Europe Ain’t Dead Yet
By Richard Davis (04/12/06)
The European death watch has begun, or so it would seem from the spate of recent books and articles predicting the continent’s imminent demise. Even publications too terror-stricken to print Muhammad’s caricature appear to have few qualms about speculating openly that his followers are about to snuff out modern civilization itself. Just don’t put that in cartoon form.
According to the doomsayers, an aging and welfare-bloated Old Europe is falling victim to both the economic realities of globalization and the rising tide of unassimilable and imperious Muslims within its borders. Multiculturally neutered and helplessly shell-shocked from the last century, today’s Europeans can’t even muster the willpower to work a full week let alone reproduce themselves or resist Islamic colonization.
Clair Berlinski, author of the new book Menace in Europe, summed it up succinctly in a recent interview with Frontpagemag.com: “In brief, Europeans are lazy, unwilling to fight for anything and willing to surrender to anyone; they are fascinated by decadence; they favor the bureaucracy over the corporation; they are unable to assimilate their immigrants; they no longer have children; they no longer produce much of cultural or scientific significance; they have lost their religious vocation and they no longer hold their lives to be meaningful.”
If that isn’t bleak enough for you, try this assessment from Mark Steyn: “The only question about Europe is whether it's going to be (a) catastrophically bad or (b) apocalyptically bad, as in head for the hills, here come the Four Horsemen: Death (the self-extinction of European races too self-absorbed to breed), Famine (the withering of unaffordable social programs), War (civil strife as the disaffected decide to move beyond mere Citroën-torching), and Conquest (the inevitable victory of the Muslim successor population already in place). I'd say option (b) looks the better bet, for a few if not all Continental nations: united they'll fall, but divided, a handful might stand a chance.”
Berlinski and Steyn may be right, but predicting European history is tricky business. No one foresaw the cataclysms that shook the continent in the past century, including the swift rise of the fascists or the swift collapse of the communists. No one in the 1920s foresaw the 1930s. Just three years ago France was prancing across the world stage acting the stable, civilized internationalist to Bush’s unstable unilateral cowboy. Today the country’s a basket case, and Der Spiegel writes that a “major historical shift is in the air.” History on the continent is becoming very fluid once again.
Like the rest of the world Europe is embroiled in an identity crisis. Europeans are only now awakening from their Cold War, EU bureaucratic stupor and recognizing the mess their ruling elites have gotten them into. “There is a huge backlash brewing among ordinary citizens in Europe,” Francis Fukuyama wrote in Slate.com two weeks ago. How that backlash will manifest itself is unclear, but Fukuyama thinks he knows how Europe can avoid the abyss this time around: suicide.
Like all multiculturalists, Fukuyama blames Europeans and not their invaders for the continent’s predicament. (If Europeans were the colonizers then of course the talk would be of indigenous rights, self-determination, reverse immigration, etc.) Specifically, the problem is that Europeans have a “blood-and-soil understanding of identity,” says Fukuyama.
The solution is for Europeans to dissolve their identities into a “universalist culture” like America’s. “What each European society needs is to invent an open form of national identity similar to the American creed, an identity that is accessible to newcomers regardless of ethnicity or religion,” Fukuyama writes. In other words, Europe needs to stop being Europe, much as America is being forced to stop being America. (Fukuyama writes as if American history has ended, and it all turned out well.)
But why should Europe follow America’s path of self-immolation? European ethnicities and nation states have been the source of most of the continent’s cultural strength and pre-eminence for centuries. Do they jettison that now for cheap labor, or to accommodate migrants who offer nothing substantive, hate Europe and follow a dangerous totalitarian ideology that calls for European dhimmitude and death?
Europeans don’t have to make that sacrifice, and it’s doubtful they will. They still have the numbers, strength and time on their side. Conversely, Muslims in Europe are essentially powerless today except for their ability to bully the natives and capitalize on liberal guilt and self-loathing. They control none of the apparatuses of political and cultural power and authority. They are outsiders, ethnic invaders, who can only provoke Europe’s dormant strength, not wield it, and that can have nasty consequences. Europeans aren’t afraid of themselves for no reason.
Ironically, both sides over-estimate the influence of moderates. From the silence of the majority of Muslims, European appeasers extrapolate a religion of peace and love. From European appeasement, Islamists extrapolate a culture too weak to defend itself and ripe for conquest. In truth, silence denotes nothing positive about Islam, and appeasement portends nothing about the future of Europe. Moderates simply don’t matter. They filled the Axis Powers before the war. First they were silent witnesses, then appeasers, then enablers and finally victims.
Although appeasement and capitulation are nothing new to the continent --collaborators outnumbered resistance fighters many times over in the last war -- European submission to Muslims isn’t that of a vanquished people before a superior force, as many Muslims seem to believe. Europeans recognize no superiors. That is why they hate Americans and barely tolerate each other. Despite the PC claptrap, Europeans harbor no silly illusions about the equality of cultures. Arrogance is a force more determining of Europe’s future than multiculturalism.
Keep in mind we don’t really know what is happening in Europe because we only know Europe through the actions of its bureaucrats and the mainstream media, and both are farther left than our own. Political correctness has become political repression. Muslims can say whatever they want; all others see the prosecutor. That keeps the lid on things for now, but unless Europeans find a way to open up the marketplace of ideas to permit reasonable debate, even if it is nationalistic and politically incorrect, they stand a good chance of reaping a whirlwind in the coming years.
One common American misconception should be put to rest: Europe’s predicament is not the result of secularism and the abandonment of Christianity. The church has been a spent force for over a century. Liberalism and the left are the agents crippling the West, not secularism. Secularism is the force arising (ever so slowly) to defend it.
In truth, the church is the one doing the abandoning. When you’ll apologize for the Crusades, endorse Islamic instruction in public schools, turn a blind eye to church desecration and the slaughter of Christians, including your own priests, your hour on the stage is pretty much up.
God is dead, and he’s not coming back to life in Europe, not even in Arab garb. The Devil, on the other hand, may be a different matter.
Richard Davis’ immigrant ancestors said good riddance to Europe a couple centuries ago, entered America legally, learned the language and assimilated.
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