No Decent Answers: On Douglas Murray’s “The Strange Death of Europe”, by John Derbyshire.
Murray’s subject is the catastrophe that has been visited on Europe — including Britain, and with some side commentary on British-settler nations — by mass Third World immigration, especially of Muslims, in the decades since WW2. …
Elite contempt gave rise to the English Defence League:
[Murray] is very good on the vindictiveness with which the political and opinion-forming classes have met the concerns of ordinary working- and middle-class Europeans.
Consider for example the case of Luton, a small English town thirty miles north of London. Murray tells the story in Chapter 14.
In 2009 the Royal Anglian Regiment, on their return from Afghanistan, was given a homecoming parade through the town of Luton. This is one of the towns in England in which “white British” are in a minority (45 percent) … and the town has an especially large Muslim community. Many locals turned out for the parade and were angered by the sight of extremists from the Islamist group al-Muhajiroun heckling and protesting the soldiers as they moved through the town centre … Enraged members of the public attempted to confront the protesters, but the British police protected the protesters and threatened the enraged locals with arrest.
In the weeks that followed, some of these locals tried to organize a protest opposing the Islamists, but they were prevented from getting to the same Town Hall to which al-Muhajiroun had previously walked.
It was those events that inspired the formation of the English Defence League (EDL), who in subsequent years tried to organize protest all around the U.K.
The subsequent history of the EDL is somewhat more colorful than Murray tells, but there is no doubt that, as he says, “At no stage did the police or local government, the national police or government, consider that the EDL had a point.”
The EDL and its leader, the pseudonymous Tommy Robinson, were relentlessly harassed by the British authorities, while Muslim gangs like the ones that kidnapped and gang-raped white girls in Rotherham and elsewhere were ignored for fear that prosecution of them would be thought “racist.” …
Swedes expressed overwhelming opposition to massive third word immigration as early as 1993, but the elites ignored them:
It’s been the same all over Western Europe. In 1993 the Swedish tabloid newspaper Expressen published an opinion poll revealing that 63 percent of Swedes wanted immigrants to go back to their home countries. An accompanying op-ed by the paper’s editor-in-chief, Erik Månsson, called this “an opinion bomb about to go off.” The owners of the paper fired Mr. Månsson. …
Enoch is proving more correct than the elites:
At all points from the 1968 defenestration of Enoch Powell onwards, and still today, the attitude among the European governing and intellectual classes has been that everything will work out just fine so long as native Europeans stop complaining. If they won’t stop, they must be stopped, so that … everything will work out just fine.
Now, deep into the crisis, it is ever more clear that the thick-skulled grumbling proles were right and their masters were wrong.
Rampant virtue signaling is threatening the West’s existence:
Guilt — over white colonialism, slavery, the Holocaust — has, says Murray, “become a moral intoxicant in Western Europe.”
People imbibe it because they like it: they get high on it. It lifts them up and exalts them. Rather than being people responsible for themselves and answerable to those they know, they become the self-appointed representatives of the living and dead, the bearers of a terrible history as well as the potential redeemers of mankind. From being a nobody one becomes a somebody. …
An interesting question is why Europeans are so susceptible to this “moral intoxicant.” Plenty of other peoples—well-nigh all, I think—have historical crimes on their record, but don’t go around lamenting the fact.
Mongolians are not flagellating themselves over the Sack of Baghdad, nor are Manchus … holding a Sorry Day for their very brutal conquest of Ming China. …
Why is it only Europeans who find it so intoxicating to wallow in race guilt? Is it some genetic peculiarity, like the issues American Indians have with liquor? One would like to know whether the behavioral geneticists have anything to say about this.
The conclusion of the book is a warning:
Day by day the continent of Europe is not only changing but is losing any possibility of a soft landing in response to such change.
An entire political class have failed to appreciate that many of us who live in Europe love the Europe that was ours. We do not want our politicians, through weakness, self-hatred, malice, tiredness, or abandonment to change our home into an utterly different place. And while Europeans may be almost endlessly compassionate, we may not be boundlessly so.
The public may want many contradictory things, but they will not forgive politicians if — whether by accident or design — they change our continent completely. If they do so change it then many of us will regret this quietly. Others will regret it less quietly. Prisoners of the past and of the present, for Europeans there seem finally to be no decent answers to the future. Which is how the fatal blow will finally land.
