If you're near a radio dial this week, on Wednesday and Thursday I'll be back behind the Golden EIB Microphone, guest-hosting for Rush on America's Number One radio show, live from 12 noon Eastern/9am Pacific. If you are in possession of the necessary receiving apparatus, I hope you'll tune in either on one of 600 radio stations across the US or via iHeartRadio livestream or your Rush 24/7 subscription.
~Anybody who's written as much as I have over the decades gets a ton of stuff wrong. But one thing I got right, very early, was that Islam sends its sons to the west not as immigrants, or refugees, but as colonizers. From page 42 of my bestselling book America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It: "Europe is the colony now."
That was 2006. Daniel Pipes was a little wary of my thesis back then, but returns to the question of Europe's - or more specifically France's - future in an examination of two novels separated by four decades, Jean Raspail's The Camp Of The Saints and Michel Houellebecq's Submission. He concludes:
Jumping another 42 years ahead, what story might a futuristic novel published in 2057 tell? Such thinkers as Oriana Fallaci, Bat Ye'or, and Mark Steyn would expect an account that assumes Islam's victory and narrates the chasing down of France's few remaining Christian believers. But I predict nearly the opposite: a report that assumes Camus' great replacement failed and imagines a violent repression of Muslims (in the words of Claire Berlinski) "shambling out of the mists of European history" accompanied by a nativist French reassertion.
The key word there is "shambling". I'd say "tottering", and in need of a walker: The neo-fascist resurgence may be leaving things, demographically speaking, a little too late. It's hard to turn to a strong man on a horse when the strong man is no longer strong enough to get up on the horse. In The Weekly Standard, contemplating Western Europe's headlong rush to civilizational suicide, Jean Kaufman riffs on my recent visit to Sweden:
Not only do the countries of Western Europe seem to be rejecting national individualism, but their leaders seem to want their citizens to reject what Mann called "the European tradition as a whole" in favor of accepting a large number of people from third-world countries without expecting or demanding that they assimilate. What's more, the Western European leaders are trying to impose both of these renunciations on the countries of Eastern Europe, which are still loath to cooperate. One culture is seen as just as desirable and ethical as another to Western Europeans raised on the gospel of cultural and moral relativism, who have been taught that tolerance almost without limits is the highest good.
That brings us to reason number four, which can be characterized as a combination of inertia and ennui that seems to have taken over much of Western Europe. Here's Steyn again:
'But, just as I took my seat [on a train from Copenhagen to Malmö] and settled in, a gaggle of Abdul's fellow "refugees" swarmed in, young bearded men and a smaller number of covered women, the lads shooing away those first-class ticket-holders not as nimble in securing their seats as I. The conductor gave a shrug, the great universal shorthand for there's-nothing-I-can-do...
'There were more shrugs at Malmö, when I asked a station official about it. He told me that, on the train from Stockholm the other day, a group of "refugees" had looted the café car. The staff were too frightened to resist. "Everyone wants a quiet life," he offered by way of explanation. Sweden prides itself on accepting more "refugees" per capita than any other European country, and up to a thousand a day are registering for asylum in Malmö.'
That last paragraph unites two already-mentioned elements: the lack of energy to change anything, and pride in being the charitable ones who cannot be accused of bigotry.
So the choice remains as I put it all those years ago: the glass is either fifteen-sixteenths empty (civilizational exhaustion) or one-sixteenth full (bloody fascist resurgence). Very sad.
On a related theme, Daniel Greenfield looks at the matter from Islam's viewpoint:
Outside Israel, agriculture in the Middle East is sparse. The strong attachment to the land that is found among Israelis or Europeans is absent. Feudalism associates working the land with inferiority and feudalism is a more recent memory among Muslims than among most Europeans. Success means expanding into someone else's land and living off the spoils rather than staying and working your own...
Western societies seek to settle permanently. They plan for the long term. Nomadic tribals burn through resources, viewing cities and institutions as assets to strip, raid and dispose of, before moving on. The Islamic migration is not a new phenomenon and Europe is not meant to be its stopping point.
Some years ago I said Islam was like an industrial-scale version of the small Abenaki settlements in my corner of northern New England. They settled somewhere, killed and devoured everything around them, and, when there was nothing left to kill and devour, moved on to fresher fields. Europe is a very lush pasture.
~Turning from total civilizational collapse to my cat album, thank you for your continued support for my new CD Feline Groovy: Songs for Swingin' Cats, dedicated to my own beloved cat Marvin. It has a four-and-a-half star rating over at iTunes and a ton of five-star reviews at Amazon. I liked this one from Glen Flint:
Mellow covers of some rock and roll classics. The most laid back treatment of Cat Scratch Fever you could imagine!
I'm not sure "I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Tat" counts as a rock'n'roll classic, but we do our best. If you buy only one feline concept album this year, make it Feline Groovy.
~My book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn is just out in audio format - and narrated by yours truly. It's a Top Three bestseller on the political humor hit parade. Currently it's available for download, but if you'd prefer it in good old-fashioned CD form that's coming soon and you can pre-order it right now.