The Decline and Fall of European Civilization

Of course, there is more to Western civilization than Europe. Still, Europe is one of two central loci of the civilization. If European culture collapses under a wave of Muslim immigrants, we in America will have a problem.

Writing in The Federalist, John Daniel Davidson (via Maggie’sFarm) reminds us of a prophetic 1973 novel by a Frenchman, Jean Raspail. It’s title, The Camp of the Saints.

In his book Raspail described how Europe was invaded and eventually transformed by an army of unarmed immigrants. They did not come to contribute. They did not come to work and achieve. They did not come to adapt to the local culture. They wanted to preserve their culture and to take what they did not earn.

Davidson describes the novel:

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.

Why do the Europeans accept this cultural colonization. The reason is: Western guilt. It presents itself as compassionate feelings for the world’s downtrodden and tells us that we are responsible for their failures and that we owe them recompense.

Didn’t Bernie Sanders proclaim yesterday that we have a right to health care because we are human beings? A noble sentiment, no doubt, but the question was really about the constitution? Where in the constitution, Bret Baier should have asked, does it say that we have a right to health care?

The Sanders shuffle, commonplace in the humanitarian left, is a dodge. True enough, we are all human beings, but that only means that we belong to the human species. You do not have to do anything to be a human being. And there is nothing you can do that will cause you to be expelled from the human species. Thus, identifying yourself and everyone else as human is a recipe for amorality.

Yet, all human beings belong to groups. They all follow rules and principles laid down by cultures. The multicultural left would have it that all cultures are created equal because all human beings are created equal. It’s a grand cosmopolitan vision.

It sounds perfectly innocent and innocuous, until the moment comes when the West is invaded by Muslims who reject the values of our civilization, values that are held by both the left and the right. At that point, we discover that this mushy humanitarian cosmopolitanism has softened us up and prepared us to be occupied by an alien culture.

It is, as I have often remarked, a guilt culture. If all people are equal and if some do better than others, then those who do better are cheats and thieves and oppressors. If other civilizations have failed, we who have succeeded are at fault. Being guilty, we must be punished or we must do penance. One way is to allow people from alien civilizations to molest Western women with impunity.

Davidson explains the point Raspail makes in his novel:

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.

  

Like Angela Merkel, the French officials fictionalized in Raspail’s novel believe that the refugees are “citizens of the world.” (Where have we heard that before?) It sounded innocent enough when Barack Obama intoned it in Germany. How is it working out now that Germany has let in over a million refugees? But, the guilt culture tells us that we have no right to be judgmental, to say that our Western civilization is better and that their culture is worse.

In Davidson’s words:

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!’”

Strangely, those who are most vocal in defending cultural aliens, which does not only include Mrs. Merkel, but also the multiculturalist left, will see their own rights, the right to free expression, the rights of women, the rights of homosexuals, the rights of Jews… severely circumscribed by the marauding army that refuses to adapt to the local culture.

After all, it was only yesterday that a Sharia patrol beat a man senseless in Vienna, Austria. The man’s crime: he told the patrol to stop harassing his wife and daughter over their dress.

The Daily Mail reported:

Austrians fear parts of Vienna are becoming no-go areas after a father was attacked by a 'Sharia patrol' when he told them to stop threatening his wife and daughter for not being correctly dressed.

As various factions of migrants stake claims to territory in the city, it has been reported that the self-styled Sharia patrols have been visiting clubs and bars in the Millennium City area to make sure Chechen women were properly dressed and acting appropriately.

However, when one Austrian man tried to step in to stop the patrol from hassling his Chechen wife and daughter, he ended up being hospitalised.

Today, the Daily Mail reports that a town in northern Sweden has warned women not to go out alone after dark. The cause: multiple sexual assaults perpetrated by non-Swedish men. Other cities and towns in Europe have issued similar warnings. So much for women's freedom to travel. 

The question that Raspail posed in his novel and that Davidson asks in his column is this: can Europe assert the value of its own civilization? Can it accept that its civilization and its culture are better than others? Can it defend its civilization and culture against those who would exploit its weakness—it’s guilt—in order to destroy it from within.

Davidson concludes:

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.