world that prized “identity,” Muslim immigrants were aristocrats. Those who became radicalized developed the most monstrous kind of self-regard. A chilling moment in the most recent terrorist drama came when the TV network RTL phoned the kosher supermarket where the Malian-French hostage-taker, Amedy Coulibaly, was holding his victims at gunpoint. He refused to talk but hung up the phone carelessly. The newspaper Le Monde was able to publish a transcript of the strutting stupidity to which he then gave expression:
“They’re always trying to make you believe that Muslims are terrorists. Me, I’m born in France. If they hadn’t been attacked elsewhere, I wouldn’t be here…Think of the people who had Bashar al-Assad in Syria. They were torturing people…We didn’t intervene for years…Then bombers, coalition of 50,000 countries, all that…Why did they do that?”
The Muslim community is not to be confused with the terrorists it produces. But left to its own, it probably lacks the means, the inclination and the courage to stand up to the faction, however small, that supports terrorism. In 1995, there were riots among French Muslims after the arrest of Khalid Kelkal of Lyon, who had planted several bombs—in a train station, near a Jewish school, on a high-speed rail track. In 2012, when Mohamed Merah of Toulouse was killed by police after having gunned down soldiers, a rabbi and three Jewish elementary-school children, his brother professed himself “proud,” and his father threatened to file a wrongful-death suit against the government.
And when Charlie Hebdo printed a memorial cover this week that had a
picture of its controversial cartoon character “Muhammad” on it, it was
as if the attacks had never happened: Muslim community spokesmen, even
moderate ones, issued dire warnings about the insult to them and their
coreligionists. To many Muslims in France and the rest of Europe, the
new drawings were evidence not that the terrorists had failed to kill a
magazine but that the French had failed to heed a warning. Impressive
though the post-attack memorial marches were, “the working classes and
the North African and West African immigrant kids weren’t there,” as the
president of France’s Young Socialists told the newspaper Le Temps.
It may seem harsh to criticize the French in their time of grief, but they are responding today with tools that have failed them in previous crises. They reflexively look at their own supposed bigotry as always, somehow, the ultimate cause of Islamist terrorism, and they limit their efforts to making minority communities feel more at home.
The mysterious riots of 2005 in France—which lasted for almost three weeks, during which the rioters made no claims and put forward no leaders—were chalked up to deprivation. The French media responded with an effort to hire more nonwhite news anchors and reporters, and the government promised to spend more in the suburbs. Now, after the murders in Paris, the contradictions continue to accumulate:
• On religion: Mr. Hollande has insisted that the attacks have “nothing to do with Islam.” At the same time, Prime Minister Manuel Valls speaks of “moderate Islam” and rails against “conservatism and obscurantism”—as if the violence had everything to do with Islam, and even with religious devotion in general.
• On spying: Some in the French government blame intelligence failures, since the secret services tracked the Charlie Hebdo killers Said and Chérif Kouachi until last summer. But government officials boast of about their principled unwillingness to legislate a “Patriot Act a la française”—even as they draw daily on intelligence gathered by the U.S.
• On religious hatred: Justice Minister Christiane Taubira has announced an all-out assault on “racism and anti-Semitism,” promising that those who attack others because of their religion will be fought “with rigor and resolve.” In theory, this sounds like a promise to protect Jewish shoppers from getting killed at their neighborhood grocery stores. In practice, it will mean placing limits on any inquiry into the inner dynamics of Muslim communities and may wind up increasing the terrorist threat rather than diminishing it.
What continues is the deafness of France’s government and mainstream
parties to public opinion (and popular suffrage) on the issues of
immigration and a multiethnic society. Mr. Hollande’s approval ratings
have risen since the attacks, but they are still below 30%. In January
2013, according to the newsweekly L’Express, 74% of the French said that
Islam “is not compatible with French society.” Though that number fell
last year, it is almost certain to be higher now.
Voters all across Europe feel abandoned by the mainstream political class, which is why populist parties are everywhere on the rise. Whatever the biggest initial grievance of these parties—opposition to the European Union for the U.K. Independence Party, opposition to the euro for Alternative für Deutschland, corruption for Italy’s 5 Star Movement—all wind up, by voter demand, placing immigration and multiculturalism at the center of their concerns.
In France, it is the Front National, a party with antecedents on the far right, that has been the big beneficiary. In the last national election, for seats in the European Parliament, the FN, led by Marine Le Pen (daughter of the party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen), topped the polls. But the ruling Socialists froze the Front National out of the recent national ceremonies of mourning, limiting participation in the Paris rally to those parties it deemed “republican.” This risks damaging the cause of republicanism more than the cause of Le Pen and her followers.
Acts of terrorism can occur without shaking a country to its core. These latest attacks, awful as they were, could be taken in stride if the majority in France felt itself secure. But it does not. Thanks to wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, thousands of young people who share the indignation of the Kouachis and Coulibaly are now battle-hardened and heavily armed.
France, like Europe more broadly, has been careless for decades. It has not recognized that free countries are for peoples strong enough to defend them. A willingness to join hands and to march in solidarity is a good first response to the awful events of early January. It will not be enough.
Mr. Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.”
The Camp of the Saints (Le Camp des Saints) is a 1973 French apocalyptic novel by Jean Raspail. The novel depicts a setting wherein Third World mass immigration to France and the West leads to the destruction of Western civilization. Almost forty years after publication the book returned to the bestseller list in 2011.[1] The title is a reference to the Book of Revelation (Rev 20:9).
An Indian "wise man" then rallies the masses to make an exodus to live in Europe. Most of the story centers on the French Riviera, where almost no one remains except for the military and a few civilians, including a retired professor who has been watching the huge fleet of run-down freighters approaching the French coast.
The story alternates between the French reaction to the mass immigration and the attitude of the immigrants. They have no desire to assimilate into French culture but want the goods that are in short supply in their native India. Although the novel focuses on France, the rest of the West shares its fate.
Near the end of the story the mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem, the Queen of the United Kingdom must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman, and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese people as they swarm into Siberia. The one holdout until the end of the novel is Switzerland, but by then international pressure isolating it as a rogue state for not opening its borders forces it to capitulate.
In 2002 Lionel Shriver described the novel as "both prescient and appalling," certainly "racist" but "written with tremendous verbal energy and passion." Shriver writes that the book "gives bilious voice to an emotion whose expression is increasingly taboo in the West, but that can grow only more virulent when suppressed: the fierce resentment felt by majority populations when that status seems threatened."[8]
William F. Buckley, Jr. praised the book in 2004 as "a great novel" which raised questions on how to respond to massive illegal immigration.[9] In 2005 the conservative Chilton Williamson praised the book as "one of the most uncompromising works of literary reaction in the 20th century."[10] In 2001 the Southern Poverty Law Center described it as "widely revered by American white supremacists and is a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries,"[11] and as recently as October of 2015 condemned the novel as "the favorite racist fantasy of the anti-immigrant movement in the US."[12]
The book returned to the bestseller list in 2011.[1]
In a gloomy but strangely enthralling book published at the end of the First World War, the historian and polymath Oswald Spengler wrote of the decline of the West, arguing that Europe was moving inevitably to its end according to a pattern that can be observed among civilizations from the beginning of recorded history. Each historical superorganism, he argued, displays its distinctive and defining spirit through its culture. That of the West is “Faustian”—involving an outgoing and conquering attitude to the world displayed in the science, art, and institutions that came to fruition at the Reformation, spread themselves far and wide through the Enlightenment, and then reached a crisis at the French Revolution.
After that great period, things began to ossify into rigid legal and bureaucratic forms. Thus was born the period of “civilization,” typified by Napoleon’s new rationalization of the old spirit of France. Culture leads to civilization, which in turn leads to decay and then death. The culture of the West, Spengler argued, will dwindle to a purely mechanical simulacrum of its former greatness before disappearing entirely.
In the wake of the First World War, Europe was more than normally receptive to stories of its doom, and Spengler was eagerly embraced by the reading public. Despite a polemical attack from G. K. Chesterton, his brand of cultural pessimism survived to gather momentum with the outbreak of the Second World War and to exert a mesmerizing influence over the post-war literary world.
Many of Spengler’s arguments are sophistical, many of his facts are invented and his comparisons far-fetched, but it is difficult, on reading Spengler now, to think that his prophecy of doom was entirely unfounded. In one particular, he has surely been proven right, which is that the culture of Europe is destined to become an empty shell, held in place by rigid structures of law and bureaucracy around the void where art and religion were once enthroned in splendor.
In one particular, however, Spengler seems to have been wholly off-beam, and that is America. His Eurocentric vision is focused, like that of Marx, on the great turning points in our continental history: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution. He has nothing, or nothing significant, to say about the other revolution that preceded the French by 13 years and which led to the founding of the longest-lasting democracy that the world has so far known.
The American Revolution was, for Spengler, a distant commotion like the bursting of a supernova light-years away in space, a tiny pinpoint of light in the ambient darkness, but the nation that was born on these shores has proved itself more resilient, more creative, and more able to sustain its defining mission than any other in the modern world. It is, of course, tied to Europe, and to one European country in particular, by language, history, culture, and institutions. It is a product of the European diaspora, and in particular of the English religious and political inheritance. The American Constitution does not make sense without that inheritance and is in one interpretation simply an attempt to transcribe into a document the civic freedom that the English won for themselves over centuries of common-law government.
Nevertheless, the American Revolution was in itself a move away from Europe, an attempt to embark on a different kind of history from those that had prevailed across the ocean, and although the ties to Britain remain, it is not possible to predict the condition of America from the facts presented by Europe. It could be that the rapid and radical decline that we witness on our side of the Atlantic has no equivalent here. Or, if it has an equivalent, it would be presumptuous to assume that the American decline can be understood outside the special context provided by the history and self-image of the United States.
From inside, we confront the radicalization of our Muslim populations and the loss of the core structures of European society: the family, marriage, the Christian faith, and little platoons built from those things. From outside, we confront mass migration of populations seeking the benefits of European legal order without assuming the cost. And we confront a growing military threat from Russia. In the past, that threat has been countered by the NATO alliance, but the alliance has been weakened both by European indifference and by the isolationist foreign policy of the Obama Administration.
The radicalization of our Muslim populations is connected to the migration problem: Not all those fleeing the Middle East are hostile to the Islamist philosophy of ISIS. Many come ready to bear arms against their hosts, and recent atrocities in France have shown the extent to which new arrivals are ready and willing to join the cause of Allah against the infidel. As ISIS consolidates its grip on Syria and loses what support it has among the local populations, it will increasingly seek to export its Islamist ideology and the violence associated with it.
Such is the lesson of modern history: that revolutionary governments become stable when they can export their chaos to their neighbors. Europe has defenses against armed invasion, but it has no defenses against those who invade without weapons.
The big questions in my mind are these: To what extent is the loss of our traditional religion and the culture that grew from it responsible for our weakness in the face of these threats, and what could we conceivably do now to remedy the defect?
Those questions are difficult even to discuss. The EU institutions have made a point of removing all references to the Christian religion and its moral legacy from official documents, on the view that such things will constitute discrimination in favor of one group of Europeans over another. Cases brought before the European Court of Human Rights and also the European Court of Justice (the court charged with the application and enforcement of the treaties) are pushing for continent-wide laws permitting gay marriage, easy divorce, and abortion on demand, as well as laws banning the crucifix from public places and curtailing the teaching of the Christian religion in schools.
These initiatives have their parallels here in America, and in the same way that liberal activists have used the Supreme Court to overrule the religion-based decisions of state legislatures, secularists and Islamists are using the European courts to impose their vision on the nation-states of Europe.
It is true, of course, that activists gather always at the top and try to push society in the direction that they favor, but their getting to the top is not independent of the fact that they are allowed to get to the top, and the people who allow them are those whom they wish to control. In any case, whatever the cause, there is no doubt as to the effect. Europe is rapidly jettisoning its Christian heritage and has found nothing to put in the place of it save the religion of “human rights.”
I call this a religion because it is designed expressly to fill the hole in people’s worldview that is left when religion is taken away. The notion of a human right purports to offer the ground for moral opinions, for legal precepts, for policies designed to establish order in places where people are in competition and conflict. However, it is itself without foundations. If you ask what religion commands or forbids, you usually get a clear answer in terms of God’s revealed law or the Magisterium of the church. If you ask what rights are human or natural or fundamental, you get a different answer depending on whom you ask, and nobody seems to agree with anyone else regarding the procedure for resolving conflicts.
Consider the dispute over marriage. Is it a right or not? If so, what does it permit? Does it grant a right to marry a partner of the same sex? And if yes, does it therefore permit incestuous marriage too? The arguments are endless, and nobody knows how to settle them.
Things are made more complex still by the inclusion, in all European provisions, of “non-discrimination” as a human right. When offering a benefit, a contract of employment, a place in a college, or a bed in a hospital, you are commanded not to discriminate on grounds of…there then follows a list derived from the victims of recent history: race, ethnic group, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and whatever is next to be discovered. But all coherent societies are based on discrimination: A society is an “in-group,” however large and however hospitable to newcomers.
Non-discrimination laws effectively tie the hands of the indigenous European communities, forbidding them from offering privileges to their existing members while permitting every kind of discrimination among the incoming migrants. It is natural for an immigrant family to offer jobs to its own members, to discriminate on grounds of race, ethnic group, religion, and (without necessarily mentioning this) gender and orientation. Hence, European cities are increasingly places of tightly knit immigrant communities with fiercely defended territory, from which the fair-minded indigenous inhabitants are excluded because they will not and cannot offer privileges to their kind.
This development has led, however, to a sudden burst of Christian nostalgia—not only among the older generation, but among young people too. There are evangelical movements in the cities which reach out to the young and attempt to include them in a purified Christian vision. This new evangelism is not opposed to the official “rights” culture but carves out a private space within it—a space where, taking advantage of the permissions granted by the secular order, the old discipline can be adopted as a personal cross.
This privatized Christianity can be found in surprising places. One of them is worth mentioning, since it concerns the art form that more than any other expresses the “Faustian” spirit of Europe as Spengler discerned it: namely, music.
Following the example of Messiaen in France, a new generation of composers has emerged eager to compose liturgical and spiritual music, usually quite difficult music that will be heard only in the concert hall, but nevertheless music with the old message, written in defiance of the secular culture. Notable in Britain is Sir James MacMillan, whose knighthood, recently bestowed, is a sign that this way of reviving Christian values does not offend the powers that be. MacMillan is a Catholic Scot; his predecessor as the voice of Christian music in Britain, Sir John Tavener, was a Greek Orthodox Englishman; and MacMillan’s most important rival for the ear of Christians in Britain is John Rutter, who is an Anglican, wedded to the old harmless, half-believing rites of our national church.
I mention these people because they exemplify a phenomenon that can be encountered all across Europe, which is the search for the old God of the continent in the sacred buildings, liturgies, and music of our various churches, even and especially among people who don’t set foot in a church on a Sunday for fear of being trapped into prayer.
The marks of Christianity have therefore not been rubbed out from the high culture of Europe. There are still poets, composers, painters, and sculptors who accept the old role of the artist as the one who praises God in the name of his fellow human beings and who represents their dignity before the throne of the Lord.
Another interesting effect of the rights pandemic is the increasing turn of young Muslims to a fervent “Salafist” version of their faith. The rights idea leaves everything that is most important in the life of a Muslim without official endorsement: In everything to do with sex, marriage, and the family, in the operation of the law, in the division of the day and the hours of work and recreation, the Muslim heart is at odds with the new official Europe.
Had Christianity retained its status as the foundation of domestic custom and public law, it would have been easier for a Muslim to accept the European order. Our way of life would have seemed like a form of obedience and a human adaptation to the will of God. But the foundationless idea of human rights leaves the Muslim no alternative but to dismiss the secular law entirely as an impertinent attempt by human beings to usurp a privilege which is God’s alone: the privilege of guiding us to our salvation. We see in the young people eagerly travelling to Syria to join ISIS, in the growth of religious schools and unofficial shari’a courts, and in the wearing of the hijab and (where permitted) the niqab and the burqa a defiant Islamic culture that refuses to belong to the European order and which defines itself increasingly against that order.
One interesting side-effect of this has been the trafficking of vulnerable girls from the infidel community, an effect that has been devastating in our English cities. I have touched on this matter in my recent novel The Disappeared, in which I attempt to show some of the fault lines between the new Islamized underclass and the surrounding culture of nothingness.
Another interesting side-effect of Islamization has been the growth of anti-Semitism in Europe. It was inconceivable in my youth that anyone should voice an anti-Semitic sentiment, still more inconceivable that he should exhibit violence, contemptuous language, or any kind of assault towards others on account of their Jewishness. This has changed, and changed almost overnight.
Of course, people say that it is all the result of the bad behavior of Israel, but what is now considered bad behavior is precisely what was cheered on and endorsed a decade ago. The real cause of the new wave of anti-Semitism is the growing self-confidence and numbers of the Muslim minority—a fact that you cannot publicly declare in Britain, still less in France or Belgium, for fear of provoking the charge of Islamophobia and even the threat of legal action.
So much for the rights culture, which displays its foundationless character precisely in this matter for which it should put itself aggressively on display. It is precisely the advocates of human rights as a social panacea who are the most ardent in seeking excuses for anti-Semitism.
Now, with the expansion of the Union, that provision in the treaty has become the cause of massive disruption: the flight of the educated elite from Eastern Europe, the overwhelming of the welfare systems in Western Europe, and the crowding of millions of migrants into Britain and Ireland, the only European countries where the international language is spoken. The most important consequence of this is that if a migrant can make it to any country in the Union and somehow (it is never very difficult) gain the permission to reside there, he can then migrate to his country of choice.
The result for us in Britain is the breakdown of our welfare system; the destructive overloading of our infrastructure; the collapse of a precious planning system that had served to keep the country looking roughly as it had always done during all the decades since the Second World War; and, last but by no means least, the total destruction of our state schools, in which city teachers have to teach classes of children for whom English is at best a second language and in which topics like national history, English literature, Christian scripture, Latin, and music appreciation have next to no meaning even though they are, or were, the foundation of everything that England once was.
That this problem has been exacerbated by the EU is an understatement. It was created by the EU and by the destructive attempt to govern a continent by a treaty, bypassing the legislatures of all signatory states. A treaty can be amended only by a laborious process and only assuming the consent of all the original signatories. It cannot by its nature adapt to changes that occur with the rapidity of wars, natural disasters, and mass migrations.
There is no way, in my view, that the EU could now adapt to the inflow of unwanted migrants, and it therefore responds by pretending that the migrants are really wanted, that inward migration is an economic benefit, and that no other factor needs to be considered. This is the message sent out to the world by the German political class, and the extraordinary fact is that it comes from a nation that once destroyed Europe in the name of its own search for Lebensraum.
All of Europe is now waiting for the politicians to come up with a policy that will solve or at least ease the migration problem, but because the EU is construed as a business deal—though a merger rather than (as for Napoleon and Hitler) an acquisition—it cannot address the cause of the problem. People are migrating into Europe because conditions are intolerable in much of the Middle East and because there is no cost, but only gain, for those engaged in people trafficking.
Had the EU taken the form of a military alliance rather than a social and economic merger, it would perhaps have been able to respond to ISIS, to the breakdown of order in Libya, and to the situation in Iraq. For these are, for European civilization, military issues, to be solved in the end by force. But without American leadership, which vanished with the election of President Barack Obama, Europe is unable to involve itself in policing those parts of the world that are exporting their chaos to Europe.
The failure of Europe in this matter illustrates the application of the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy is always increasing but can be made to decrease within a closed system. The active policy of the EU, which has been to dissolve borders and renounce the use of force, has created an open system without the resources to counter the entropy pouring in from outside.
Confrontation with Russia. The same weakness is manifest in the confrontation with Russia. Vladimir Putin has understood that the outer borders of Europe are porous and that the withdrawal of American interest is now more or less inevitable, given the failure of the European leadership to understand the need for it.
Having seized parts of Georgia, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine without any real cost, other than sanctions that mean as little as such sanctions always do, Putin is beginning to probe NATO defense lines in the Baltic States and Eastern Poland. The farcical peace treaty in Ukraine, negotiated by German Chancellor Merkel and French President Hollande in Minsk, shows exactly how pointless in such circumstances is diplomacy not backed by the threat of force. In every way, Putin is being presented with the image of Europe as a military pushover and responding accordingly.
Of course, the Russian elite won’t want to bomb London, since they own it (another consequence of the EU, which has made land and buildings into property that aliens as well as citizens can buy and sell). However, it seems that the Russian army’s strategic planning has shifted ominously from escalation to de-escalation as the central strand (so I learn from contacts in Polish intelligence). In other words, not invasion followed by the threat of a nuclear bomb, but a nuclear bomb followed by occupation.
There are signs that people in Eastern Europe, and in the Baltic States especially, are seriously concerned about Russian ambitions, and there are some of them who do not take this as just another reason to flee to London. There is a growing awareness in the European political class that if mass migration is not brought under control, Britain and perhaps other Northern countries will withdraw from the Union, which will in all probability collapse in consequence.
For there to be a successful turnaround in confronting these two external threats, however, there must also be a rebirth of national sentiment and local attachments. So far, the foundationless ideology of rights has wiped away the emotions that would be needed if people are to be resolute in defense of their shared assets. We see at every level the retreat from confrontation, the embarrassed refusal to affirm our patrimony or its legitimate claim for sacrifice. The only first-person plural that is officially allowed is that of Europe itself, though it is a “we” that few people now understand and which has in any case been bowdlerized by the political elite.
But we also see, here and there, the signs of social and cultural renewal. During the 19th century, many Europeans thought they could compensate for the decline of the Christian faith by attaching themselves to ideologies: socialism, nationalism, communism, Marxism. The rights panacea is the latest of these, but we know or ought to know that it does not work. It is only by reconnecting with our true inheritance that we can develop the kind of first-person plural that will enable us to stand together against the growing threats to us.
I mentioned the encouraging examples set by English composers in recent years. I could mention the movement of Catholic youth in Italy around the Rimini meetings established by Father Giussani. I could mention the reaction in France—confused as yet and unfocused—to the recent Islamist atrocities. I could mention the extraordinary rebirth of representational painting around the work of Odd Nerdrum in Norway and the emergence in Britain of poets, such as Ruth Padel, John Burnside, and Don Paterson, who speak directly to both young and old in a language that also recuperates our past.
Even popular culture is moving in the same direction, trying as best it can to recapture the sense of belonging and enchantment, as in the film epics of Harry Potter, Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings. I don’t say that these blockbuster movies are great works of art, but they are not repudiations of our civilization either. In fact, they are affirmations which convey confused but real guidance to young people concerning the values that made them what they are.
But there is one thing that Americans have which we Europeans lack: namely, a sense of shared identity, of being included together in an enterprise the rewards of which and the costs of which are distributed among us all. This sense of identity depends upon borders. It depends upon a law defined by territory and human procedures rather than by God. And it depends on the idea of the nation.
Looking at Europe and at what follows when the political class loses all sight of that idea, Americans should recognize how lucky they are and how they must at all costs hold onto the belief in themselves as one nation. And if they add to that phrase the two words “under God,” they will be on the way to protecting the principal thing that we Europeans have lost.
It is not difficult for Americans to learn that lesson. In every crisis, they stand together as a nation, and the tradition of charitable giving is as strong here as it ever was. It is well known that Americans give more per capita to charitable causes than the people of any other country, and even if you complain that 2 percent of GDP is not much, it compares interestingly with the 0.2 percent of France and the less than 0.1 percent of Germany. Of course, in France and Germany, the state looks after those in need, but that is exactly the European problem: namely, that the state has grown to replace the bonds of civil society and little by little to extinguish them.
This goes hand in hand with a decline in national feeling—indeed, in the case of Germany, with a repudiation of national feeling among the political elite, which treads the world with exquisite softness for fear of the Nazi shadow that creeps along behind. Learning to value your nation as a symbol of your togetherness in a shared land is, in my view, the way forward for all who would live as citizens. It is what has disappeared from the Middle East and what is now under threat in Europe, but it is not under threat here, and long may that continue.
This brings me to a point in which Europe has the edge on America, which is the innate respect of Europeans for their aesthetic inheritance. Our landscapes and townscapes are dear to us and have been protected through all the destruction wrought by two world wars to survive as symbols of our long-standing settlement.
America is a new country, whose planning laws arose from the need to build quickly and, when the opportunity arose, move on. As a result, the country is now encumbered with vast urban wastelands like Detroit. Very few American cities have a center where anyone wants to reside, and all of them have begun to spread like a fungus over the landscape, forcing people to depend on fossil fuels and hours behind the wheel for the basic needs of life. There is a kind of loneliness that advances with the suburbs as closely knit communities are replaced with people too comfortable in their boxes to have much need of neighbors.
This was not always so. Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries wanted their cities to emulate those of Europe. Architecture was properly taught according to the beaux-arts tradition in the American schools, and city fathers were keen to lay out streets, parks, and city centers as public domains in which all residents have an interest. Look at the photographs of New York at the beginning of the 20th century, or the Chicago of Louis Sullivan, and you will see beautiful townscapes and facades, public spaces and genial details that match in every way the great achievement of Europe.
Of course, American architects are as greedy as their European counterparts and have no qualms in destroying environments if there is money to be made in doing so, but the result is not appreciated by the people, as is shown by the fact that, while no educated American would go to Detroit, Tampa, or Houston for a holiday, almost all want to visit Florence, Paris, or Rome. So here is one particular in which America can learn from Europe—and indeed, with the New Urbanism movement, is beginning to do so. But it will require strength of will to resist the corporate interests and the ideological fantasies of the schools of architecture.
A new revolution from below is needed here, and it should model itself on the long-standing revolution from below that we have had in England and which I document in my book How to Think Seriously About the Planet. We in England have taken possession of our landscape and townscape and said “no” to those who want to make it unrecognizable as a human habitat. The habit of saying “no” to new things goes against the grain for most Americans, but some noes are also yeses, and this is especially true of those said on behalf of a loved inheritance and a symbol of what we are.
—Roger Scruton is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor of The New Atlantis. He is the author of over 30 books on a variety of topics including How to Be a Conservative, The Meaning of Conservatism, and An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture.
http://www.heresyblog.net/
As Europe continues to absorb hostile
hordes of illegal African "migrants" who are flooding the shores of the
Mediterranean, it is becoming increasingly clear that these (primarily
Muslim) invaders pose an existential threat to the survival of Europe as
we know it.
They are coming as conquerors, not as immigrants. Their boats are full of young males of fighting age, and they are demanding that European taxpayers feed, house, and provide medical care for them upon arrival.
Astoundingly, the traitorous left has acquiesced to the demands of these African invaders, as Frederica Mogherini, the High Representative of the EU(SSR) for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, has stated that "no migrants intercepted at sea should be sent back against their will."
(It should be noted that Mrs. Mogherini, in her early years, was a member of the Italian Communist Youth Federation, the youth wing of the Italian Communist Party.)
In other words, any illegal African invader who can make it to Europe will be allowed to stay in Europe and will be exempt from deportation.
Within this context, all Europeans
should be aware of a threatening Youtube video posted by an African
invader, in which this invader exposes the Africans' true motives for
invading Europe in large numbers.
This invader, "Doctor" Ebou Bah, makes a number of threatening statements in his video, and I will be responding to three of his most preposterous statements.
"Doctor Bah's" first preposterous statement was his claim that Africans will invade Europe and America at all costs, no matter what we do to try to prevent them from invading us:
Thanks to the leftists who took control of our nations in the 1960's, we are welcoming Dr. Bah and his comrades with open arms, then showering them with taxpayer-funded housing, food, and medical care.
Moreover, Communists such as Angela "Germany is becoming a country of immigration" Merkel and Frederica "All illegals are welcome to stay" Mogherini are ensuring that the African and Muslim invasion of Europe will continue unabated, and that the invasion will be facilitated by the Communists who control the EUSSR.
As for the United States, our dear
leader King Hussein, disciple of the honorable Reverend Wright, is
actively importing masses of African and Muslim "refugees" into American
communities, despite backlash from states such as South Carolina and Idaho.
With that being said, my message to Dr. Bah is this:
Nothing is stopping you from illegally invading Europe and America. In fact, our leaders are assisting and funding these illegal invasions.
But what you and your comrades must keep in mind is that by illegally invading our lands, you are placing yourselves at great risk.
This is because your allies on the left (King Hussein, Merkel, Renzi, Hollande) are not going to be in charge forever, and the Nationalists who are coming to replace these traitors will not be as tolerant of your presence in our lands.
I believe that sometime very soon you invaders will be wishing you had never stepped foot on European (or American) soil and will be begging for our mercy. I advise you to leave while you still have a chance and while tolerant, effeminate cowards are still in charge of our nations.
Decades of mass legal and illegal immigration has awoken the European peoples, and we are discovering that we must regain the warrior mentality of our forefathers if our nations are to survive.
We are a sleeping giant who is slowly awakening, and illegal hostile invaders certainly do not want to be present in our lands when we rise up to take back what is rightfully ours.
Moving on to Dr. Bah's second preposterous statment:
First off, our lands do not belong to Africans. And we have every right to insist that we do not want Africans (and Muslims) in our territories, because, in general, Africans and Muslims have brought nothing but violence, chaos, dysfunction, and terror into our lands.
It is no longer safe for European children to walk their own streets after dark anymore, thanks to the presence of violent, predatory third-world immigrants in many of our major cities.
Prior to the left's facilitated mass
immigration into our lands, it was not necessary to lock our doors every
time we left the house. But thanks to our new and "diverse" countrymen,
many Europeans (and Americans) no longer feel safe in our own
neighborhoods.
We have every right to complain about more of your people entering our lands, and furthermore, we have every right to appeal to our government's to remove all illegal immigrants from our territories.
As for Bah's threat that "we Africans are coming", it should be noted that Europeans and Americans do not fear Africans taking over our lands whatsoever.
These groups lack the intelligence, organization, forethought, and ingenuity to defeat us. Your people could never defeat ours in a state of total war, regardless of numerical superiority.
In truth, we do not view your people as a threatening enemy. Our real enemies are our fellow Europeans who have embraced Communism, Marxism, Maoism, Trotskyism, Leninism, Stalinism, and every other "ism" that seeks to undermine, subvert, and eventually destroy Western Civilization.
African invaders are only present in Europe because the aforementioned leftists have brought you here and funded your lifestyles with the tax dollars of native Europeans.
This state of affairs is no longer acceptable to a large number of Europeans, and patriots and Nationalists throughout Europe are coalescing to eliminate the threats to the survival of Europe and Western Civilization at large.
As for Dr. Bah's third preposterous statement:
It is absolutely incredulous for Dr. Bah to assume that America, France, Germany, and Italy will be controlled by Africans. Africans lack the ability to even control their own city blocks, so how in the world are they going to control technologically advanced and developed Western nations?
Not long ago, Africans were handed the keys to a highly developed Western nation, South Africa, and managed to turn that country into a third-world hellhole of murder, rape, and mass chaos within the span of two decades.
Despite what Dr. Bah seems to believe,
Germany, Italy, America, France, and England will never be controlled by
Africans. Africans will not control the West, nor will they conquer the
entire continent of Europe.
Those who believe as Dr. Bah believes must not have read their history books. Europeans fought off the Mongols, the Huns, the Turks, the Berbers, the Ottomans, and every other external threat that has ever threatened the survival of Europe, its peoples, and its civilization.
It may have taken hundreds of years in some cases, but each and every time European warriors have fought back all foreign invaders and purged them from our territories. This is not hyperbole, this is a historical fact.
Conclusion
Westerners must remember that invaders such as Dr. Bah are being imported to our nations by the left, granted citizenship by the left, and then they form political alliances with the treasonous left.
Then, they stab us in the back by claiming we are racists, white supremacists, and that we have white privilege, despite the fact that Westerners have been more than welcoming to the third-world masses who have come to our nations since the 1960's, and the fact that it is primarily the tax dollars of the conservative working-class (not the left's dependency class) that has subsidized their housing, food, and health care.
Indeed, a majority of the third-world
invaders who continue to flock to our nations are forming political
alliances with the Communists, who are embarked on a program of
dissolution of all national identities in Europe, which includes the
demographic replacement of the native European peoples with "new"
Europeans, who the Communists bestow with generous benefits, while
covering up immigrant crimes against native Europeans.
We must not allow one more immigrant into our lands and we must remove all illegal immigrants from our territories as quickly as possible. Muslim immigrants, in particular, must be deported en masse to Islamic countries where they can practice Sharia law in peace, far away from the "racist" and "Islamophobic" Westerners.
This may seem like a radical proposal,
but what is actually radical is the fact that the left's program of mass
immigration was forced on us without our consent. We were never asked
if we wanted to become multicultural, multi-ethnic proposition nations.
We were never consulted about this.
And despite the left's claims that Europeans and Americans who oppose mass immigration are "racists" and "white supremacists", that could not be further than the truth.
Would the third-world be following us around everywhere if we were violent and xenophobic? Of course not. We have been extremely tolerant of the invaders in our midst, which is why they choose to come to our lands rather than Muslim, African, and Asian nations.
Without a doubt, no Muslim, African, or Asian nations would ever accept the levels of humiliation the Europeans and Americans have put up with at the hands of outsiders.
Thus, we are now opposing immigration in large numbers because we have been so tolerant and welcoming to these foreigners, yet we have been paid back with ingratitude, hostility, and subversion.
It is only a matter of time before Europe and America turn "far-right". Liberalism and Marxism are dying a slow, painful death, and Nationalists are priming to fill the political vacuum created by the left's collapse.
My advice to invaders like Dr. Bah is to get out of our countries while you can. Because if history serves as a guide, your experience in our territories may not end up being so pleasant if you continue to provoke us.
At every turn, it seems, the weak and uncertain leadership of the West is submitting to the strength and evil certainty of radical Islam, of which Winston Churchill warned more than a century ago “no stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”
We began giving up our self-confidence a century ago when the Western governments who fought on both sides of World War I abandoned classical liberalism and its associated political philosophy of constitutional liberty and replaced it with autocratic top-down, state controlled central planning.
Modern liberalism, as practiced by the Democratic Party in the United States in 2015 and 2016 and its state-centric counterparts in Europe, bears little resemblance to classical liberalism.
“The ideology of classical liberalism is closer to what today is a current of conservatism in the United States,” Richard Huddleson wrote in his 1999 book, Modern Political Philosophy.
The constitutionally destructive consequence of World War I was noted by Leonard Liggio, who wrote recently at the Acton Institute:
“I hold that governments are meant to be, and must remain, the servants of the citizens; that states and federations only come into existence and can only by justified by preserving the ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ in the homes and families of individuals. The true right and power rest in the individual. He gives of his right and power to the State, expecting and requiring thereby in return to receive certain advantages and guarantees,” Winston Churchill wrote in his classic 1936 essay, “What Good’s a Constitution?”, a definitive description of constitutional liberty.
“The 19th century was the century of classical liberalism. Partly for that reason it was also the century of ever-increasing economic and political liberty, relative international peace, relative price stability and unprecedented economic growth,” John Goodman, founder of the National Center for Policy Analysis and its president for 31 years, now head of the Goodman Institute, wrote recently.
“By contrast, the 20th century was the century that rejected classical liberalism. Partly for that reason, it was the century of dictatorship, depression and war. Nearly 265 million people were killed by their own governments (in addition to all the deaths from wars!) in the 20th century – more than in any previous century and possibly more than in all previous centuries combined,” Goodman noted.
The 21st century, unfortunately, has seen an accelerating decline in Western self-confidence, one seen in the cringe inducing weakness of its political leaders. They respond to the challenge of radical Islam with the same type of appeasement shown by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain to Hitler in the 1930s, rather than the strength and moral certitude of his successor, Churchill, who ultimately helped lead the West to victory in World War II.
History shows that strength attracts followers. The latest example that confirms this maxim is the recent report that the Islamic terrorists at ISIS are actively planning to increase their attacks on innocent civilians in the West, in an attempt to provoke one final, huge decisive battle.
“Where is our modern Churchill to exercise the strength of the West to resist this terroristic swagger?” every day citizens in the United States and Europe wonder aloud.
More importantly, “Why have our political institutions produced such weak and feckless leaders?”
A recent Rasmussen Reports Poll indicates that dissatisfaction with President Obama’s leadership-or lack thereof- is at record levels and is on the rise. Dissatisfaction with European leaders is also high.
Several conservative authors in America, among them Mark Steyn, have observed this decline in the West, but none have offered a specific solution to reverse this trend.
A hint at the direction in which the resurrection of the West may be found comes, surprisingly, from two British authors, one of whom is a former cabinet minister in the government of British Labour prime minister Tony Blair.
Almost a decade ago British entrepreneur Richard Koch (no relation to the American Koch Brothers) and former United Kingdom cabinet member Chris Smith wrote a prescient book called Suicide of the West.
In it they argued:
Restoring the self-confidence of the West, Koch says, is something that must originate with the individual, not the group.
“This is not a battle of empires or wars, which are no longer effective at winning hearts and minds,” Koch tells Breitbart News.
“It is a matter of inculcating calm self-confidence, individual and collective, and refusing to be drawn into all the sound and fury that can dismay and distract us,” Koch adds.
Radical Islam poses a threat to the West, Koch argues, put it has not yet reached the power of Nazism or communism in the 1930s. Koch tells Breitbart News:
While Koch excels at diagnosing the problems of the West, he understates the existential threat posed by radical Islam and offers an insufficient, passive prescription to remedy the West’s decline.
Koch views Western Civilization as something of a “self-correcting system.” But now, as its very existence is threatened by radical Islam, a more pro-active solution is demanded.
This is particularly true since, as Koch and Smith point out in Suicide of the West, the attacks on the principal ideas that brought the West to dominance come primarily from within—from individuals who have benefited financially from the very culture upon which their wealth was created. (Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and other Silicon Valley technology oligarchs, as well as atheist progressive George Soros immediately come to mind as examples of this group.)
What is needed to reverse that decline is a very focused “back to basics” movement to restore believe in these six principal ideas – Christianity, optimism, science, economic growth, classical liberalism (in its political expression of constitutional liberty and its economic expression of free markets) and individualism – and more importantly, the transfer of belief in these principal ideas to subsequent generations.
Therein lies the rub.
In a popular culture subsumed by triviality – where most know a great deal about current entertainment trends and how to use their smartphones – but little else, “back to basics” is easier said than done.
Here’s one look at what “back to basics” means for the six principal ideas that built the West.
“Back to basics” in classical liberalism and constitutional liberty means the re-assertion of state sovereignty and individual rights in the face of increasing constitutional usurpations by the executive branch, statutorily unauthorized regulations, and a spineless and ineffective federal legislative branch.
“Back to basics” in Christianity translates into encouraging the growth and flourishing of Christianity in the West by removing the State’s power to exercise control over the operation of Christian churches and organizations and the conduct of individual Christians who are acting within the law.
It does not mean government approved enforcement of Christian belief on other citizens.
It also means a complete separation of church and state when it comes to the delivery of government sanctioned “social justice” programs. “Public private partnerships” where church organizations are paid lucratively to carry out liberal government policies, such as the Unholy Alliance between Christian “non-profits” and the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, must come to an end.
In addition, it means ending the government persecution of Christians in business matters large and small, the most egregious of which is the recent actions by the State of Oregon forcing Christian bakers to pay an estimated $135,000 fine to a gay couple who demanded they bake a wedding cake for them, a demand they refused.
History shows that Christianity thrives when it is completely independent of government. When it becomes the “official” state religion, or “partners” with the state, it becomes corrupt, weak, and devoid of intellectual vigor.
Richard Koch and Leonard Liggio agree on the critical role played by Christianity in the rise of the West.
“Of all the civilizations around the world, why did only the Christian West become both free and prosperous?” Leonard Liggio asked at the Acton Institute.
“Many scholars have studied this and have come to the conclusion that this is due to the fact that the religious institutions were totally separate from, and often in conflict with, political institutions only in the Christian West. This created the space in which free institutions could emerge. The idea of independent religious institutions is absent even in Eastern Christianity; their religious institutions are part of the bureaucracy of the state,” Liggio wrote.
“In Western Europe, though, the religious institutions were autonomous among themselves, and totally independent from and often in opposition to state power. The result was the creation of a polycentric system. And whenever this system was threatened by claims of total empire by the political rulers, Christian philosophy was utilized as part of its defense,” Liggio added.
“So within that space, the economic institutions–often modeled on the religious institutions as autonomous entities–could flourish and survive,” Liggio concluded.
Coincident to the decline of Christianity is a rise of triviality in the West.
“There is a frivolity and lack of moral seriousness afflicting the West, but this too is not unprecedented or wholly bad. The Nazis, the communists, and radical Islamists were or are terribly serious,” Koch says.
“Modern Western liberal society is probably the most humane and decent ever seen on the face of the earth. I would like to see more moral seriousness, but of the right kind. Establishing this is like walking through a minefield,” Koch adds.
“Back to basics” in optimism requires a return to the American “can-do” spirit and the western values of the enlightenment.
Simply put, the easiest way to return optimism to America and the West is to take a blow torch to the regulatory state and dismantle the vast majority of paralyzing regulations that afflict businesses and individuals.
Throughout our history, we Americans have been renowned for our ability for getting things done. But when government tells us how we can and cannot live, that optimism turns to pessimism and fatalism, when every positive action is held back by paralyzing regulations.
Coincident with the rise of big government has been the growing cult of “victimhood,” the antithesis of optimism.
Similarly, “back to basics” in economic growth requires the application of an even bigger blow torch to the regulatory state.
“The strange thing is that the underlying reality of the world and especially the West is better than ever. Most people in the world now live in some kind of market system, that is working slowly but remorselessly to eliminate the bulk of poverty and deprivation,” Koch notes.
“Things are getting better, but it doesn’t feel that way,” Koch adds.
A more limited government with dramatically diminished regulatory powers would unleash the entrepreneurial explosion, which in turn will turn the sluggish 2 percent economic growth experienced under the Obama administration into real economic growth that reinvigorates the diminishing middle class, that broad portion of the population that currently knows why “things getting better” don’t feel that way.
“Back to basics” in individualism requires an end to penalizing students and workers who actually exhibit individual thinking. Our schools, both at the elementary, high school, and collegiate level, need to return to the values of the enlightenment, where free and open inquiry are encouraged and allowed. They must cease acting as the propaganda enforcement arms of the social welfare state.
“Back to basics” in science is perhaps the trickiest of all, Science and technology are advancing at a breathtaking pace and such success does not immediately suggest a need for change.
As Richard Koch accurately notes, “the world’s top universities, science, and technology have never been more vibrant or productive. Business is more creative than ever, producing miracles from the internet to the iPod and smartphone.”
While this is true, it is also the case that what Churchill observed in 1899 about the role of science in Western society is no longer true.
“Were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science—the science against which it had vainly struggled—the civilisation of modern Europe might fall [to radical Islam], as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome,” Churchill wrote in his second book, The River War.
Capital, technological skill, and effective organizations will continue to combine in such a way as to drive the frontiers of applied science further and faster than we can currently imagine.
Yet many of those who control those forces currently have little loyalty to constitutional liberty, and are guided more by their personal desires to shape the world to their own peculiar political and social justice philosophies through the exercise of their own wealth and power.
It is unclear whether Western Civilization in 2016 and beyond will be “sheltered in the strong arms of science.”
A movement to go “back to basics” in these six principal ideas that brought the West to dominance, while ambitious, is completely consistent with the grassroots energy that brought the Tea Party movement to prominence in 2009.
It has the added advantage that it is not dependent upon a collectivist effort, but rather on millions of individual efforts.
If you want to know why the West is losing its self-confidence, look in the mirror. If you’re not working ceaselessly to return yourself, your family and your immediate sphere of influence back to the basics of these six principal ideas that brought the West to the top, you’re responsible, in your own small way, for its continued decline.
If leaders are weak and feckless, replace them. If institutions are failing, reform and reinvigorate them.
Don’t rail at the moon. Lasso it.
Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban has taken a hard line on the European Union's migrant crisis (AFP Photo/John Thys)
- See more at: http://americanfreepress.net/using-mass-migration-to-commit-genocide/#sthash.wudRV9SF.dpuf
http://www.spectator.co.uk/
Let us suppose that along the coast of Normandy up to one
million non-EU migrants are waiting to be packed like sardines in small
unseaworthy vessels and to cross the English Channel.
Let us suppose that first the Royal Navy, then the navies of a dozen other EU countries, start to search for all such vessels in the Channel right up to the French coast, out into the North Sea and the Atlantic even, and then ferry all the passengers on board to Dover, Folkestone, Hastings, Eastbourne and Brighton in a surreal modern-day never-ending version of the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940. Would the British government agree to take them all? What of the British people? And if they did agree, what would the British government and people do with all the migrants? How would they cope?
Well, Italy has been invaded in just this way, by migrants from many nations all coming over here from Libya. And Italy’s unelected government has agreed to take them all. This makes the Italian people — who are among the least racist in Europe — very angry. It’s hard to blame them.
In October 2013, Italy’s previous unelected government, which like the current one was left-wing, ordered the Italian navy to search for and rescue all boat people in the Sicilian channel and beyond. This hugely expensive operation — ‘Mare Nostrum’ — ran until October last year and rescued nearly 190,000 people. The Italian government took this decision after a migrant boat sank with the loss of 360 lives 500 yards from an idyllic beach on the island of Lampedusa, once a resort of choice for the right-on rich.
The same left-wing Italian government also took the extraordinary step of decriminalising illegal immigration, which means among other things that none of the boat people are arrested once on dry land. Instead, they are taken to ‘Centri di accoglienza’ (welcome centres) for identification and a decision on their destinies. In theory, only those who identify themselves and claim political asylum can remain in Italy until their application is refused — or, if it is accepted, indefinitely. And in theory, under the Dublin Accords, they can only claim political asylum in Italy — the country where they arrived in the EU. In practice, however, only a minority claim political asylum in Italy. Pretty well all of them remain there incognito, or else move on to other EU countries.
Here’s how it works. In the welcome centres, they are given free board and lodging plus mobile phones, €3 a day in pocket money, and lessons — if they can be bothered — in such things as ice-cream-making or driving a car and (I nearly forgot) Italian. Their presence in these welcome centres is voluntary and they are free to come and go, though not to work, and each of them costs those Italians who do pay tax €35 a day (nearly €13,000 a year). Yes, they are supposed to have their photographs and fingerprints taken, but many refuse and the Italian police, it seems, do not insist. As the Italian interior minister, Angelino Alfano, explained to a TV reporter the other day: ‘They don’t want to be identified here — otherwise, under the Dublin Accords, they would have to stay in our country. So when a police officer is in front of an Eritrean who is two metres tall who doesn’t want his fingerprints taken, he can’t break his fingers, but must respect his human rights.’
This year, there is space for just 75,000 migrants in such places. Hotels are filling the breach, including the four-star Kulm hotel perched high above the luxury resort of Portofino on the Ligurian coast. But most of the rescued migrants could not care less about all that jazz and have just disappeared.
The ones who stay long in the welcome centres are those who have
revealed their identities in order to apply for political asylum in
Italy. Last year, 64,900 migrants did so in Italy — roughly a third of
those saved by the Italian navy. But this being Italy, the judicial
system only had time to reach a decision on half those applications
(accepting 60 per cent of them), and anyway, thanks to the byzantine
Italian appeals procedure, those refused asylum can remain for years.
Even if their asylum claim is finally rejected and by some cruel quirk
of fate they are actually handed a deportation order, it is easily
ignored: last year Italy forcibly deported just 6,944 people — a figure
set to shrink even more once a law before parliament is passed banning
deportation to countries where human rights are abused.
Fair enough, you might say, if all the asylum seekers were genuine refugees from war zones. But contrary to the impression given by most of the world’s media, hardly any of 2014’s intake were from war-torn countries such as Syria or Iraq (though it is true that the number of Syrians is now rising).
Last year, most were from sub-Saharan Africa. Top of the league table were the Nigerians, followed by the Malians and the Gambians, the Senegalese and even the Pakistanis — who together made up 70 per cent of the total. No doubt these countries are no picnic to live in, and parts of some of them are war zones, but that should not, and in theory does not, guarantee refugee status. It is also a fact that most boat people are young single men and the price of a ticket on a people-smuggling boat is €2,000 (nearly two years’ pay for the average worker in Mali).
It’s worth remembering here that the majority of the boat people are Muslims and reports suggest that a small number are Islamic terrorists. The terrorists of ISIS are, we know from their Twitter feeds, obsessed with taking their crusade to Rome. One of those arrested in connection with the Islamic terrorist attack on the Bardo National Museum of Tunis in March had crossed the Mediterranean from Libya to Italy in a migrant boat in February.
Many refugees have no intention of staying in Italy, which is hardly surprising. For a start, only people who lose a full-time job are entitled to unemployment benefit. Italy, thanks to the straitjacket of the single currency, has been mired in recession for most of the past six years, with an official unemployment rate of 13 per cent (the real rate is probably 20 per cent) and the youth unemployment rate at a staggering 43 per cent.
The government of Matteo Renzi — the man billed as the Latin left’s answer to Tony Blair — seems happy to ferry into Italy a vast army of migrants with no real idea what to do with them except hope that they move on to other EU countries. The Italian premier has also been quick to champion the Euro-luvvie definition of this as a ‘European’ and not an ‘Italian’ crisis. So as of spring 2015, the ferry service is now operated not just by the Italian navy in the Sicilian channel but across the entire Mediterranean by the navies of many other EU countries, including the Royal Navy. This year, they have brought 54,000 boat people into Italy and a further 48,000 into Greece, and the summer migration season is not even in full swing yet.
Recently, Nick Cooke-Priest, captain of the British vessel involved in the rescue mission, HMS Bulwark, told reporters that ‘the indications are that there are 450,000 to 500,000 migrants in Libya who are waiting’ to reach Italy. The British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said ‘We could see hundreds of thousands trying to cross this summer.’ Fabrice Leggeri, the head of the EU’s border agency Frontex, has put the figure even higher, at ‘between 500,000 and a million’. So huge are the numbers that Italian police often just dump coach loads of migrants in town squares or at main railway stations which are then turned into temporary camps. Government policy is to try and spread the migrants out throughout the peninsula to lessen their impact; but now many regional and town councils (of all political persuasions), especially in the north, are in open revolt and refusing to take any more. Scabies is rife (of 46,000 migrants tested this year, 4,700 were infested) and one in four migrants is said by doctors to have Hepatitis C. The anti-immigration vote is rocketing and the Italian left has taken a hammering in the recent regional and city elections.
The EU — urged on in particular by an increasingly desperate Italy and Greece — is trying to draw up a quota deal to distribute the huge migrant army; but as with the single currency, when push comes to shove, it is every nation for itself. Despite months of talks, there are few signs of an agreement even on the small numbers being bandied about. A couple of months ago, there was much talk about UN sanctioned military action by the EU to stop the smugglers’ boats putting to sea from the Libyan coast. For weeks now, the silence on that subject has been deafening.
The French have ‘closed’ their border with Italy on the Côte d’Azur in defiance of the Schengen Agreement, which guarantees free movement within member nations. They are rigorously checking trains, cars and even footpaths across the mountains, and sending any illegal migrants back to Italy; they say they have sent back 6,000 this year. The justification is simple: the Italians are failing to identify these people and distinguish economic migrants from refugees. Who can argue with that? The Austrians are doing the same at the Brenner Pass in the Alps.
Pope Francis said last month that leaving the boat people to drown (about 3,500 are known to have died last year, and already nearly 2,000 this year) is ‘an attack against life’ akin to abortion. All of us feel it to be our moral duty to save lives where we can. Yet it cannot be our moral duty to ferry such vast numbers across the Mediterranean into Italy and Europe for ever, unless they are genuine refugees. In fact, our moral duty is not to do so — and the only solution is the one which few politicians dare even talk about, let alone implement: that the navies of the EU should stop the ferry service and start a blockade of Libya.
Prime Minister Renzi tried to pretend that the migrant crisis did not exist, but now that it has turned into an emergency he can remain silent no longer. He blames other EU countries for putting the nation before the union — in this latest meltdown of EU collective responsibility — and the British and the French in particular for getting rid of Muammar Gaddafi and turning Libya into a failed state. When Gaddafi was in power, thanks to a deal struck with Berlusconi, who like Blair had an excellent rapport with the Colonel, the number of boat people slowed to a trickle.
Signor Renzi now threatens his EU partners with what he calls ‘Plan B’ but refuses to reveal the details. It is thought to involve, among other things, refusing the EU fleet permission to land rescued migrants in Italy, and giving all migrants already here temporary leave-to-remain cards — in order to fox the French and flood Europe with them. That’ll teach them. The Italians call Renzi ‘Il Rottamatore’ (the Demolition Man) because of his vow to reform Italy root and branch. The nickname may end up being more apt than anybody realised.
Let us suppose that first the Royal Navy, then the navies of a dozen other EU countries, start to search for all such vessels in the Channel right up to the French coast, out into the North Sea and the Atlantic even, and then ferry all the passengers on board to Dover, Folkestone, Hastings, Eastbourne and Brighton in a surreal modern-day never-ending version of the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940. Would the British government agree to take them all? What of the British people? And if they did agree, what would the British government and people do with all the migrants? How would they cope?
Well, Italy has been invaded in just this way, by migrants from many nations all coming over here from Libya. And Italy’s unelected government has agreed to take them all. This makes the Italian people — who are among the least racist in Europe — very angry. It’s hard to blame them.
In October 2013, Italy’s previous unelected government, which like the current one was left-wing, ordered the Italian navy to search for and rescue all boat people in the Sicilian channel and beyond. This hugely expensive operation — ‘Mare Nostrum’ — ran until October last year and rescued nearly 190,000 people. The Italian government took this decision after a migrant boat sank with the loss of 360 lives 500 yards from an idyllic beach on the island of Lampedusa, once a resort of choice for the right-on rich.
The same left-wing Italian government also took the extraordinary step of decriminalising illegal immigration, which means among other things that none of the boat people are arrested once on dry land. Instead, they are taken to ‘Centri di accoglienza’ (welcome centres) for identification and a decision on their destinies. In theory, only those who identify themselves and claim political asylum can remain in Italy until their application is refused — or, if it is accepted, indefinitely. And in theory, under the Dublin Accords, they can only claim political asylum in Italy — the country where they arrived in the EU. In practice, however, only a minority claim political asylum in Italy. Pretty well all of them remain there incognito, or else move on to other EU countries.
Here’s how it works. In the welcome centres, they are given free board and lodging plus mobile phones, €3 a day in pocket money, and lessons — if they can be bothered — in such things as ice-cream-making or driving a car and (I nearly forgot) Italian. Their presence in these welcome centres is voluntary and they are free to come and go, though not to work, and each of them costs those Italians who do pay tax €35 a day (nearly €13,000 a year). Yes, they are supposed to have their photographs and fingerprints taken, but many refuse and the Italian police, it seems, do not insist. As the Italian interior minister, Angelino Alfano, explained to a TV reporter the other day: ‘They don’t want to be identified here — otherwise, under the Dublin Accords, they would have to stay in our country. So when a police officer is in front of an Eritrean who is two metres tall who doesn’t want his fingerprints taken, he can’t break his fingers, but must respect his human rights.’
This year, there is space for just 75,000 migrants in such places. Hotels are filling the breach, including the four-star Kulm hotel perched high above the luxury resort of Portofino on the Ligurian coast. But most of the rescued migrants could not care less about all that jazz and have just disappeared.
Fair enough, you might say, if all the asylum seekers were genuine refugees from war zones. But contrary to the impression given by most of the world’s media, hardly any of 2014’s intake were from war-torn countries such as Syria or Iraq (though it is true that the number of Syrians is now rising).
Last year, most were from sub-Saharan Africa. Top of the league table were the Nigerians, followed by the Malians and the Gambians, the Senegalese and even the Pakistanis — who together made up 70 per cent of the total. No doubt these countries are no picnic to live in, and parts of some of them are war zones, but that should not, and in theory does not, guarantee refugee status. It is also a fact that most boat people are young single men and the price of a ticket on a people-smuggling boat is €2,000 (nearly two years’ pay for the average worker in Mali).
It’s worth remembering here that the majority of the boat people are Muslims and reports suggest that a small number are Islamic terrorists. The terrorists of ISIS are, we know from their Twitter feeds, obsessed with taking their crusade to Rome. One of those arrested in connection with the Islamic terrorist attack on the Bardo National Museum of Tunis in March had crossed the Mediterranean from Libya to Italy in a migrant boat in February.
Many refugees have no intention of staying in Italy, which is hardly surprising. For a start, only people who lose a full-time job are entitled to unemployment benefit. Italy, thanks to the straitjacket of the single currency, has been mired in recession for most of the past six years, with an official unemployment rate of 13 per cent (the real rate is probably 20 per cent) and the youth unemployment rate at a staggering 43 per cent.
The government of Matteo Renzi — the man billed as the Latin left’s answer to Tony Blair — seems happy to ferry into Italy a vast army of migrants with no real idea what to do with them except hope that they move on to other EU countries. The Italian premier has also been quick to champion the Euro-luvvie definition of this as a ‘European’ and not an ‘Italian’ crisis. So as of spring 2015, the ferry service is now operated not just by the Italian navy in the Sicilian channel but across the entire Mediterranean by the navies of many other EU countries, including the Royal Navy. This year, they have brought 54,000 boat people into Italy and a further 48,000 into Greece, and the summer migration season is not even in full swing yet.
Recently, Nick Cooke-Priest, captain of the British vessel involved in the rescue mission, HMS Bulwark, told reporters that ‘the indications are that there are 450,000 to 500,000 migrants in Libya who are waiting’ to reach Italy. The British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said ‘We could see hundreds of thousands trying to cross this summer.’ Fabrice Leggeri, the head of the EU’s border agency Frontex, has put the figure even higher, at ‘between 500,000 and a million’. So huge are the numbers that Italian police often just dump coach loads of migrants in town squares or at main railway stations which are then turned into temporary camps. Government policy is to try and spread the migrants out throughout the peninsula to lessen their impact; but now many regional and town councils (of all political persuasions), especially in the north, are in open revolt and refusing to take any more. Scabies is rife (of 46,000 migrants tested this year, 4,700 were infested) and one in four migrants is said by doctors to have Hepatitis C. The anti-immigration vote is rocketing and the Italian left has taken a hammering in the recent regional and city elections.
The EU — urged on in particular by an increasingly desperate Italy and Greece — is trying to draw up a quota deal to distribute the huge migrant army; but as with the single currency, when push comes to shove, it is every nation for itself. Despite months of talks, there are few signs of an agreement even on the small numbers being bandied about. A couple of months ago, there was much talk about UN sanctioned military action by the EU to stop the smugglers’ boats putting to sea from the Libyan coast. For weeks now, the silence on that subject has been deafening.
The French have ‘closed’ their border with Italy on the Côte d’Azur in defiance of the Schengen Agreement, which guarantees free movement within member nations. They are rigorously checking trains, cars and even footpaths across the mountains, and sending any illegal migrants back to Italy; they say they have sent back 6,000 this year. The justification is simple: the Italians are failing to identify these people and distinguish economic migrants from refugees. Who can argue with that? The Austrians are doing the same at the Brenner Pass in the Alps.
Pope Francis said last month that leaving the boat people to drown (about 3,500 are known to have died last year, and already nearly 2,000 this year) is ‘an attack against life’ akin to abortion. All of us feel it to be our moral duty to save lives where we can. Yet it cannot be our moral duty to ferry such vast numbers across the Mediterranean into Italy and Europe for ever, unless they are genuine refugees. In fact, our moral duty is not to do so — and the only solution is the one which few politicians dare even talk about, let alone implement: that the navies of the EU should stop the ferry service and start a blockade of Libya.
Prime Minister Renzi tried to pretend that the migrant crisis did not exist, but now that it has turned into an emergency he can remain silent no longer. He blames other EU countries for putting the nation before the union — in this latest meltdown of EU collective responsibility — and the British and the French in particular for getting rid of Muammar Gaddafi and turning Libya into a failed state. When Gaddafi was in power, thanks to a deal struck with Berlusconi, who like Blair had an excellent rapport with the Colonel, the number of boat people slowed to a trickle.
Signor Renzi now threatens his EU partners with what he calls ‘Plan B’ but refuses to reveal the details. It is thought to involve, among other things, refusing the EU fleet permission to land rescued migrants in Italy, and giving all migrants already here temporary leave-to-remain cards — in order to fox the French and flood Europe with them. That’ll teach them. The Italians call Renzi ‘Il Rottamatore’ (the Demolition Man) because of his vow to reform Italy root and branch. The nickname may end up being more apt than anybody realised.
Nicholas Farrell is the author of Mussolini: A New Life.
http://www.westernjournalism.com/
Scary: Radical Islam Is Completely Taking Over Europe. See Why America Could Be Next
"We have to take the necessary action now..."
Dear friends,
Thank you very much for inviting me.
I come to America with a mission. All is not well in the old world. There is a tremendous danger looming, and it is very difficult to be optimistic. We might be in the final stages of the Islamization of Europe. This not only is a clear and present danger to the future of Europe itself; it is a threat to America and the sheer survival of the West. The United States is the last bastion of Western civilization, facing an Islamic Europe.
First, I will describe the situation on the ground in Europe. Then, I will say a few things about Islam. To close, I will tell you about a meeting in Jerusalem.
The Europe you know is changing.
All throughout Europe, a new reality is rising: entire Muslim neighborhoods where very few indigenous people reside or are even seen. And if they are, they might regret it. This goes for the police as well. It’s the world of head scarves, where women walk around in figureless tents, with baby strollers and a group of children. Their husbands, or slaveholders if you prefer, walk three steps ahead. With mosques on many street corners. The shops have signs you and I cannot read. You will be hard-pressed to find any economic activity. These are Muslim ghettos controlled by religious fanatics. These are Muslim neighborhoods, and they are mushrooming in every city across Europe. These are the building-blocks for territorial control of increasingly larger portions of Europe , street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city.
There are now thousands of mosques throughout Europe . With larger congregations than there are in churches. And in every European city, there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region. Clearly, the signal is: we rule.
Many European cities are already one-quarter Muslim: just take Amsterdam , Marseille, and Malmo in Sweden. In many cities, the majority of the under-18 population is Muslim. Paris is now surrounded by a ring of Muslim neighborhoods. Mohammed is the most popular name among boys in many cities.
Many state schools in Belgium and Denmark only serve halal food to all pupils. In once-tolerant Amsterdam, gays are beaten up almost exclusively by Muslims. Non-Muslim women routinely hear ‘whore, whore.’ Satellite dishes are not pointed to local TV stations, but to stations in the country of origin.
In France, schoolteachers are advised to avoid authors deemed offensive to Muslims, including Voltaire and Diderot; the same is increasingly true of Darwin. The history of the Holocaust can no longer be taught because of Muslim sensitivity.
In England, sharia courts are now officially part of the British legal system. Many neighborhoods in France are no-go areas for women without head scarves. Last week, a man almost died after being beaten up by Muslims in Brussels because he was drinking during the Ramadan.
Jews are fleeing France in record numbers, on the run for the worst wave of anti-Semitism since World War II. French is now commonly spoken on the streets of Tel Aviv and Netanya, Israel. I could go on forever with stories like this. Stories about Islamization.
San Diego University recently calculated that a staggering 25 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim just 12 years from now. Bernhard Lewis has predicted a Muslim majority by the end of this century.
Now these are just numbers. And the numbers would not be threatening if the Muslim immigrants had a strong desire to assimilate. But there are few signs of that. The Pew Research Center reported that half of French Muslims see their loyalty to Islam as greater than their loyalty to France. One-third of French Muslims do not object to suicide attacks. The British Centre for Social Cohesion reported that one-third of British Muslim students are in favor of a worldwide caliphate. Muslims demand what they call ‘respect’. And this is how we give them respect. We have Muslim official state holidays.
The Christian-Democratic attorney general is willing to accept sharia in the Netherlands if there is a Muslim majority. We have cabinet members with passports from Morocco and Turkey.
Muslim demands are supported by unlawful behavior, ranging from petty crimes and random violence, for example, against ambulance workers and bus drivers, to small-scale riots. Paris has seen its uprising in the low-income suburbs, the banlieus. I call the perpetrators ‘settlers’ because that is what they are. They do not come to integrate into our societies; they come to integrate our society into their Dar-al-Islam. Therefore, they are settlers.
Much of this street violence I mentioned is directed exclusively against non-Muslims, forcing many native people to leave their neighborhoods, their cities, their countries. Moreover, Muslims are now a swing vote not to be ignored.
The second thing you need to know is the importance of Mohammed the prophet. His behavior is an example to all Muslims and cannot be criticized. Now, if Mohammed had been a man of peace, let us say like Ghandi and Mother Theresa wrapped in one, there would be no problem. But Mohammed was a warlord, a mass murderer, a pedophile, and had several marriages – at the same time. Islamic tradition tells us how he fought in battles, how he had his enemies murdered and even had prisoners of war executed. Mohammed himself slaughtered the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza. If it is good for Islam, it is good. If it is bad for Islam, it is bad.
Let no one fool you about Islam being a religion. Sure, it has a god, and a here-after, and 72 virgins. But in its essence, Islam is a political ideology. It is a system that lays down detailed rules for society and the life of every person. Islam wants to dictate every aspect of life. Islam means ‘submission’. Islam is not compatible with freedom and democracy because what it strives for is sharia. If you want to compare Islam to anything, compare it to communism or national-socialism; these are all totalitarian ideologies.
Now you know why Winston Churchill called Islam ‘the most retrograde force in the world’, and why he compared Mein Kampf to the Quran. The public has wholeheartedly accepted the Palestinian narrative, and sees Israel as the aggressor. I have lived in this country and visited it dozens of times. I support Israel, first, because it is the Jewish homeland after two thousand years of exile up to and including Auschwitz , second because it is a democracy, and third because Israel is our first line of defense.
This tiny country is situated on the fault line of jihad, frustrating Islam’s territorial advance. Israel is facing the front lines of Jihad, like Kashmir, Kosovo, the Philippines, Southern Thailand, Darfur in Sudan, Lebanon, and Aceh in Indonesia . Israel is simply in the way, the same way West-Berlin was during the Cold War.
The war against Israel is not a war against Israel. It is a war against the West. It is Jihad. Israel is simply receiving the blows that are meant for all of us. If there would have been no Israel, Islamic imperialism would have found other venues to release its energy and its desire for conquest. Thanks to Israeli parents who send their children to the army and lay awake at night, parents in Europe and America can sleep well and dream, unaware of the dangers looming.
Many in Europe argue in favor of abandoning Israel in order to address the grievances of our Muslim minorities. But if Israel were, God forbid, to go down, it would not bring any solace to the West. It would not mean our Muslim minorities would all of a sudden change their behavior and accept our values. On the contrary, the end of Israel would give enormous encouragement to the forces of Islam. They would, and rightly so, see the demise of Israel as proof that the West is weak, and doomed.
The end of Israel would not mean the end of our problems with Islam, but only the beginning. It would mean the start of the final battle for world domination. If they can get Israel, they can get everything. So-called journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of Islamization as a ‘right-wing extremists’ or ‘racists’. In my country, the Netherlands, 60 percent of the population now sees the mass immigration of Muslims as the number one policy mistake since World War II. And another 60 percent sees Islam as the biggest threat.
Yet there is a greater danger than terrorist attacks, the scenario of America as the last man standing. The lights may go out in Europe faster than you can imagine. An Islamic Europe means a Europe without freedom and democracy, an economic wasteland, an intellectual nightmare, and a loss of military might for America – as its allies will turn into enemies, enemies with atomic bombs. With an Islamic Europe, it would be up to America alone to preserve the heritage of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem.
Dear friends, liberty is the most precious of gifts. My generation never had to fight for this freedom; it was offered to us on a silver platter, by people who fought for it with their lives. All throughout Europe, American cemeteries remind us of the young boys who never made it home, and whose memory we cherish. My generation does not own this freedom; we are merely its custodians. We can only hand over this hard-won liberty to Europe’s children in the same state in which it was offered to us. We cannot strike a deal with mullahs and imams. Future generations would never forgive us. We cannot squander our liberties. We simply do not have the right to do so.
We have to take the necessary action now to stop this Islamic stupidity from destroying the free world that we know.
The views expressed in this opinion article are solely those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by WesternJournalism.com.
http://www.wsj.com/
Immigration and Islam: Europe’s Crisis of Faith
France and the rest of Western Europe have never honestly confronted the issues raised by Muslim immigration
Consider Éric Zemmour, a slashing television debater and a gifted polemicist. His history of the collapse of France’s postwar political order, “Le suicide français,” was No. 1 on the best-seller lists for several weeks this fall. “Today, our elites think it’s France that needs to change to suit Islam, and not the other way around,” Mr. Zemmour said on a late-night talk show in October, “and I think that with this system, we’re headed toward civil war.”
More recently, Michel Houellebecq published “Submission,” a novel set in the near future. In it, the re-election of France’s current president, François Hollande, has drawn recruits to a shadowy group proclaiming its European identity. “Sooner or later, civil war between Muslims and the rest of the population is inevitable,” a sympathizer explains. “They draw the conclusion that the sooner this war begins, the better chance they’ll have of winning it.” Published, as it happened, on the morning of the attacks, Mr. Houellebecq’s novel replaced Mr. Zemmour’s at the top of the best-seller list, where it remains.
Two days after the Charlie Hebdo killings, there was a disturbing indication on Le Monde’s website of how French people were thinking. One item about the killing vastly outpaced all others in popularity. The reactions of Europe’s leaders was shared about 5,000 times, tales of Muslim schoolchildren with mixed feelings about 6,000, a detailed account of the Charlie Hebdo editorial meeting ended by the attack, 9,000. Topping them all, shared 28,000 times, was a story about reprisals: “Mosques become targets, French Muslims uneasy.” Those clicks are the sound of French fear that something larger may be under way.
Such a migration is not something that Europeans would have countenanced at any other moment in their generally xenophobic history, and the politicians who permitted it to happen were not lucky. The movement coincided with a collapse in European birthrates, which lent the immigration an unstoppable momentum, and with the rise of modern political Islam, which gave the diaspora a radical edge.
Europe was not just disoriented by the trauma of World War II. It was also demoralized and paralyzed by the memory of Nazism and the continuing dismantling of colonialism. Leaders felt that they lacked the moral standing to address problems that were as plain as the noses on their faces—just as U.S. leaders ducked certain racial issues in the wake of desegregation.
Europeans drew the wrong lessons from the American civil-rights movement. In the U.S., there was race and there was immigration. They were separate matters that could (at least until recently) be disentangled by people of good faith. In Europe, the two problems have long been inseparable. Voters who worried about immigration were widely accused of racism, or later of “Islamophobia.”
In France, antiracism set itself squarely against freedom of speech. The passage of the 1990 Gayssot Law, which punished denial of the Holocaust, was a watershed. Activist lobbies sought to expand such protections by limiting discussion of a variety of historical events—the slave trade, colonialism, foreign genocides. This was backed up by institutional muscle. In the 1980s, President François Mitterrand’s Socialist party created a nongovernmental organization called SOS Racisme to rally minority voters and to hound those who worked against their interests.
Older bodies such as the communist-inspired Movement against Racism and for Friendship Among the Peoples made a specialty of threatening (and sometimes carrying out) lawsuits against European intellectuals for the slightest trespasses against political correctness: the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci for her post-9/11 lament “The Rage and the Pride,” the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut for doubting that the 2005 riots in France’s suburban ghettos were due to unemployment, the Russia scholar Hélène Carrère d’Encausse for speculating about the role of polygamy in the problems of West African immigrants.
Speech codes have done little to facilitate entry into the workforce for immigrants and their children or to reduce crime. But they have intimidated European voting publics, insulated politicians from criticism and turned certain crucial matters into taboos. Immigrant and ethnic issues have become tightly bound to the issue of building the multinational European Union, which has removed vast areas of policy from voter accountability. “Anti-European” sentiments continue to rise.
When mass immigration began, Europeans did not give much thought to the influence of Islam. In the 1960s, there might have been worries that a North African was, say, a Nasserite Arab nationalist, but not that he was a would-be jihadist. Too many Europeans forgot that people carry a long past within them—and that, even when they do not, they sometimes wish to. Materialistic, acquisitive, averse to God and family, Europe’s culture appeared cold, dead and unsatisfying to many Muslims. It failed to satisfy a lot of non-Muslims too, but until they ran out of borrowed money with the 2008 crash, they could avoid facing it squarely.
Europeans didn’t know enough about the cultural background of Muslims to browbeat them the same way they did the native-born. Muslims felt none of the historic guilt over fascism and colonialism that so affected non-Muslim Europeans. They had a freedom of political action that Europeans lacked.
As European politics grew duller and the stakes lower, many political romantics looked enviously at the aspirations of the Muslim poor, particularly regarding Palestine. You could see a hint of this last weekend in the BBC journalist who interrupted a mourning Frenchwoman, distraught about the targeting of Jews for murder at a kosher supermarket, to say that “the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands.”
In a world that prized “identity,” Muslim immigrants were aristocrats. Those who became radicalized developed the most monstrous kind of self-regard. A chilling moment in the most recent terrorist drama came when the TV network RTL phoned the kosher supermarket where the Malian-French hostage-taker, Amedy Coulibaly, was holding his victims at gunpoint. He refused to talk but hung up the phone carelessly. The newspaper Le Monde was able to publish a transcript of the strutting stupidity to which he then gave expression:
“They’re always trying to make you believe that Muslims are terrorists. Me, I’m born in France. If they hadn’t been attacked elsewhere, I wouldn’t be here…Think of the people who had Bashar al-Assad in Syria. They were torturing people…We didn’t intervene for years…Then bombers, coalition of 50,000 countries, all that…Why did they do that?”
The Muslim community is not to be confused with the terrorists it produces. But left to its own, it probably lacks the means, the inclination and the courage to stand up to the faction, however small, that supports terrorism. In 1995, there were riots among French Muslims after the arrest of Khalid Kelkal of Lyon, who had planted several bombs—in a train station, near a Jewish school, on a high-speed rail track. In 2012, when Mohamed Merah of Toulouse was killed by police after having gunned down soldiers, a rabbi and three Jewish elementary-school children, his brother professed himself “proud,” and his father threatened to file a wrongful-death suit against the government.
It may seem harsh to criticize the French in their time of grief, but they are responding today with tools that have failed them in previous crises. They reflexively look at their own supposed bigotry as always, somehow, the ultimate cause of Islamist terrorism, and they limit their efforts to making minority communities feel more at home.
The mysterious riots of 2005 in France—which lasted for almost three weeks, during which the rioters made no claims and put forward no leaders—were chalked up to deprivation. The French media responded with an effort to hire more nonwhite news anchors and reporters, and the government promised to spend more in the suburbs. Now, after the murders in Paris, the contradictions continue to accumulate:
• On religion: Mr. Hollande has insisted that the attacks have “nothing to do with Islam.” At the same time, Prime Minister Manuel Valls speaks of “moderate Islam” and rails against “conservatism and obscurantism”—as if the violence had everything to do with Islam, and even with religious devotion in general.
• On spying: Some in the French government blame intelligence failures, since the secret services tracked the Charlie Hebdo killers Said and Chérif Kouachi until last summer. But government officials boast of about their principled unwillingness to legislate a “Patriot Act a la française”—even as they draw daily on intelligence gathered by the U.S.
• On religious hatred: Justice Minister Christiane Taubira has announced an all-out assault on “racism and anti-Semitism,” promising that those who attack others because of their religion will be fought “with rigor and resolve.” In theory, this sounds like a promise to protect Jewish shoppers from getting killed at their neighborhood grocery stores. In practice, it will mean placing limits on any inquiry into the inner dynamics of Muslim communities and may wind up increasing the terrorist threat rather than diminishing it.
Voters all across Europe feel abandoned by the mainstream political class, which is why populist parties are everywhere on the rise. Whatever the biggest initial grievance of these parties—opposition to the European Union for the U.K. Independence Party, opposition to the euro for Alternative für Deutschland, corruption for Italy’s 5 Star Movement—all wind up, by voter demand, placing immigration and multiculturalism at the center of their concerns.
In France, it is the Front National, a party with antecedents on the far right, that has been the big beneficiary. In the last national election, for seats in the European Parliament, the FN, led by Marine Le Pen (daughter of the party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen), topped the polls. But the ruling Socialists froze the Front National out of the recent national ceremonies of mourning, limiting participation in the Paris rally to those parties it deemed “republican.” This risks damaging the cause of republicanism more than the cause of Le Pen and her followers.
Acts of terrorism can occur without shaking a country to its core. These latest attacks, awful as they were, could be taken in stride if the majority in France felt itself secure. But it does not. Thanks to wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, thousands of young people who share the indignation of the Kouachis and Coulibaly are now battle-hardened and heavily armed.
France, like Europe more broadly, has been careless for decades. It has not recognized that free countries are for peoples strong enough to defend them. A willingness to join hands and to march in solidarity is a good first response to the awful events of early January. It will not be enough.
Mr. Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.”
The Camp of the Saints
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
First edition
|
|
Author | Jean Raspail |
---|---|
Original title | Le Camp des Saints |
Translator | Norman Shapiro |
Country | France |
Language | French |
Publisher | Éditions Robert Laffont |
Publication date
|
1973 |
Published in English
|
1975 |
Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
ISBN | 0-684-14240-6 |
OCLC | 1174645 |
843/.9/14 | |
LC Class | PZ4.R227 Cam PQ2635.A379 |
The Camp of the Saints (Le Camp des Saints) is a 1973 French apocalyptic novel by Jean Raspail. The novel depicts a setting wherein Third World mass immigration to France and the West leads to the destruction of Western civilization. Almost forty years after publication the book returned to the bestseller list in 2011.[1] The title is a reference to the Book of Revelation (Rev 20:9).
Contents
Plot
The Camp of the Saints is a novel about population migration and its consequences. In Calcutta, India, the Belgian government announces a policy in which Indian babies will be adopted and raised in Belgium. The policy is reversed after the Belgian consulate is inundated with poverty-stricken parents eager to give up their infant children.An Indian "wise man" then rallies the masses to make an exodus to live in Europe. Most of the story centers on the French Riviera, where almost no one remains except for the military and a few civilians, including a retired professor who has been watching the huge fleet of run-down freighters approaching the French coast.
The story alternates between the French reaction to the mass immigration and the attitude of the immigrants. They have no desire to assimilate into French culture but want the goods that are in short supply in their native India. Although the novel focuses on France, the rest of the West shares its fate.
Near the end of the story the mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem, the Queen of the United Kingdom must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman, and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese people as they swarm into Siberia. The one holdout until the end of the novel is Switzerland, but by then international pressure isolating it as a rogue state for not opening its borders forces it to capitulate.
Publication
A translation by Norman Shapiro was published by Scribner in 1975 (ISBN 0-684-14240-6). It was republished in mass market paperback format by Ace Books in 1977 (ISBN 0-441-09120-2), and in softcover format by The Social Contract Press in 1995 (ISBN 1-881780-07-4); The Washington Post reports that reading the novel "focused" the ideas of John Tanton, Social Contract Press' founder.[2]Response
In 1975 Time magazine panned the novel as a "bilious tirade" that only required a response because it "arrives trailing clouds of praise from French savants, including Dramatist Jean Anouilh ('A haunting book of irresistible force and calm logic'), with the imprint of a respected U.S. publisher and a teasing pre-publication ad campaign ('The end of the white world is near')".[3] Jeffrey Hart in the National Review lauded the novel, stating "in freer and more intelligent circles in Europe, the book is a sensation and Raspail is a prize-winner…his plot is both simple and brilliant”.[4] In 1983, Linda Chavez declared she was "appalled" at the novel, and called it "racist, xenophobic and paranoid".[5] The December 1994 cover story of The Atlantic Monthly focused on the themes of the novel, analyzing them in the context of international relations.[6](This was at about the same time that The Social Contract Press chose to bring it back into U.S. publication.[7])In 2002 Lionel Shriver described the novel as "both prescient and appalling," certainly "racist" but "written with tremendous verbal energy and passion." Shriver writes that the book "gives bilious voice to an emotion whose expression is increasingly taboo in the West, but that can grow only more virulent when suppressed: the fierce resentment felt by majority populations when that status seems threatened."[8]
William F. Buckley, Jr. praised the book in 2004 as "a great novel" which raised questions on how to respond to massive illegal immigration.[9] In 2005 the conservative Chilton Williamson praised the book as "one of the most uncompromising works of literary reaction in the 20th century."[10] In 2001 the Southern Poverty Law Center described it as "widely revered by American white supremacists and is a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries,"[11] and as recently as October of 2015 condemned the novel as "the favorite racist fantasy of the anti-immigrant movement in the US."[12]
The book returned to the bestseller list in 2011.[1]
See also
- The March, a 1990 movie with a similar plot.
Rome's lesson for the EU regarding mass immigration
Europe's bitter lesson on immigration doesn't have to come from law books, it could come from history books as well.
At the height of the Roman Empire, Rome controlled all of what is now western Europe all the way to what is now Armenia and present day Iraq. Rome was the center of development and innovation for western civilization and cities such as Rome developed to include plumbing and irrigation to farms far beyond the reach of rivers, lakes and streams. Though Rome was an empire, the Senate still exist, even if it was only a mouthpiece of the emperor. Most of the world's trade either came from Rome and went to Rome. Rome had built itself to be a massive civilization.
However, as with all great empires in history, the first step toward its demise was complacency. As the Roman imperial government became stable, bureaucrats appeared and with them came ignorance. At times the people did rise up against them, these rebellions would either be put down viciously or the army would side with the rebels in aiding with the removal of corrupt provincial and city governors. At times, these rebellions would topple emperors. To placate these developments, the Roman government implemented the first vestiges of welfare- giving people food to eat and a place to live. A lot of times this came on the backs of the Romans that did pay their taxes. With this came fewer incentives to work, especially since there are fewer people to do jobs that needed to be done. As labor shortages arose, who were the Romans to turn to?
The answer came from beyond its frontiers.
As barbarians for the east storm their way west, killing and destroying civilizations in their paths, they forced massive amounts of people west. The farther west the ruthless barbarians went, the closer these ethnic groups came to Rome until their communities buttressed the frontiers themselves. At first, Rome forbade entrance to these groups fearing they would have a threatening influence on Roman society. But some politicians saw this as a political opportunity; if they helped these 'foreigners' integrate into Roman society, they would repay the politicians by helping them remain in power.
These politicians, either senators or governors, would reach out and invite these foreigners into the Roman empire. They soon took up jobs that the Romans didn't want to do, sometimes for money and sometimes for food and a place to live. Over time, their children and their descendants would integrate into Roman society. Some would move on to be soldiers in its army and some even gained enough influence to become senators themselves. This was nothing new- as Rome conquered Europe and the people of those lands would become Roman slaves and then themselves Roman citizens. But the migration toward Rome was something new and overtime it would become a burden. As more and more peoples sought shelter within Rome, they came to outnumber Roman citizens, even those who were from conquered lands. As more came, not only did it become difficult to feed and house them, it became difficult for the government to appease its own people. Sometimes Romans would riot against the growing foreign population. But soon, it became apparent that the massive number of foreigners going into Rome would lead to its own demise.
As these foreign groups grew in size through birth and further migration, they also grew impatient with the government's inability to take care of their people. Then, these disaffected peoples would arm themselves and eventually attack Rome itself. Several times, migrant groups that had seen Rome as their sanctuary turned on their hosts and destroyed the city that symbolized the empire.
The ferocity and frequency of these attacks increased overtime to the point that Rome could not defend itself against foreign invasions. So not only would foreign armies attack and pillage the once great city, but foreign groups that Rome thought would be their allies turned on them and by the 400's, Rome had been destroyed so much so many times that when the empire was divided into a western empire and an eastern empire (which became the Byzantine empire), Rome and western Europe, was left in its own rot and thrown to the foreign invaders who would fight over its leftovers.
Right now, Europe is again being threatened by millions of foreign invaders who are bent on destroying European society. Everyday, thousands of people are seen now daily clamoring from rickety boats trying to reach the EU or die trying. The main EU body says that its the humanely thing to do by helping them. But are they?
As soon as they are in the EU, gullible politicians give them similar welfare benefits that the Romans gave more than a thousand years ago. The same amount and spirit of charity the governments give are also being given on the backs of hardworking Europeans without much of a choice- they either give or they can be called racist or bigots because the main recipients are not white Europeans. But I'm not talking about whites when I talk of the EU. Like the EU, Roman society was multi-ethnic and multiracial as Rome included lands in Africa and what is now the middle east. But what tied them together was SPQR- For the Senate and People of Rome , which identified them proudly as Romans. However, like back then, immigrants are threatening to unravel years of hard work that was done to make what the EU stands for today, especially since ww2, which happened less then a hundred years ago.
Many of us joke at the idea that the EU could become a part of the muslim world, but it is not a joke since a similar pattern of immigrant violence brought down one of the most mightiest empires in history. muslims are keen to this, that is why they see taking Europe as being a cakewalk for them and, sadly, they might be right. Unless politicians wake up to the nightmare they are creating, they are complicit to the destruction of the EU, like the way greedy and ambitious senators and governors lent an unwitting helping hand in destroying Rome.
At the height of the Roman Empire, Rome controlled all of what is now western Europe all the way to what is now Armenia and present day Iraq. Rome was the center of development and innovation for western civilization and cities such as Rome developed to include plumbing and irrigation to farms far beyond the reach of rivers, lakes and streams. Though Rome was an empire, the Senate still exist, even if it was only a mouthpiece of the emperor. Most of the world's trade either came from Rome and went to Rome. Rome had built itself to be a massive civilization.
However, as with all great empires in history, the first step toward its demise was complacency. As the Roman imperial government became stable, bureaucrats appeared and with them came ignorance. At times the people did rise up against them, these rebellions would either be put down viciously or the army would side with the rebels in aiding with the removal of corrupt provincial and city governors. At times, these rebellions would topple emperors. To placate these developments, the Roman government implemented the first vestiges of welfare- giving people food to eat and a place to live. A lot of times this came on the backs of the Romans that did pay their taxes. With this came fewer incentives to work, especially since there are fewer people to do jobs that needed to be done. As labor shortages arose, who were the Romans to turn to?
The answer came from beyond its frontiers.
As barbarians for the east storm their way west, killing and destroying civilizations in their paths, they forced massive amounts of people west. The farther west the ruthless barbarians went, the closer these ethnic groups came to Rome until their communities buttressed the frontiers themselves. At first, Rome forbade entrance to these groups fearing they would have a threatening influence on Roman society. But some politicians saw this as a political opportunity; if they helped these 'foreigners' integrate into Roman society, they would repay the politicians by helping them remain in power.
These politicians, either senators or governors, would reach out and invite these foreigners into the Roman empire. They soon took up jobs that the Romans didn't want to do, sometimes for money and sometimes for food and a place to live. Over time, their children and their descendants would integrate into Roman society. Some would move on to be soldiers in its army and some even gained enough influence to become senators themselves. This was nothing new- as Rome conquered Europe and the people of those lands would become Roman slaves and then themselves Roman citizens. But the migration toward Rome was something new and overtime it would become a burden. As more and more peoples sought shelter within Rome, they came to outnumber Roman citizens, even those who were from conquered lands. As more came, not only did it become difficult to feed and house them, it became difficult for the government to appease its own people. Sometimes Romans would riot against the growing foreign population. But soon, it became apparent that the massive number of foreigners going into Rome would lead to its own demise.
As these foreign groups grew in size through birth and further migration, they also grew impatient with the government's inability to take care of their people. Then, these disaffected peoples would arm themselves and eventually attack Rome itself. Several times, migrant groups that had seen Rome as their sanctuary turned on their hosts and destroyed the city that symbolized the empire.
The ferocity and frequency of these attacks increased overtime to the point that Rome could not defend itself against foreign invasions. So not only would foreign armies attack and pillage the once great city, but foreign groups that Rome thought would be their allies turned on them and by the 400's, Rome had been destroyed so much so many times that when the empire was divided into a western empire and an eastern empire (which became the Byzantine empire), Rome and western Europe, was left in its own rot and thrown to the foreign invaders who would fight over its leftovers.
Right now, Europe is again being threatened by millions of foreign invaders who are bent on destroying European society. Everyday, thousands of people are seen now daily clamoring from rickety boats trying to reach the EU or die trying. The main EU body says that its the humanely thing to do by helping them. But are they?
As soon as they are in the EU, gullible politicians give them similar welfare benefits that the Romans gave more than a thousand years ago. The same amount and spirit of charity the governments give are also being given on the backs of hardworking Europeans without much of a choice- they either give or they can be called racist or bigots because the main recipients are not white Europeans. But I'm not talking about whites when I talk of the EU. Like the EU, Roman society was multi-ethnic and multiracial as Rome included lands in Africa and what is now the middle east. But what tied them together was SPQR- For the Senate and People of Rome , which identified them proudly as Romans. However, like back then, immigrants are threatening to unravel years of hard work that was done to make what the EU stands for today, especially since ww2, which happened less then a hundred years ago.
Many of us joke at the idea that the EU could become a part of the muslim world, but it is not a joke since a similar pattern of immigrant violence brought down one of the most mightiest empires in history. muslims are keen to this, that is why they see taking Europe as being a cakewalk for them and, sadly, they might be right. Unless politicians wake up to the nightmare they are creating, they are complicit to the destruction of the EU, like the way greedy and ambitious senators and governors lent an unwitting helping hand in destroying Rome.
Rome's lesson for the EU regarding mass immigration
http://www.heritage.org/
The Future of European Civilization: Lessons for America
America has much to learn from Europe’s current condition. In Europe, the decline in religious faith has led to a universal weakening of society and a loss of confidence in the value of its civilization. And the effects of this have been grave: throngs of unassimilated immigrants, unchecked military threats from abroad, and confusion about national identity threaten Europe’s future. America, by contrast, still shows many signs of strength. Nonetheless, should we lose our sense of shared identity, Europe’s path likely awaits.In a gloomy but strangely enthralling book published at the end of the First World War, the historian and polymath Oswald Spengler wrote of the decline of the West, arguing that Europe was moving inevitably to its end according to a pattern that can be observed among civilizations from the beginning of recorded history. Each historical superorganism, he argued, displays its distinctive and defining spirit through its culture. That of the West is “Faustian”—involving an outgoing and conquering attitude to the world displayed in the science, art, and institutions that came to fruition at the Reformation, spread themselves far and wide through the Enlightenment, and then reached a crisis at the French Revolution.
After that great period, things began to ossify into rigid legal and bureaucratic forms. Thus was born the period of “civilization,” typified by Napoleon’s new rationalization of the old spirit of France. Culture leads to civilization, which in turn leads to decay and then death. The culture of the West, Spengler argued, will dwindle to a purely mechanical simulacrum of its former greatness before disappearing entirely.
In the wake of the First World War, Europe was more than normally receptive to stories of its doom, and Spengler was eagerly embraced by the reading public. Despite a polemical attack from G. K. Chesterton, his brand of cultural pessimism survived to gather momentum with the outbreak of the Second World War and to exert a mesmerizing influence over the post-war literary world.
Many of Spengler’s arguments are sophistical, many of his facts are invented and his comparisons far-fetched, but it is difficult, on reading Spengler now, to think that his prophecy of doom was entirely unfounded. In one particular, he has surely been proven right, which is that the culture of Europe is destined to become an empty shell, held in place by rigid structures of law and bureaucracy around the void where art and religion were once enthroned in splendor.
In one particular, however, Spengler seems to have been wholly off-beam, and that is America. His Eurocentric vision is focused, like that of Marx, on the great turning points in our continental history: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution. He has nothing, or nothing significant, to say about the other revolution that preceded the French by 13 years and which led to the founding of the longest-lasting democracy that the world has so far known.
The American Revolution was, for Spengler, a distant commotion like the bursting of a supernova light-years away in space, a tiny pinpoint of light in the ambient darkness, but the nation that was born on these shores has proved itself more resilient, more creative, and more able to sustain its defining mission than any other in the modern world. It is, of course, tied to Europe, and to one European country in particular, by language, history, culture, and institutions. It is a product of the European diaspora, and in particular of the English religious and political inheritance. The American Constitution does not make sense without that inheritance and is in one interpretation simply an attempt to transcribe into a document the civic freedom that the English won for themselves over centuries of common-law government.
Nevertheless, the American Revolution was in itself a move away from Europe, an attempt to embark on a different kind of history from those that had prevailed across the ocean, and although the ties to Britain remain, it is not possible to predict the condition of America from the facts presented by Europe. It could be that the rapid and radical decline that we witness on our side of the Atlantic has no equivalent here. Or, if it has an equivalent, it would be presumptuous to assume that the American decline can be understood outside the special context provided by the history and self-image of the United States.
The European Union and the Threats to Europe
Let me summarize some relevant facts about Europe and its civilization today. There is no doubt in my mind both that Europe is now profoundly threatened and also that the approach of the European Union to the threats is informed by a comprehensive failure to understand them. The threats come from both inside and outside, and the two are connected.From inside, we confront the radicalization of our Muslim populations and the loss of the core structures of European society: the family, marriage, the Christian faith, and little platoons built from those things. From outside, we confront mass migration of populations seeking the benefits of European legal order without assuming the cost. And we confront a growing military threat from Russia. In the past, that threat has been countered by the NATO alliance, but the alliance has been weakened both by European indifference and by the isolationist foreign policy of the Obama Administration.
The radicalization of our Muslim populations is connected to the migration problem: Not all those fleeing the Middle East are hostile to the Islamist philosophy of ISIS. Many come ready to bear arms against their hosts, and recent atrocities in France have shown the extent to which new arrivals are ready and willing to join the cause of Allah against the infidel. As ISIS consolidates its grip on Syria and loses what support it has among the local populations, it will increasingly seek to export its Islamist ideology and the violence associated with it.
Such is the lesson of modern history: that revolutionary governments become stable when they can export their chaos to their neighbors. Europe has defenses against armed invasion, but it has no defenses against those who invade without weapons.
The big questions in my mind are these: To what extent is the loss of our traditional religion and the culture that grew from it responsible for our weakness in the face of these threats, and what could we conceivably do now to remedy the defect?
Those questions are difficult even to discuss. The EU institutions have made a point of removing all references to the Christian religion and its moral legacy from official documents, on the view that such things will constitute discrimination in favor of one group of Europeans over another. Cases brought before the European Court of Human Rights and also the European Court of Justice (the court charged with the application and enforcement of the treaties) are pushing for continent-wide laws permitting gay marriage, easy divorce, and abortion on demand, as well as laws banning the crucifix from public places and curtailing the teaching of the Christian religion in schools.
These initiatives have their parallels here in America, and in the same way that liberal activists have used the Supreme Court to overrule the religion-based decisions of state legislatures, secularists and Islamists are using the European courts to impose their vision on the nation-states of Europe.
The De-Christianizing of Europe
This de-Christianizing of Europe is being pursued also through the European Parliament and its Fundamental Rights Agency, charged with the advocacy of human rights at all legislative levels. The Fundamental Rights Agency is led by activists in the cause of “gender equality” and LGBT rights and is inherently hostile to the traditional family and to the religion-based morality that shaped it. It is now pressing for the recognition of abortion as a human right—presumably a right of the mother rather than the child. It is active in promoting the “gender agenda” wherever this can be brought into play and is staffed largely by people who have spent their lives as busybodies and who have never done what my parents would have called an honest job of work.It is true, of course, that activists gather always at the top and try to push society in the direction that they favor, but their getting to the top is not independent of the fact that they are allowed to get to the top, and the people who allow them are those whom they wish to control. In any case, whatever the cause, there is no doubt as to the effect. Europe is rapidly jettisoning its Christian heritage and has found nothing to put in the place of it save the religion of “human rights.”
I call this a religion because it is designed expressly to fill the hole in people’s worldview that is left when religion is taken away. The notion of a human right purports to offer the ground for moral opinions, for legal precepts, for policies designed to establish order in places where people are in competition and conflict. However, it is itself without foundations. If you ask what religion commands or forbids, you usually get a clear answer in terms of God’s revealed law or the Magisterium of the church. If you ask what rights are human or natural or fundamental, you get a different answer depending on whom you ask, and nobody seems to agree with anyone else regarding the procedure for resolving conflicts.
Consider the dispute over marriage. Is it a right or not? If so, what does it permit? Does it grant a right to marry a partner of the same sex? And if yes, does it therefore permit incestuous marriage too? The arguments are endless, and nobody knows how to settle them.
Things are made more complex still by the inclusion, in all European provisions, of “non-discrimination” as a human right. When offering a benefit, a contract of employment, a place in a college, or a bed in a hospital, you are commanded not to discriminate on grounds of…there then follows a list derived from the victims of recent history: race, ethnic group, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and whatever is next to be discovered. But all coherent societies are based on discrimination: A society is an “in-group,” however large and however hospitable to newcomers.
Non-discrimination laws effectively tie the hands of the indigenous European communities, forbidding them from offering privileges to their existing members while permitting every kind of discrimination among the incoming migrants. It is natural for an immigrant family to offer jobs to its own members, to discriminate on grounds of race, ethnic group, religion, and (without necessarily mentioning this) gender and orientation. Hence, European cities are increasingly places of tightly knit immigrant communities with fiercely defended territory, from which the fair-minded indigenous inhabitants are excluded because they will not and cannot offer privileges to their kind.
Effects of the “Rights Culture”
We are witnessing, in effect, the removal of the old religion that provided foundations to the moral and legal inheritance of Europe and its replacement with a quasi-religion that is inherently foundationless. Nobody knows how to settle the question whether this or that privilege, freedom, or claim is a “human right,” and the European Court of Human Rights is now overwhelmed by a backlog of cases in which just about every piece of legislation passed by national parliaments in recent times is at stake.This development has led, however, to a sudden burst of Christian nostalgia—not only among the older generation, but among young people too. There are evangelical movements in the cities which reach out to the young and attempt to include them in a purified Christian vision. This new evangelism is not opposed to the official “rights” culture but carves out a private space within it—a space where, taking advantage of the permissions granted by the secular order, the old discipline can be adopted as a personal cross.
This privatized Christianity can be found in surprising places. One of them is worth mentioning, since it concerns the art form that more than any other expresses the “Faustian” spirit of Europe as Spengler discerned it: namely, music.
Following the example of Messiaen in France, a new generation of composers has emerged eager to compose liturgical and spiritual music, usually quite difficult music that will be heard only in the concert hall, but nevertheless music with the old message, written in defiance of the secular culture. Notable in Britain is Sir James MacMillan, whose knighthood, recently bestowed, is a sign that this way of reviving Christian values does not offend the powers that be. MacMillan is a Catholic Scot; his predecessor as the voice of Christian music in Britain, Sir John Tavener, was a Greek Orthodox Englishman; and MacMillan’s most important rival for the ear of Christians in Britain is John Rutter, who is an Anglican, wedded to the old harmless, half-believing rites of our national church.
I mention these people because they exemplify a phenomenon that can be encountered all across Europe, which is the search for the old God of the continent in the sacred buildings, liturgies, and music of our various churches, even and especially among people who don’t set foot in a church on a Sunday for fear of being trapped into prayer.
The marks of Christianity have therefore not been rubbed out from the high culture of Europe. There are still poets, composers, painters, and sculptors who accept the old role of the artist as the one who praises God in the name of his fellow human beings and who represents their dignity before the throne of the Lord.
Another interesting effect of the rights pandemic is the increasing turn of young Muslims to a fervent “Salafist” version of their faith. The rights idea leaves everything that is most important in the life of a Muslim without official endorsement: In everything to do with sex, marriage, and the family, in the operation of the law, in the division of the day and the hours of work and recreation, the Muslim heart is at odds with the new official Europe.
Had Christianity retained its status as the foundation of domestic custom and public law, it would have been easier for a Muslim to accept the European order. Our way of life would have seemed like a form of obedience and a human adaptation to the will of God. But the foundationless idea of human rights leaves the Muslim no alternative but to dismiss the secular law entirely as an impertinent attempt by human beings to usurp a privilege which is God’s alone: the privilege of guiding us to our salvation. We see in the young people eagerly travelling to Syria to join ISIS, in the growth of religious schools and unofficial shari’a courts, and in the wearing of the hijab and (where permitted) the niqab and the burqa a defiant Islamic culture that refuses to belong to the European order and which defines itself increasingly against that order.
One interesting side-effect of this has been the trafficking of vulnerable girls from the infidel community, an effect that has been devastating in our English cities. I have touched on this matter in my recent novel The Disappeared, in which I attempt to show some of the fault lines between the new Islamized underclass and the surrounding culture of nothingness.
Another interesting side-effect of Islamization has been the growth of anti-Semitism in Europe. It was inconceivable in my youth that anyone should voice an anti-Semitic sentiment, still more inconceivable that he should exhibit violence, contemptuous language, or any kind of assault towards others on account of their Jewishness. This has changed, and changed almost overnight.
Of course, people say that it is all the result of the bad behavior of Israel, but what is now considered bad behavior is precisely what was cheered on and endorsed a decade ago. The real cause of the new wave of anti-Semitism is the growing self-confidence and numbers of the Muslim minority—a fact that you cannot publicly declare in Britain, still less in France or Belgium, for fear of provoking the charge of Islamophobia and even the threat of legal action.
So much for the rights culture, which displays its foundationless character precisely in this matter for which it should put itself aggressively on display. It is precisely the advocates of human rights as a social panacea who are the most ardent in seeking excuses for anti-Semitism.
External Threats to Europe
Mass Migration. This brings me to the external threats to Europe, the one explicit and obvious, which is mass migration, the other implicit and insinuating, which is the growing military readiness of Russia. The migration problem has been exacerbated by three factors:- The instability and violence in Africa and the Middle East;
- The welfare culture of European nations; and
- The effect of the EU’s mobility provisions, which have made it impossible for member states either to control the movement of people or to affirm national loyalty as the sine qua non of residence.
Now, with the expansion of the Union, that provision in the treaty has become the cause of massive disruption: the flight of the educated elite from Eastern Europe, the overwhelming of the welfare systems in Western Europe, and the crowding of millions of migrants into Britain and Ireland, the only European countries where the international language is spoken. The most important consequence of this is that if a migrant can make it to any country in the Union and somehow (it is never very difficult) gain the permission to reside there, he can then migrate to his country of choice.
The result for us in Britain is the breakdown of our welfare system; the destructive overloading of our infrastructure; the collapse of a precious planning system that had served to keep the country looking roughly as it had always done during all the decades since the Second World War; and, last but by no means least, the total destruction of our state schools, in which city teachers have to teach classes of children for whom English is at best a second language and in which topics like national history, English literature, Christian scripture, Latin, and music appreciation have next to no meaning even though they are, or were, the foundation of everything that England once was.
That this problem has been exacerbated by the EU is an understatement. It was created by the EU and by the destructive attempt to govern a continent by a treaty, bypassing the legislatures of all signatory states. A treaty can be amended only by a laborious process and only assuming the consent of all the original signatories. It cannot by its nature adapt to changes that occur with the rapidity of wars, natural disasters, and mass migrations.
There is no way, in my view, that the EU could now adapt to the inflow of unwanted migrants, and it therefore responds by pretending that the migrants are really wanted, that inward migration is an economic benefit, and that no other factor needs to be considered. This is the message sent out to the world by the German political class, and the extraordinary fact is that it comes from a nation that once destroyed Europe in the name of its own search for Lebensraum.
All of Europe is now waiting for the politicians to come up with a policy that will solve or at least ease the migration problem, but because the EU is construed as a business deal—though a merger rather than (as for Napoleon and Hitler) an acquisition—it cannot address the cause of the problem. People are migrating into Europe because conditions are intolerable in much of the Middle East and because there is no cost, but only gain, for those engaged in people trafficking.
Had the EU taken the form of a military alliance rather than a social and economic merger, it would perhaps have been able to respond to ISIS, to the breakdown of order in Libya, and to the situation in Iraq. For these are, for European civilization, military issues, to be solved in the end by force. But without American leadership, which vanished with the election of President Barack Obama, Europe is unable to involve itself in policing those parts of the world that are exporting their chaos to Europe.
The failure of Europe in this matter illustrates the application of the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy is always increasing but can be made to decrease within a closed system. The active policy of the EU, which has been to dissolve borders and renounce the use of force, has created an open system without the resources to counter the entropy pouring in from outside.
Confrontation with Russia. The same weakness is manifest in the confrontation with Russia. Vladimir Putin has understood that the outer borders of Europe are porous and that the withdrawal of American interest is now more or less inevitable, given the failure of the European leadership to understand the need for it.
Having seized parts of Georgia, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine without any real cost, other than sanctions that mean as little as such sanctions always do, Putin is beginning to probe NATO defense lines in the Baltic States and Eastern Poland. The farcical peace treaty in Ukraine, negotiated by German Chancellor Merkel and French President Hollande in Minsk, shows exactly how pointless in such circumstances is diplomacy not backed by the threat of force. In every way, Putin is being presented with the image of Europe as a military pushover and responding accordingly.
Of course, the Russian elite won’t want to bomb London, since they own it (another consequence of the EU, which has made land and buildings into property that aliens as well as citizens can buy and sell). However, it seems that the Russian army’s strategic planning has shifted ominously from escalation to de-escalation as the central strand (so I learn from contacts in Polish intelligence). In other words, not invasion followed by the threat of a nuclear bomb, but a nuclear bomb followed by occupation.
Importance of National Sentiment and Local Attachments
All in all, taking the external and the internal threats together, it is difficult to be cheerful about the future of European civilization. However, what I have said is not the end of the story by any means.There are signs that people in Eastern Europe, and in the Baltic States especially, are seriously concerned about Russian ambitions, and there are some of them who do not take this as just another reason to flee to London. There is a growing awareness in the European political class that if mass migration is not brought under control, Britain and perhaps other Northern countries will withdraw from the Union, which will in all probability collapse in consequence.
For there to be a successful turnaround in confronting these two external threats, however, there must also be a rebirth of national sentiment and local attachments. So far, the foundationless ideology of rights has wiped away the emotions that would be needed if people are to be resolute in defense of their shared assets. We see at every level the retreat from confrontation, the embarrassed refusal to affirm our patrimony or its legitimate claim for sacrifice. The only first-person plural that is officially allowed is that of Europe itself, though it is a “we” that few people now understand and which has in any case been bowdlerized by the political elite.
But we also see, here and there, the signs of social and cultural renewal. During the 19th century, many Europeans thought they could compensate for the decline of the Christian faith by attaching themselves to ideologies: socialism, nationalism, communism, Marxism. The rights panacea is the latest of these, but we know or ought to know that it does not work. It is only by reconnecting with our true inheritance that we can develop the kind of first-person plural that will enable us to stand together against the growing threats to us.
I mentioned the encouraging examples set by English composers in recent years. I could mention the movement of Catholic youth in Italy around the Rimini meetings established by Father Giussani. I could mention the reaction in France—confused as yet and unfocused—to the recent Islamist atrocities. I could mention the extraordinary rebirth of representational painting around the work of Odd Nerdrum in Norway and the emergence in Britain of poets, such as Ruth Padel, John Burnside, and Don Paterson, who speak directly to both young and old in a language that also recuperates our past.
Even popular culture is moving in the same direction, trying as best it can to recapture the sense of belonging and enchantment, as in the film epics of Harry Potter, Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings. I don’t say that these blockbuster movies are great works of art, but they are not repudiations of our civilization either. In fact, they are affirmations which convey confused but real guidance to young people concerning the values that made them what they are.
Lessons for America
There are lessons in this for America. The threats confronting Europe confront America too: mass immigration of people whose loyalty cannot be guaranteed or who may, like the Boston bombers, see the host society as the devil’s work; the purging of Christian assumptions from the law and the public square and the replacement of them by the contradictory panacea of human rights; the unwillingness to confront threats while they can still be confronted—notably the threats posed by Russia and China.But there is one thing that Americans have which we Europeans lack: namely, a sense of shared identity, of being included together in an enterprise the rewards of which and the costs of which are distributed among us all. This sense of identity depends upon borders. It depends upon a law defined by territory and human procedures rather than by God. And it depends on the idea of the nation.
Looking at Europe and at what follows when the political class loses all sight of that idea, Americans should recognize how lucky they are and how they must at all costs hold onto the belief in themselves as one nation. And if they add to that phrase the two words “under God,” they will be on the way to protecting the principal thing that we Europeans have lost.
It is not difficult for Americans to learn that lesson. In every crisis, they stand together as a nation, and the tradition of charitable giving is as strong here as it ever was. It is well known that Americans give more per capita to charitable causes than the people of any other country, and even if you complain that 2 percent of GDP is not much, it compares interestingly with the 0.2 percent of France and the less than 0.1 percent of Germany. Of course, in France and Germany, the state looks after those in need, but that is exactly the European problem: namely, that the state has grown to replace the bonds of civil society and little by little to extinguish them.
This goes hand in hand with a decline in national feeling—indeed, in the case of Germany, with a repudiation of national feeling among the political elite, which treads the world with exquisite softness for fear of the Nazi shadow that creeps along behind. Learning to value your nation as a symbol of your togetherness in a shared land is, in my view, the way forward for all who would live as citizens. It is what has disappeared from the Middle East and what is now under threat in Europe, but it is not under threat here, and long may that continue.
This brings me to a point in which Europe has the edge on America, which is the innate respect of Europeans for their aesthetic inheritance. Our landscapes and townscapes are dear to us and have been protected through all the destruction wrought by two world wars to survive as symbols of our long-standing settlement.
America is a new country, whose planning laws arose from the need to build quickly and, when the opportunity arose, move on. As a result, the country is now encumbered with vast urban wastelands like Detroit. Very few American cities have a center where anyone wants to reside, and all of them have begun to spread like a fungus over the landscape, forcing people to depend on fossil fuels and hours behind the wheel for the basic needs of life. There is a kind of loneliness that advances with the suburbs as closely knit communities are replaced with people too comfortable in their boxes to have much need of neighbors.
This was not always so. Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries wanted their cities to emulate those of Europe. Architecture was properly taught according to the beaux-arts tradition in the American schools, and city fathers were keen to lay out streets, parks, and city centers as public domains in which all residents have an interest. Look at the photographs of New York at the beginning of the 20th century, or the Chicago of Louis Sullivan, and you will see beautiful townscapes and facades, public spaces and genial details that match in every way the great achievement of Europe.
Of course, American architects are as greedy as their European counterparts and have no qualms in destroying environments if there is money to be made in doing so, but the result is not appreciated by the people, as is shown by the fact that, while no educated American would go to Detroit, Tampa, or Houston for a holiday, almost all want to visit Florence, Paris, or Rome. So here is one particular in which America can learn from Europe—and indeed, with the New Urbanism movement, is beginning to do so. But it will require strength of will to resist the corporate interests and the ideological fantasies of the schools of architecture.
A new revolution from below is needed here, and it should model itself on the long-standing revolution from below that we have had in England and which I document in my book How to Think Seriously About the Planet. We in England have taken possession of our landscape and townscape and said “no” to those who want to make it unrecognizable as a human habitat. The habit of saying “no” to new things goes against the grain for most Americans, but some noes are also yeses, and this is especially true of those said on behalf of a loved inheritance and a symbol of what we are.
—Roger Scruton is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor of The New Atlantis. He is the author of over 30 books on a variety of topics including How to Be a Conservative, The Meaning of Conservatism, and An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture.
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
"We Africans Will Control the West": A Message to Europe and America from an African Invader
African boat invaders aka "New Europeans" (Source) |
They are coming as conquerors, not as immigrants. Their boats are full of young males of fighting age, and they are demanding that European taxpayers feed, house, and provide medical care for them upon arrival.
Astoundingly, the traitorous left has acquiesced to the demands of these African invaders, as Frederica Mogherini, the High Representative of the EU(SSR) for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, has stated that "no migrants intercepted at sea should be sent back against their will."
(It should be noted that Mrs. Mogherini, in her early years, was a member of the Italian Communist Youth Federation, the youth wing of the Italian Communist Party.)
In other words, any illegal African invader who can make it to Europe will be allowed to stay in Europe and will be exempt from deportation.
(Source) |
This invader, "Doctor" Ebou Bah, makes a number of threatening statements in his video, and I will be responding to three of his most preposterous statements.
"Doctor Bah's" first preposterous statement was his claim that Africans will invade Europe and America at all costs, no matter what we do to try to prevent them from invading us:
- "Let me put it to the European Union and America. You see we the blacks? Even when you guys put a barbed wire between Europe and Africa, we will jump the barbed wire. You guys buy one of the most expensive concrete, we will dig and dig and dig and dig, until we are in Europe. You guys build an ocean between Africa and America or Europe, we will swim until until until we are in Europe."
Thanks to the leftists who took control of our nations in the 1960's, we are welcoming Dr. Bah and his comrades with open arms, then showering them with taxpayer-funded housing, food, and medical care.
Moreover, Communists such as Angela "Germany is becoming a country of immigration" Merkel and Frederica "All illegals are welcome to stay" Mogherini are ensuring that the African and Muslim invasion of Europe will continue unabated, and that the invasion will be facilitated by the Communists who control the EUSSR.
(Source) |
With that being said, my message to Dr. Bah is this:
Nothing is stopping you from illegally invading Europe and America. In fact, our leaders are assisting and funding these illegal invasions.
But what you and your comrades must keep in mind is that by illegally invading our lands, you are placing yourselves at great risk.
This is because your allies on the left (King Hussein, Merkel, Renzi, Hollande) are not going to be in charge forever, and the Nationalists who are coming to replace these traitors will not be as tolerant of your presence in our lands.
I believe that sometime very soon you invaders will be wishing you had never stepped foot on European (or American) soil and will be begging for our mercy. I advise you to leave while you still have a chance and while tolerant, effeminate cowards are still in charge of our nations.
Decades of mass legal and illegal immigration has awoken the European peoples, and we are discovering that we must regain the warrior mentality of our forefathers if our nations are to survive.
We are a sleeping giant who is slowly awakening, and illegal hostile invaders certainly do not want to be present in our lands when we rise up to take back what is rightfully ours.
PEGIDA Dresden yesterday (Source) |
- "Right now you guys are complaining that we the blacks should not come. We are coming to get what belongs to us. Yes, you used our grandparents, did you compensate us? No. We are here to get that compensation. We Africans, we will still come, no matter what you guys did. We will still come. We are coming. We the Africans, we are coming."
First off, our lands do not belong to Africans. And we have every right to insist that we do not want Africans (and Muslims) in our territories, because, in general, Africans and Muslims have brought nothing but violence, chaos, dysfunction, and terror into our lands.
It is no longer safe for European children to walk their own streets after dark anymore, thanks to the presence of violent, predatory third-world immigrants in many of our major cities.
The streets of "New Paris" (Source) |
We have every right to complain about more of your people entering our lands, and furthermore, we have every right to appeal to our government's to remove all illegal immigrants from our territories.
As for Bah's threat that "we Africans are coming", it should be noted that Europeans and Americans do not fear Africans taking over our lands whatsoever.
These groups lack the intelligence, organization, forethought, and ingenuity to defeat us. Your people could never defeat ours in a state of total war, regardless of numerical superiority.
In truth, we do not view your people as a threatening enemy. Our real enemies are our fellow Europeans who have embraced Communism, Marxism, Maoism, Trotskyism, Leninism, Stalinism, and every other "ism" that seeks to undermine, subvert, and eventually destroy Western Civilization.
African invaders are only present in Europe because the aforementioned leftists have brought you here and funded your lifestyles with the tax dollars of native Europeans.
This state of affairs is no longer acceptable to a large number of Europeans, and patriots and Nationalists throughout Europe are coalescing to eliminate the threats to the survival of Europe and Western Civilization at large.
Polish Nationalists (Source) |
- "We started from America. The president is what, African. From here, from America, we go to England. We have France. We have Germany. We have Italy. At the end of the day, we'll control everything. We Africans will control the West. Every day we will have sex with our wives so that we can have more children, At the end of the day, we can conquer the entire Europe."
It is absolutely incredulous for Dr. Bah to assume that America, France, Germany, and Italy will be controlled by Africans. Africans lack the ability to even control their own city blocks, so how in the world are they going to control technologically advanced and developed Western nations?
Not long ago, Africans were handed the keys to a highly developed Western nation, South Africa, and managed to turn that country into a third-world hellhole of murder, rape, and mass chaos within the span of two decades.
(Source) |
Those who believe as Dr. Bah believes must not have read their history books. Europeans fought off the Mongols, the Huns, the Turks, the Berbers, the Ottomans, and every other external threat that has ever threatened the survival of Europe, its peoples, and its civilization.
It may have taken hundreds of years in some cases, but each and every time European warriors have fought back all foreign invaders and purged them from our territories. This is not hyperbole, this is a historical fact.
Normans expelling Muslims from Sicily in the 11th century (Source) |
Westerners must remember that invaders such as Dr. Bah are being imported to our nations by the left, granted citizenship by the left, and then they form political alliances with the treasonous left.
Then, they stab us in the back by claiming we are racists, white supremacists, and that we have white privilege, despite the fact that Westerners have been more than welcoming to the third-world masses who have come to our nations since the 1960's, and the fact that it is primarily the tax dollars of the conservative working-class (not the left's dependency class) that has subsidized their housing, food, and health care.
Immigrants protesting against "racist" America (Source) |
We must not allow one more immigrant into our lands and we must remove all illegal immigrants from our territories as quickly as possible. Muslim immigrants, in particular, must be deported en masse to Islamic countries where they can practice Sharia law in peace, far away from the "racist" and "Islamophobic" Westerners.
(Source) |
And despite the left's claims that Europeans and Americans who oppose mass immigration are "racists" and "white supremacists", that could not be further than the truth.
Would the third-world be following us around everywhere if we were violent and xenophobic? Of course not. We have been extremely tolerant of the invaders in our midst, which is why they choose to come to our lands rather than Muslim, African, and Asian nations.
Without a doubt, no Muslim, African, or Asian nations would ever accept the levels of humiliation the Europeans and Americans have put up with at the hands of outsiders.
Thus, we are now opposing immigration in large numbers because we have been so tolerant and welcoming to these foreigners, yet we have been paid back with ingratitude, hostility, and subversion.
It is only a matter of time before Europe and America turn "far-right". Liberalism and Marxism are dying a slow, painful death, and Nationalists are priming to fill the political vacuum created by the left's collapse.
My advice to invaders like Dr. Bah is to get out of our countries while you can. Because if history serves as a guide, your experience in our territories may not end up being so pleasant if you continue to provoke us.
(Source) |
http://www.breitbart.com
Why Western Civilization Has Lost Its Self-Confidence
When did we give up? And can we reenergize Western society?
As we approach 2016, the West is experiencing a civilizational loss of self-confidence, arising from a narcissistic fatalism and cataclysmic failure of institutional leadership.At every turn, it seems, the weak and uncertain leadership of the West is submitting to the strength and evil certainty of radical Islam, of which Winston Churchill warned more than a century ago “no stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”
We began giving up our self-confidence a century ago when the Western governments who fought on both sides of World War I abandoned classical liberalism and its associated political philosophy of constitutional liberty and replaced it with autocratic top-down, state controlled central planning.
Modern liberalism, as practiced by the Democratic Party in the United States in 2015 and 2016 and its state-centric counterparts in Europe, bears little resemblance to classical liberalism.
“The ideology of classical liberalism is closer to what today is a current of conservatism in the United States,” Richard Huddleson wrote in his 1999 book, Modern Political Philosophy.
Central to the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century is a commitment to the liberty of individual citizens. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly were core commitments of classic liberalism, as was the underlying conception of just government as the protection of the liberties of individual citizens. Also central to classical liberalsim was a commitment to a system of free markets as the best way to organize economic life.There is little wonder that progressivism reached its early zenith under the direction of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, the same commander-in-chief who supervised the collective resource management imposed upon the American people throughout World War I.
The constitutionally destructive consequence of World War I was noted by Leonard Liggio, who wrote recently at the Acton Institute:
Classical liberalism was the dominant philosophy in the United States and England, really, until about the First World War. The war, unfortunately, was a disaster for liberalism, because it disrupted constitutional order. All the countries at war used extreme measures of repression. Even England and America created police states on the model of Germany or their Czarist allies and trampled liberty underfoot. At the same time, they trampled economic liberty by allocating resources through central planning, again modeled on the German desperation as they were cut off by the wartime blockade. In fact, Lenin viewed the German wartime operations of centralization as the model for his Bolshevik regime. It gave him what he felt were practical models for creating centralized direction of the economy once the Bolshevik revolution occurred.The bulwark of classical liberalism is constitutional liberty, which is defined as “such freedom as is enjoyed by the citizens of a country or state under the protection of its constitution; the aggregate of those personal, civil, and political rights of the individual which are guarantied by the constitution and secured against invasion by the government or any of its agencies.”
So the First World War was this great watershed, a great tragedy for all who were killed or wounded on the battlefield, for the many who died or were disabled by the epidemics that followed, and for the economic waste that prevented investment in the postwar period and led to the great depression and to movements toward greater government control. So, everywhere, liberalism was put on the defensive by this catastrophe.
“I hold that governments are meant to be, and must remain, the servants of the citizens; that states and federations only come into existence and can only by justified by preserving the ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ in the homes and families of individuals. The true right and power rest in the individual. He gives of his right and power to the State, expecting and requiring thereby in return to receive certain advantages and guarantees,” Winston Churchill wrote in his classic 1936 essay, “What Good’s a Constitution?”, a definitive description of constitutional liberty.
“The 19th century was the century of classical liberalism. Partly for that reason it was also the century of ever-increasing economic and political liberty, relative international peace, relative price stability and unprecedented economic growth,” John Goodman, founder of the National Center for Policy Analysis and its president for 31 years, now head of the Goodman Institute, wrote recently.
“By contrast, the 20th century was the century that rejected classical liberalism. Partly for that reason, it was the century of dictatorship, depression and war. Nearly 265 million people were killed by their own governments (in addition to all the deaths from wars!) in the 20th century – more than in any previous century and possibly more than in all previous centuries combined,” Goodman noted.
The 21st century, unfortunately, has seen an accelerating decline in Western self-confidence, one seen in the cringe inducing weakness of its political leaders. They respond to the challenge of radical Islam with the same type of appeasement shown by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain to Hitler in the 1930s, rather than the strength and moral certitude of his successor, Churchill, who ultimately helped lead the West to victory in World War II.
History shows that strength attracts followers. The latest example that confirms this maxim is the recent report that the Islamic terrorists at ISIS are actively planning to increase their attacks on innocent civilians in the West, in an attempt to provoke one final, huge decisive battle.
“Where is our modern Churchill to exercise the strength of the West to resist this terroristic swagger?” every day citizens in the United States and Europe wonder aloud.
More importantly, “Why have our political institutions produced such weak and feckless leaders?”
A recent Rasmussen Reports Poll indicates that dissatisfaction with President Obama’s leadership-or lack thereof- is at record levels and is on the rise. Dissatisfaction with European leaders is also high.
Several conservative authors in America, among them Mark Steyn, have observed this decline in the West, but none have offered a specific solution to reverse this trend.
A hint at the direction in which the resurrection of the West may be found comes, surprisingly, from two British authors, one of whom is a former cabinet minister in the government of British Labour prime minister Tony Blair.
Almost a decade ago British entrepreneur Richard Koch (no relation to the American Koch Brothers) and former United Kingdom cabinet member Chris Smith wrote a prescient book called Suicide of the West.
In it they argued:
One hundred years ago, most Westerners felt tremendous pride and confidence in their civilisation. They knew what it stood for, and they believed in it. Today that sense has gone.In an exclusive email interview with Breitbart News, Koch, who is also a Huffington Post contributor, offers a surprisingly upbeat view of the future of Western Civilization as we close out 2015.
That is largely because the six principal ideas which underpinned Western confidence – those of Christianity, optimism, science, economic growth, [classical] liberalism and individualism – have suffered a century of sustained attack. These ideas no longer inspire or unite the West as they once did.
Restoring the self-confidence of the West, Koch says, is something that must originate with the individual, not the group.
“This is not a battle of empires or wars, which are no longer effective at winning hearts and minds,” Koch tells Breitbart News.
“It is a matter of inculcating calm self-confidence, individual and collective, and refusing to be drawn into all the sound and fury that can dismay and distract us,” Koch adds.
Radical Islam poses a threat to the West, Koch argues, put it has not yet reached the power of Nazism or communism in the 1930s. Koch tells Breitbart News:
I see radical Islam as a particularly nasty little virus, comparable to Nazism or communism in the 1920s (before they became really powerful). We can’t be complacent but we have to be careful in how we respond. We have a civilization and they don’t; we have the moral high ground. Their ideology is particularly repugnant and it will have very limited appeal in the West, if we maintain our values. There will always be a few people who want the excitement of an extreme cause and licence to kill, but terrorism is nothing new and it can be largely defeated, if not eliminated. But of course we have to deal with Isil – and cutting off their huge flow of money should be the top priority.Koch argues a combination of individualism and “maintaining our values” will, in the long run, redeem the West.
While Koch excels at diagnosing the problems of the West, he understates the existential threat posed by radical Islam and offers an insufficient, passive prescription to remedy the West’s decline.
Koch views Western Civilization as something of a “self-correcting system.” But now, as its very existence is threatened by radical Islam, a more pro-active solution is demanded.
This is particularly true since, as Koch and Smith point out in Suicide of the West, the attacks on the principal ideas that brought the West to dominance come primarily from within—from individuals who have benefited financially from the very culture upon which their wealth was created. (Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and other Silicon Valley technology oligarchs, as well as atheist progressive George Soros immediately come to mind as examples of this group.)
What is needed to reverse that decline is a very focused “back to basics” movement to restore believe in these six principal ideas – Christianity, optimism, science, economic growth, classical liberalism (in its political expression of constitutional liberty and its economic expression of free markets) and individualism – and more importantly, the transfer of belief in these principal ideas to subsequent generations.
Therein lies the rub.
In a popular culture subsumed by triviality – where most know a great deal about current entertainment trends and how to use their smartphones – but little else, “back to basics” is easier said than done.
Here’s one look at what “back to basics” means for the six principal ideas that built the West.
“Back to basics” in classical liberalism and constitutional liberty means the re-assertion of state sovereignty and individual rights in the face of increasing constitutional usurpations by the executive branch, statutorily unauthorized regulations, and a spineless and ineffective federal legislative branch.
“Back to basics” in Christianity translates into encouraging the growth and flourishing of Christianity in the West by removing the State’s power to exercise control over the operation of Christian churches and organizations and the conduct of individual Christians who are acting within the law.
It does not mean government approved enforcement of Christian belief on other citizens.
It also means a complete separation of church and state when it comes to the delivery of government sanctioned “social justice” programs. “Public private partnerships” where church organizations are paid lucratively to carry out liberal government policies, such as the Unholy Alliance between Christian “non-profits” and the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, must come to an end.
In addition, it means ending the government persecution of Christians in business matters large and small, the most egregious of which is the recent actions by the State of Oregon forcing Christian bakers to pay an estimated $135,000 fine to a gay couple who demanded they bake a wedding cake for them, a demand they refused.
History shows that Christianity thrives when it is completely independent of government. When it becomes the “official” state religion, or “partners” with the state, it becomes corrupt, weak, and devoid of intellectual vigor.
Richard Koch and Leonard Liggio agree on the critical role played by Christianity in the rise of the West.
“Of all the civilizations around the world, why did only the Christian West become both free and prosperous?” Leonard Liggio asked at the Acton Institute.
“Many scholars have studied this and have come to the conclusion that this is due to the fact that the religious institutions were totally separate from, and often in conflict with, political institutions only in the Christian West. This created the space in which free institutions could emerge. The idea of independent religious institutions is absent even in Eastern Christianity; their religious institutions are part of the bureaucracy of the state,” Liggio wrote.
“In Western Europe, though, the religious institutions were autonomous among themselves, and totally independent from and often in opposition to state power. The result was the creation of a polycentric system. And whenever this system was threatened by claims of total empire by the political rulers, Christian philosophy was utilized as part of its defense,” Liggio added.
“So within that space, the economic institutions–often modeled on the religious institutions as autonomous entities–could flourish and survive,” Liggio concluded.
Coincident to the decline of Christianity is a rise of triviality in the West.
“There is a frivolity and lack of moral seriousness afflicting the West, but this too is not unprecedented or wholly bad. The Nazis, the communists, and radical Islamists were or are terribly serious,” Koch says.
“Modern Western liberal society is probably the most humane and decent ever seen on the face of the earth. I would like to see more moral seriousness, but of the right kind. Establishing this is like walking through a minefield,” Koch adds.
“Back to basics” in optimism requires a return to the American “can-do” spirit and the western values of the enlightenment.
Simply put, the easiest way to return optimism to America and the West is to take a blow torch to the regulatory state and dismantle the vast majority of paralyzing regulations that afflict businesses and individuals.
Throughout our history, we Americans have been renowned for our ability for getting things done. But when government tells us how we can and cannot live, that optimism turns to pessimism and fatalism, when every positive action is held back by paralyzing regulations.
Coincident with the rise of big government has been the growing cult of “victimhood,” the antithesis of optimism.
Similarly, “back to basics” in economic growth requires the application of an even bigger blow torch to the regulatory state.
“The strange thing is that the underlying reality of the world and especially the West is better than ever. Most people in the world now live in some kind of market system, that is working slowly but remorselessly to eliminate the bulk of poverty and deprivation,” Koch notes.
“Things are getting better, but it doesn’t feel that way,” Koch adds.
A more limited government with dramatically diminished regulatory powers would unleash the entrepreneurial explosion, which in turn will turn the sluggish 2 percent economic growth experienced under the Obama administration into real economic growth that reinvigorates the diminishing middle class, that broad portion of the population that currently knows why “things getting better” don’t feel that way.
“Back to basics” in individualism requires an end to penalizing students and workers who actually exhibit individual thinking. Our schools, both at the elementary, high school, and collegiate level, need to return to the values of the enlightenment, where free and open inquiry are encouraged and allowed. They must cease acting as the propaganda enforcement arms of the social welfare state.
“Back to basics” in science is perhaps the trickiest of all, Science and technology are advancing at a breathtaking pace and such success does not immediately suggest a need for change.
As Richard Koch accurately notes, “the world’s top universities, science, and technology have never been more vibrant or productive. Business is more creative than ever, producing miracles from the internet to the iPod and smartphone.”
While this is true, it is also the case that what Churchill observed in 1899 about the role of science in Western society is no longer true.
“Were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science—the science against which it had vainly struggled—the civilisation of modern Europe might fall [to radical Islam], as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome,” Churchill wrote in his second book, The River War.
Capital, technological skill, and effective organizations will continue to combine in such a way as to drive the frontiers of applied science further and faster than we can currently imagine.
Yet many of those who control those forces currently have little loyalty to constitutional liberty, and are guided more by their personal desires to shape the world to their own peculiar political and social justice philosophies through the exercise of their own wealth and power.
It is unclear whether Western Civilization in 2016 and beyond will be “sheltered in the strong arms of science.”
A movement to go “back to basics” in these six principal ideas that brought the West to dominance, while ambitious, is completely consistent with the grassroots energy that brought the Tea Party movement to prominence in 2009.
It has the added advantage that it is not dependent upon a collectivist effort, but rather on millions of individual efforts.
If you want to know why the West is losing its self-confidence, look in the mirror. If you’re not working ceaselessly to return yourself, your family and your immediate sphere of influence back to the basics of these six principal ideas that brought the West to the top, you’re responsible, in your own small way, for its continued decline.
If leaders are weak and feckless, replace them. If institutions are failing, reform and reinvigorate them.
Don’t rail at the moon. Lasso it.
Hungary says 900 'no-go areas' in Europe
Budapest
(AFP) - Europe has more than 900 "no-go areas" with large immigrant
populations, Hungary's government claims on a hard-hitting new website
aimed at drumming up opposition to an EU scheme to share out migrants
around the bloc.
In
these areas "with a high number of immigrants", for example in Paris,
London, Stockholm or Berlin, the authorities have "little or no control"
and "norms of the host society barely prevail," the site says.
Asked
for the source of the information, government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs
told AFP on Friday it came from "data publicly available on the
Internet," without giving further details.
The
website, launched this week ahead of referendum in Hungary in the
second half of the year on the EU quota plan, also features a ticking
clock representing a migrant entering Europe every 12 seconds.
"The mandatory European quotas increase the terrorist risk in Europe and imperils our culture," the website says.
"Illegal
migrants cross the borders unchecked, so we do not know who they are
and what their intentions are. We do not know how many of them are
disguised as terrorists," it adds.
Prime
Minister Viktor Orban's government voted against an EU plan in
September to distribute 160,000 asylum-seekers among member states via
quotas, and in December joined Slovakia in filing a legal complaint.
So
far, only 1,100 have been relocated, with Hungary not taking a single
one. If Hungarian voters reject the quotas in the referendum, as surveys
suggest, this would be another blow for the troubled scheme.
Orban,
whose hard line in the EU's migrant crisis saw him seal Hungary's
southern borders, announced the referendum in February, saying Brussels
has no right to "redraw Europe's cultural and religious identity."
The
referendum question will ask: "Do you want the EU to prescribe the
mandatory relocation of non-Hungarian citizens to Hungary without the
approval of the Hungarian parliament?"
Oli Scarff/Getty
The former head of Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Trevor Phillips, has admitted he “got almost everything wrong” regarding immigration in a new report, claiming Muslims are creating “nations within nations” in the West.
Phillips says followers of Islam hold very different values from the rest of society and many want to lead separate lives.
The former head of the U.K.’s equalities watchdog also advocates the monitoring of ethnic minority populations on housing estates to stop them becoming “ghetto villages.”
He says schools may have to consider a 50 per cent limit on Muslim, or other minority pupils, to encourage social integration.
And he says disturbing survey findings point to a growing chasm between the attitudes of many British Muslims and their compatriots.
Phillips’ intervention comes after he was asked to analyse the findings of a major survey on Muslim attitudes in the U.K., which will form the basis of Channel 4’s documentary, What British Muslims Really Think, which is due to air on Wednesday night.
An ICM poll released to the Times, in Britain, ahead of the broadcast reveals:
• One in five Muslims in Britain never enter a non-Muslim house
• 39 per cent of Muslims, male and female, say a woman should always obey her husband
• 31 per cent of British Muslims support the right of a man to have more than one wife
• 52 per cent of Muslims did not believe that homosexuality should be legal
• 23 per cent of Muslims support the introduction of Sharia law rather than the laws laid down by parliament
The documentary will portray the U.K.’s Muslims as a “nation within a nation” that has its own geography and values.
Phillips commissioned a report into Britain and Islamophobia in 1997 which, according to both Phillips himself and academics across the country, popularised the phrase which has now become synonymous with any criticism of Islam or Muslims.
“It’s not as though we couldn’t have seen this coming. But we’ve repeatedly failed to spot the warning signs,” he now writes in The Times , in response to new data collected.
“Twenty years ago… I published the report titled Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, we thought that the real risk of the arrival of new communities was discrimination against Muslims.
“Our 1996 survey of recent incidents showed that there was plenty of it around. But we got almost everything else wrong.”
In an article for the Daily Mail, Phillips warns of a “life-and-death struggle for the soul of British Islam.”
“Britain is in many ways a better place than it’s ever been—more prosperous, more diverse, more liberal.
“But for some of our fellow citizens, we’re heading in entirely the wrong direction. So much so that some of them would rather live under a wholly different system.
“Indeed, a significant minority of Britain’s three million Muslims consider us a nation of such low morals that they would rather live more separately from their non-Muslim countrymen, preferably under sharia law.
“This sobering conclusion comes from the most comprehensive survey of British Muslims ever conducted, commissioned by Channel 4.
“Having been asked to examine its results, I believe it holds a grim message for all of us.
“There is a life-and-death struggle for the soul of British Islam—and this is not a battle that the rest of us can afford to sit out. We need to take sides.”
http://www.newsweek.com/
Muslims Are Creating ‘Nations Within Nations’ Says Former Head of U.K. Equalities Commission
ByOli Scarff/Getty
The former head of Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Trevor Phillips, has admitted he “got almost everything wrong” regarding immigration in a new report, claiming Muslims are creating “nations within nations” in the West.
Phillips says followers of Islam hold very different values from the rest of society and many want to lead separate lives.
The former head of the U.K.’s equalities watchdog also advocates the monitoring of ethnic minority populations on housing estates to stop them becoming “ghetto villages.”
He says schools may have to consider a 50 per cent limit on Muslim, or other minority pupils, to encourage social integration.
And he says disturbing survey findings point to a growing chasm between the attitudes of many British Muslims and their compatriots.
Phillips’ intervention comes after he was asked to analyse the findings of a major survey on Muslim attitudes in the U.K., which will form the basis of Channel 4’s documentary, What British Muslims Really Think, which is due to air on Wednesday night.
An ICM poll released to the Times, in Britain, ahead of the broadcast reveals:
• One in five Muslims in Britain never enter a non-Muslim house
• 39 per cent of Muslims, male and female, say a woman should always obey her husband
• 31 per cent of British Muslims support the right of a man to have more than one wife
• 52 per cent of Muslims did not believe that homosexuality should be legal
• 23 per cent of Muslims support the introduction of Sharia law rather than the laws laid down by parliament
The documentary will portray the U.K.’s Muslims as a “nation within a nation” that has its own geography and values.
Phillips commissioned a report into Britain and Islamophobia in 1997 which, according to both Phillips himself and academics across the country, popularised the phrase which has now become synonymous with any criticism of Islam or Muslims.
“It’s not as though we couldn’t have seen this coming. But we’ve repeatedly failed to spot the warning signs,” he now writes in The Times , in response to new data collected.
“Twenty years ago… I published the report titled Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, we thought that the real risk of the arrival of new communities was discrimination against Muslims.
“Our 1996 survey of recent incidents showed that there was plenty of it around. But we got almost everything else wrong.”
In an article for the Daily Mail, Phillips warns of a “life-and-death struggle for the soul of British Islam.”
“Britain is in many ways a better place than it’s ever been—more prosperous, more diverse, more liberal.
“But for some of our fellow citizens, we’re heading in entirely the wrong direction. So much so that some of them would rather live under a wholly different system.
“Indeed, a significant minority of Britain’s three million Muslims consider us a nation of such low morals that they would rather live more separately from their non-Muslim countrymen, preferably under sharia law.
“This sobering conclusion comes from the most comprehensive survey of British Muslims ever conducted, commissioned by Channel 4.
“Having been asked to examine its results, I believe it holds a grim message for all of us.
“There is a life-and-death struggle for the soul of British Islam—and this is not a battle that the rest of us can afford to sit out. We need to take sides.”
Using Mass Migration to Commit Genocide
• U.S., Israel fulfilling Kalergi’s radical dream of mongrelized Europe, America.
By Ronald L. Ray —
World War III is under way. It is not a typical war, fought with guns and munitions on the front lines. Nor do the armies of a million invaders carry firearms. But it is a world war—a race war—nonetheless, and its goal is to extinguish every last vestige of Christian and white civilization from the Earth. Far from an accident, it was long planned.
Sinister forces have cajoled and coerced Western political leaders into betraying their own peoples to a seething mass of foreigners, who are overwhelming societal structures and bringing about the collapse of entire cultures. It is a war of demography as destiny, driven forward by the imperialistic aggressions of the United States and Israel, as they destroy nations across North Africa and the Middle East, creating an artificial migration of peoples not seen on such a scale for nearly 2,000 years.
Photographs of thousands of Asian and African “refugees,” disturbing in themselves, are not the entire story. Although a centuries-long effort, the war’s modern salient was publicized a hundred years ago, both in America and Europe.
Some claim Jewish Communist Party apparatchik Israel Cohen wrote in 1912, “By propounding into the consciousness of the dark races that for centuries they have been oppressed by whites, we can mold them to the program of the Communist Party. . . . [We] will endeavor to instill in the whites a guilt complex for their exploitation of the negroes . . . and begin a process which will deliver America to our cause.”
In Europe, the war strategy was laid out in 1925 by Count Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi, a half-Austrian, half-Japanese diplomat, whose wife of the time was Jewish and undoubtedly influenced his views. Coudenhove Kalergi was the father of the Pan-European movement, designed to create today’s European Union (EU).
In Praktischer Idealismus [Practical Idealism], he wrote, “The man of the future will be a mongrel. Today’s races and classes will disappear owing to the disappearing of space, time and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future, similar in its outward appearance to the ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals.”
Once the white race has been eliminated, Coudenhove Kalergi envisioned that the New World Order will be ruled by the Jews, whom he saw—as they themselves—as a “master race.” “Instead of destroying European Judaism, Europe, against her will, refined and educated this people, driving them to their future status as a leading nation through this artificial evolutionary process.”
This cultural communist was supported by the likes of Baron Louis de Rothschild, banker Max Warburg, Zionist Bernard Baruch, the B’nai B’rith Masonic lodge, libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises and later the Central Intelligence Agency. The European and American rulers, who today cause and promote the inundating floods of non-whites and non-Christians into white, historically Christian countries, are following the Coudenhove Kalergi plan.
At the behest of Zionist plutocrats and Israeli terrorists, the U.S. and its allies have militarily destroyed or dismembered numerous nations: Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Ukraine and more. Economies and infrastructures were ruined deliberately, leading those who can to exit their native homes for the mirage of greater prosperity in Europe and America. Millions are moving into Europe, and, rather than improve the lot of the wrecked countries, so people can stay at home, Western governments foment and foster the intruding hordes.
Diabolical forces demand the coming race wars, to eliminate Christians and whites, and reduce the world population to a sixth of its size. But it is not just corrupt governments and clandestine organizations at work. Even multinational corporations like pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline plc seem to have a sinister hand in the matter.
The result will be the catastrophic loss of the best classes from Africa and Asia and the complete destabilization of European economies, which cannot support the invaders. While Pope Francis follows the foolery of “free migration,” the African Catholic bishops see things more clearly, warning those who would leave to stay and help their own peoples. It is not primarily those truly harmed by war flooding Europe, but largely the educated classes. And those who do not have the money to travel are subsidized by U.S organizations.
However, not all the aliens are friendly. They are almost solely responsible for astronomical increases in European violent crime, and the presence of terrorists among the “refugees” has been documented. The frequently violent and law-defying, order-destroying behavior of the foreigners on the march—and numerous photographs—prove that they are a well-funded, well-supplied revolutionary band, not peaceful immigrants.
The European peoples recognize what is happening and oppose the coming white genocide, but they have no power, because they are unarmed. A proposed EU “protection force” for dealing with the migration crisis no doubt is really intended to suppress the native whites.
So far, only the Eastern Europeans—Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic—have stood up at all for their peoples and civilizations. But it is not enough. Nor is America free of danger, where 70% of United Nations refugees are settled, along with the millions of illegal aliens bringing the race war to a formerly great country.
Ronald L. Ray is a freelance author and an assistant editor of THE BARNES REVIEW. He is a descendant of several patriots of the American War for Independence.
Using Mass Migration to Commit Genocide
• U.S., Israel fulfilling Kalergi’s radical dream of mongrelized Europe, America.
By Ronald L. Ray —
World War III is under way. It is not a typical war, fought with guns and munitions on the front lines. Nor do the armies of a million invaders carry firearms. But it is a world war—a race war—nonetheless, and its goal is to extinguish every last vestige of Christian and white civilization from the Earth. Far from an accident, it was long planned.
Sinister forces have cajoled and coerced Western political leaders into betraying their own peoples to a seething mass of foreigners, who are overwhelming societal structures and bringing about the collapse of entire cultures. It is a war of demography as destiny, driven forward by the imperialistic aggressions of the United States and Israel, as they destroy nations across North Africa and the Middle East, creating an artificial migration of peoples not seen on such a scale for nearly 2,000 years.
Photographs of thousands of Asian and African “refugees,” disturbing in themselves, are not the entire story. Although a centuries-long effort, the war’s modern salient was publicized a hundred years ago, both in America and Europe.
Some claim Jewish Communist Party apparatchik Israel Cohen wrote in 1912, “By propounding into the consciousness of the dark races that for centuries they have been oppressed by whites, we can mold them to the program of the Communist Party. . . . [We] will endeavor to instill in the whites a guilt complex for their exploitation of the negroes . . . and begin a process which will deliver America to our cause.”
In Europe, the war strategy was laid out in 1925 by Count Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi, a half-Austrian, half-Japanese diplomat, whose wife of the time was Jewish and undoubtedly influenced his views. Coudenhove Kalergi was the father of the Pan-European movement, designed to create today’s European Union (EU).
In Praktischer Idealismus [Practical Idealism], he wrote, “The man of the future will be a mongrel. Today’s races and classes will disappear owing to the disappearing of space, time and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future, similar in its outward appearance to the ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals.”
Once the white race has been eliminated, Coudenhove Kalergi envisioned that the New World Order will be ruled by the Jews, whom he saw—as they themselves—as a “master race.” “Instead of destroying European Judaism, Europe, against her will, refined and educated this people, driving them to their future status as a leading nation through this artificial evolutionary process.”
This cultural communist was supported by the likes of Baron Louis de Rothschild, banker Max Warburg, Zionist Bernard Baruch, the B’nai B’rith Masonic lodge, libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises and later the Central Intelligence Agency. The European and American rulers, who today cause and promote the inundating floods of non-whites and non-Christians into white, historically Christian countries, are following the Coudenhove Kalergi plan.
At the behest of Zionist plutocrats and Israeli terrorists, the U.S. and its allies have militarily destroyed or dismembered numerous nations: Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Ukraine and more. Economies and infrastructures were ruined deliberately, leading those who can to exit their native homes for the mirage of greater prosperity in Europe and America. Millions are moving into Europe, and, rather than improve the lot of the wrecked countries, so people can stay at home, Western governments foment and foster the intruding hordes.
Diabolical forces demand the coming race wars, to eliminate Christians and whites, and reduce the world population to a sixth of its size. But it is not just corrupt governments and clandestine organizations at work. Even multinational corporations like pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline plc seem to have a sinister hand in the matter.
The result will be the catastrophic loss of the best classes from Africa and Asia and the complete destabilization of European economies, which cannot support the invaders. While Pope Francis follows the foolery of “free migration,” the African Catholic bishops see things more clearly, warning those who would leave to stay and help their own peoples. It is not primarily those truly harmed by war flooding Europe, but largely the educated classes. And those who do not have the money to travel are subsidized by U.S organizations.
However, not all the aliens are friendly. They are almost solely responsible for astronomical increases in European violent crime, and the presence of terrorists among the “refugees” has been documented. The frequently violent and law-defying, order-destroying behavior of the foreigners on the march—and numerous photographs—prove that they are a well-funded, well-supplied revolutionary band, not peaceful immigrants.
The European peoples recognize what is happening and oppose the coming white genocide, but they have no power, because they are unarmed. A proposed EU “protection force” for dealing with the migration crisis no doubt is really intended to suppress the native whites.
So far, only the Eastern Europeans—Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic—have stood up at all for their peoples and civilizations. But it is not enough. Nor is America free of danger, where 70% of United Nations refugees are settled, along with the millions of illegal aliens bringing the race war to a formerly great country.
Ronald L. Ray is a freelance author and an assistant editor of THE BARNES REVIEW. He is a descendant of several patriots of the American War for Independence.