Reflections on the Revolution in Europe by Christopher Caldw

[Mahalingam]

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe by Christopher Caldwell
This mild-mannered, mainstream journalist's predictions for Europe's future are devastating, says Ed West.

You might not hear about this book much in the next month, nor even in the next year, but it will affect your life in some way, and that of our country and continent.

Christopher Caldwell is a mild-mannered Financial Times journalist who over the past decade has covered continental Europe (France especially) and its relationship with Islam in particular.

That Caldwell is so mainstream, well-respected and analytical makes his conclusion all the more devastating - that the mass migration of Africans and Asians into Europe since the Second World War was an unprecedented, economically unnecessary and ill-thought-out plan that has had a profoundly negative impact on our way of life.

Furthermore, he says, the mass importation of Muslims at a time when Europe has lost its own faith and Islam has developed a dangerous and powerful radicalism threatens the very freedom of Europe.

Enoch Powell was right, at least in accuracy if not morality. His 1968 prediction about a non-white population of 4.5 million by 2002 was mocked - in reality it was 4.6 million by 2001.

In 1970 he was again scorned for suggesting that Wolverhampton, Birmingham and Inner London would be between a fifth and a quarter non-white by the turn of the century. The figures were 22.2 per cent, 29.6 per cent and 34.4 per cent and rising.

But Powell's predictions of "rivers of blood" turned out to be inaccurate so far because he was out of step; the Tory MP was a passionate believer in the British Empire, while most of his political contemporaries were riddled with liberal white guilt over colonialism and the Holocaust.

Such self-loathing was at the heart of the immigration experiment and later experiments in multiculturalism and political correctness; only a society so racked with self-hatred would have invited foreign labour in such numbers despite the economic benefits being so thin. The economic benefits in the long term, Caldwell argues, have been "puny" and short-term, while the social effects are profound and permanent.

Most of the new immigrants, such as Pakistanis in Yorkshire and Turks in the Ruhr valley, were actually recruited into industries that were already on their last legs, and most immigrant groups took and still take more out of their exchequer then they pay in.

For the indigenous European poor, in particular, immigration has made life harder, but for everyone it brings challenges ("challenges" being a euphemism for problems).

Illegal immigration is handy because illegal immigrants do the jobs no one else wants to, keeping down inflation and labour costs, so allowing Europeans to work 30 hours a week and retire at 55.

The problem is that soon these new immigrants tire of doing the dirty work and new recruits are needed to keep an ever larger number of retirees and other state dependants in villas.

It is a gigantic Ponzi scheme - play today, pay tomorrow - and Europe is starting to pay now, financially and socially. The integration of Pakistanis, Algerians, Moroccans and Turks into England, France, Holland and Germany has been made a lot harder by the rapid and widespread decline of Christianity.

One of the side-effects is the collapse in the European birth rate: Austria is becoming Islamic not because Muslims are having too many children - their birth rate of 2.34 per woman is very close to the optimum - but because atheism is killing the country. Among Austrians who call themselves Catholics, which includes a majority of non-churchgoers and other nominal Christians, the birth rate is 1.32; among those who profess atheism it is 0.86. It is the same everywhere - in Brussels the seven most common boys' names are Mohamed, Adam, Rayan, Ayoub, Mehdi, Amine and Hamza. Leicester and Birmingham will soon be Britain's first-ever majority non-white cities.

And yet the elites have been in total denial about the growth of a Muslim body, arguing that to do so ignores diversity among these communities - which Caldwell compares to denying there is such a thing as a car because Volvos and Volkswagens are different.

As well as growing in size every year, this Muslim population is dis-integrating from the European mainstream; children in German Muslim schools learns six hours of Arabic a day and one of German; in England the veil has become a widespread sight; a British brigade fought in Iraq for al-Qaeda; and Muslim "nationalism" in France has led to the creation of suburban ghettos far worse than anyone realises.

Caldwell compares the French ghetto film L'Haine, which portrayed a mixed Jewish and Arab gang, to West Side Story in its realism.

That simply would not happen in a Muslim suburb. The ironic end result of this post-Holocaust guilt is a surge in anti-Semitism at the end of the century, and a Muslim bloc that has pushed Europe in an increasingly anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic direction. Norway threatened to boycott Israeli goods at the same time as Norwegians were being attacked in Gaza over the Mohammed cartoon affair. In France there were black African gangs like Tribu Ka, who roamed around Jewish areas like a "postmodern Freikorps".

The collapse of Christianity, and the introduction of novel morals such as the belief in sexual freedom and gay equality, totally at odds with both Muslim culture and European culture of only half a century ago, has made conflict between Europe and the new Europeans even harder. That is why surveys consistently show Muslims and non-Muslims thinking the other side are "disrespectful" to women, or why a large minority of young British Muslims advocate the death penalty for apostasy or homosexuality.

Can Europe be the same? Clearly not. Can we reach some happy compromise that peacefully integrates such large communities and avoids the conflicts that have plagued such multi-cultural countries in the past? Probably not.

Pim Fortuyn in Holland offered the best hope of a non-racist, liberal Europe that believed in itself; after his murder the future lies either with Nicolas Sarkozy, who believes in republican integration, or the likes of Geert Wilders, whose implacable hostility to Islam is increasingly shared across Europe.

This is a fascinating, earth-shattering account of the most radical change in European history.

Ed West

[naar boven]

Deze columnist was wat minder te spreken over het boek van Caldwell.

"What of weaponry, poverty, and environmental challenges?" vraagt hij zich af.

Het is typisch dat verdedigers van de islam nooit iets beters weten te verzinnen dan met andere misstanden aan te komen.

New Book Stokes Fear of a Muslim Europe
By Bruce B. Lawrence

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe tells of a tide of Muslim immigration ravaging European culture, and threatening the future of Western civilization. Its author, Christopher Caldwell, makes Samuel "clash of civilizations" Huntington look like a benign minor prophet.

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West
By Christopher Caldwell
(Doubleday, 2009)

This is a full-throttle polemic, a meanspirited book meant to raise alarms, stoke fears, and tame a danger at once unseen and misunderstood yet pernicious and widespread.

The danger is Islam, the villains are Muslim immigrants, the terrain is the West, and the outcome is certain defeat for European culture—unless the tide of Muslim immigration, which threatens to become a tsunami, can be stemmed.

But how? This book, despite the myriad cases set forth in its 350 pages of rant and rave, offers no explicit steps to stem the Muslim immigrant tide allegedly sweeping Western Europe, ravaging its European culture, and threatening the future of Western civilization.

For those who thought that Samuel Huntingon was an alarmist, Christopher Caldwell makes him look like a benign, minor prophet. The latter appears to be saying: “It’s not about the clash of civilizations, dummy, it’s about the near-term victory of the enemy stranger over the helpless native. It’s not a clash abroad, it’s a surrender: a total, irreversible defeat at home.”

Instead of paraphrasing, let me offer the final salvo of Caldwell’s unending series of fearmongering quotations: “It is certain that Europe will emerge changed from its confrontation with Islam… When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.”

The key word here is ‘change.’ Change is deemed to be bad, if also inevitable. And here the culture clash is between two blocs. The European bloc is defined by its core values: “individualism, democracy, freedom, and human rights” (p. 83), unquestionable goods that Europe has defended in the past and that have not (and, according to Caldwell's logic, cannot) have an equivalent in Islamic culture. Instead, what Europeans face is a series of unprecedented problems, unforeseen because of their blind embrace of immigration as an element of their contemporary sociopolitical involvement in world politics. Europe did not produce refugees or victims but it has to house them, and these same refugees and/or victims of other people’s wars now threaten the very fabric of their own “insecure, malleable, relativistic culture.”

The primary danger, therefore, is immigration. In a catalogue of problems facing 21st-century Europe, Caldwell puts immigration at the head of the list: “immigration, Islamism, bankruptcy of welfare states, financial panic, and the every-man-for-himself feeling that people got living in a consumer society.”

What of weaponry, poverty, and environmental challenges?

Bill Coffin, that ‘radical’ of the sixties, agreed with the second President Bush that there was indeed an “axis of evil.” In 2002, Coffin declared: “President Bush rightly spoke of an axis of evil, but it is not Iraq, North Korea, or Iran. It consists of environmental degradation, pandemic poverty, and a world awash with weapons.”

For Caldwell these are not real problems. It is cultural values, the immigrant challenge to them, and above all, the Islamic offense to European norms and values that is the greatest change, the ‘revolution’ that is sweeping Europe and sweeping aside its noble past.

Demagoguery against Islam and Muslims is lauded in this book. Those who are lampooned for xenophobia should instead be praised. Not content to extol Enoch Powell and Marie Le Pen for their ‘insight,’ Caldwell excoriates Dutch, British, and Scandinavian parliamentarians but especially President Sarkozy of France for their concessions to ‘diversity.’

Reserving his strongest condemnation for “the double language” of Tariq Ramadan, Caldwell cannot find a single modern-day Muslim leader worthy of praise, unless it be Aayan Hirsi Ali. The Somali-Dutch activist, of course, is no longer a Muslim, and that is what fills Caldwell with glee: “More than any other Westerner,” he crows, “Ayaan Hirsi Ali has made the case for the superiority of the Western conception of women’s rights over the Muslim one.”

Sadly, this journalist-turned-polemicist is hailed by Faoud Ajami in the New York Times as a clarion voice who “has written the most sustained and thoughtful treatment of the subject (immigration, Islam, and the West) to date.” Pace that high-five imprimatur for one of its own guild, Caldwell is less an objective journalist than an alarmist rhetorician. He clogs the reader with untrammeled, and unqualified, binaries: us vs. them, immigrants vs. natives, Islam against the West. This book amounts to a series of pseudo-propositional arguments that frame Islam as a bane, Muslims as a scourge. Their youthful bulge forms a network power that will afflict the ‘innocent, naive, unsuspecting’ West with an unstoppable, and irreversible, pathology. It will not only produce change but the end of a way of life, Western civilization as we know—and were once taught to love—it.

For those who resort to YouTube, it would be more advantageous to watch the 7 1/2 minute video “Muslim Demographics” than to read (or try to read) Caldwell’s screed. Though he is not financed by the Christian Right, his message is identical to that of the initiators, writers, and promoters of “Muslim Demographics.” The tagline, which precedes this grossly deterministic, shrilly casuistic video, declares: “Islam will overwhelm Christendom unless Christians recognize the demographic realities, begin reproducing again, and share the Gospel with Muslims.”

The main difference between “Muslim Demographics” and Caldwell’s book is the action plan—the anonymous authors of the former have one (propagate and proselytize), while the latter only has shibboleth: “Watch out—Allah may be guiding your neighbor, and that is un-European!”