Michael Totten on Europe: things fall apart
This article by Michael Totten is a review of a book by James Kirchick entitled The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. The most important line of the Totten article is “the West is losing the will to defend itself.”
But we already know that.
More about what’s happening in Europe:
“The Visegrad Four regional alliance of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia now shows signs of developing into a populist, neo-authoritarian rump within the EU,” Kirchick writes. Czech President MiloÅ¡ Zeman is the staunchest supporter of Vladimir Putin on the continent, even going so far as to deny, in the style of Baghdad Bob, that Russia invaded Ukraine at all. His campaign, not coincidentally, was funded by the Russian energy company Lukoil.
Now would be the time for Western Europe to straighten its spine. Instead, it’s doing the opposite.
And the situation, as well as the reaction to it, is more potentially problematic and extreme in Europe than here:
Britain, though, has a serious problem of its own apart from its fateful Brexit decision: the country’s political center has all but collapsed…
What’s happening in the United States is just one act in an epic drama unfolding across the entire Western world. That drama could take a much darker turn in Europe, where the far-left and far-right draw upon a relatively recent fascist and communist past that is entirely absent in the United States.
The “migrant” problem is worse in Europe, too:
“What made Merkel’s decision to open Europe’s gates to an untold number of Muslim migrants so problematic,” Kirchick writes, “is that the continent has done such a poor job integrating the Muslims who already live there.” Even the European-born children of immigrants tend to be thought of and treated as guests in Europe rather than permanent residents and citizens…
Europe, like anywhere else in the world, needs a middle path between open borders and Fortress Europe, but the political parties of the mainstream right as well as the left have spent years branding anyone who utters even a meek protest as racist. Voters who are disturbed that a million refugees can arrive at their door all at once because a foreign head of state said it’s okay have only one voting booth option””the far-right.
Yeats said it about a century ago:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
“Europe, like anywhere else in the world, needs a middle path between open borders and Fortress Europe, ”
Nice hopes and a nice dream. What Europe is going to get instead was foreseen long ago:
“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”
That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century.
Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.”
It will end in blood. Depend upon it.
“The Visegrad Four regional alliance of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia now shows signs of developing into a populist, neo-authoritarian rump within the EU,” Kirchick writes
neo-authoritarian? Well, there’s another lie.
I can’t speak to Slovakia, am doubtful that the Czechs will embrace authoritarianism but neither Hungary or Poland’s leadership are authoritarian. Hungary’s Orban is one of the few European leaders warning of the coming Holocaust and who sees clearly the EU’s underlying rationale for its pro-Muslim ‘migrant’ stance, which is not humanitarian. That’s fodder for the liberal rubes. He is also the only one I’ve read who has publicly outed George Soros’ hands at work.
Vanderleun is right in that there will be much bloodletting, whether it will be enough to save Western Europe is another question. If not, I foresee Eastern Europe becoming part of the Russian Federation simply to escape involuntary incorporation into the Ummah.
At the Battle of Vienna the Polish King Jan Sobieski commanded the European troops at the behest of then Pope.
Poles will never relinquish that legacy, there will be no Muslim incursion it to Poland, as a nation they are steadfast in honoring their past. I’m a second generation Polish American and even i heard this from my Euro born grandparents!
What I can not wrap my head around is the idea that those wanting to escape 3rd world failed states have any right to enter successful societies and suck them dry while committing rape and murder. Why should Europe or the rest of the West accept them? These ‘refugees’ bring with them the same attitudes that made their former states a failure. We see this same problem when liberals leave high tax, crazy California for Colorado only to agitate for the same policies they fled.
Is it any wonder Eastern Europe, which wanted to join Western Europe, might now see strong man Russia as a shelter from the storm? Stupid is as stupid does. Merkel, Lofven, and the rest need to watch Forrest Gump over and over again until their eyes bleed. Stupid is as stupid does.
“the West is losing the will to defend itself.”
Just so. The blame America first crowd, the multi-culti warriors, the pacifists, and those who have not informed themselves about political Islam, which includes all of the left, much of the middle, and even some libertarians; no longer have the will to stand up for Western Civilization. Some of them will go to war for open borders, transgender bathrooms, and other such deeply held, very important values. But Western Civilization, not a chance.
Europe’s behavior is not a mystery.
Whitaker Chambers in 1952 observed that the majority of the West’s younger intelligentsia had accepted Communism’s soulless view of mankind.
Concurrently, the theory of “trans-nationalism”; that nationalism is responsible for wars was embraced by Europe’s intelligentsia after WWII’s devastation and, promulgated in its universities for decades resulting in Europe’s current leadership now engaged in implementing open borders to erase cultural bonds as a prelude to a greater Europe free of its divisive nationalities.
It’s not coincidental that George Soros’ umbrella organization is the “Open Society Foundations”…
The current and future strife is viewed as a regrettable breaking of eggs to make their Utopian omelet.
The humanitarian rationale in support of open unrestricted migration being offered to the public is propaganda for their liberal useful idiots. Anyone who resists going along with the program is of course, a fascist racist. In Europe, no greater crime is possible.
Reading this, I couldn’t help but think of Gondor’s long vigil. And then that reminded me of Tolkien’s descriptions of the Long Defeat and the Fading. I do believe the West now lacks all conviction. Hell, we’re not only not supposed to be proud, we’re supposed to be ashamed of our own civilization.
And it just keeps getting worse, year by year. I’m afraid we’ve run out of steam. There’s no vitality anymore.
It’s worse. Consider Rotherham. When it blew up, a MP accused the Rotherham cops of ignoring the atrocity because they were afraid of being accused of Islamophobia.
No, said, the cops. It was because we didn’t notice it.
Nope. Turns out the MP was right.
Search for “rotherham” multiculturalism rape. You’ll get hit after hit about those in a position to do something who looked the other way to avoid getting crossways with multiculturalism. Fourteen hundred young girls victims of the culture of diversity.
“In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner.”
― Eric Ambler (The Mask of Dimitrios, 1939)
Written before the war, but looking at the politicians in Europe these days, can you point to anyone who is better than the appeasers of the 1930s?
The Kirchick comment cited by Totten is right on. Working next to someone in a factory or buying a doner from someone doesn’t mean that people are interacting at the family level.There has to be sharing at a more intimate level for integration to occur. And, of, course, in larger immigrant enclaves, this is even harder.
This is a bit OT, but I just read a post from Allahpundit at Hot Air about Obama speaking at the Evangelische Kirchentage this year in Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate. Allahpundit makes it sound as though Merkel invited him and that she had previously invited him when he was running for office. She didn’t. In fact, she denied him the use of the Brandenburg Gate and he had to relocate his speech to the Victory Tower. I get a little annoyed when Merkel is put into the deplorable category and therefore everything she ever did or does is now
awful. I don’t mind people sharing opinions or trying to learn more about foreign affairs, but I sure wish they would know a bit more about what they don’t know.
Having recently re-read Guns of August, I can appreciate the desire of many Europeans to do away with the nationalism that gave rise to German aggression twice in the space of a quarter century. But the open border cure is worse that the disease of nationalism. Allowing foreigners to settle your land, foreigners who have no appreciation of your culture and no desire to be absorbed into it, is nothing more nor less than an invasion. Who would welcome an invasion? A leader with no respect for his/her own society (like an East German, raised to hate the west for example) — that is madness. This is not the center going soft, this is the top deciding to destroy the country she has been elected to lead. This same tendency could be ascribed to Obama: hate for the country he is elected to lead.
As for the French and Brits, who can understand what motivates this same madness? Perhaps there is some sentimental tie to the old colonial system that allows hordes of north Africans into France and of Pakistanis into UK, but is there no sense of “integrate or leave”?
I keep coming back to self-hatred as the explanation of the national suicide we are seeing. Oh, you might temper that with the need for labor, as in Germany, but the term “guest worker” implies they are not expected to become Germans. Merkel has changed that dramatically. To allow Muslim “immigrants” in Germany, Sweden, France and UK to build their own enclaves and import their own legal system is to accept that your civilization will disappear. Do the leaders of those countries really anticipate and accept this? Do we here in the USA accept this?
Apparently we do. We have become hosts to a foreign parasite. When will understanding of this arrive? And when will leaders understand that ultimately, parasites kill their host — and thus themselves.
Ex Pat:
Thanks again for perspective of one living there, better than the rants from this side of the pond.
Two recently learned British stats have caused me to shorten my blood-in-the-streets timeline estimate.
1. London since 2001 – 500 closed churches and 423 new mosques.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10124/london-mosques-churches
2. Same article- “According to Innes Bowen, writing in The Spectator, only two of the 1,700 mosques in Britain today follow the modernist interpretation of Islam, compared with 56% in the United States. The Wahhabis control six percent of mosques in the UK, while the fundamentalist Deobandi control up to 45%.”
OM,
I can clearly remember how much I had to learn when I moved here. Everything is just a little different. Meat is sold differently. Pots and pans have different names and sizes: baking sheets aren’t put on a rack; they fit into the grooves on the side of the oven. If you have guests, you have to serve drinks in the right glass (I have about four sets).
I can imagine how hard it is to adjust if you come from a very different culture, which is why immigrants try to stick together. But if they can’t mix at a personal level, they don’t figure out how much room to leave their kids and the kids are stuck in a very unsatisfying middle. It’s no wonder that 15 year olds look to someone who can give them a line to follow between Western porn and the Islamic strong-man model. It’s also a bit like Hillbilly Elegy, where even if you go to good schools, there is so much more you have to learn to fit in. I guess that is why I’m always interested in visiting the places normal people go when I visit other countries. 5 Star restaurants are boringly the same.
Expat:
In my business we have a saying, “One ahh shit, wipes out a hundred atta boys”.
The migrant wave is just now starting to reap the whirlwind, it will get worse. Thats one big goof. Even if Merkel was perfect from here on out, do you think it will counter balance the continuing damage of the great migration?
Some booboo’s are not recoverable as long as the person responisible is never held to account. The German voters will get their chance, let us wait and see what they do. They will decide their own fate.
Self-hatred is probably not that rare a phenomenon.
Rad-fem (and not so rad, actually) feminist ideology of the sort which espouses the doctrine of the “tyranny of biology”, could be at root, what else than that, albeit gilded with a patina of intellectual conceit?
And certainly, hedonic nihilism, is a kind of self-hatred … a flight from the complete given, into whatever distraction is available through the stimulation of whatever faculty it is that the former man, now re-imaged as a cluster of appetites enclosed in a skin bag, happens to feel is most … pleasing.
The intellectuals of the west are too often outright nihilists, often suicidal, and many times diagnosable as mentally ill.
Math is too hard, Sit-ups are too exhausting. Striving for the one, the good, and the beautiful, is “fascist”.
Even melody becomes a victim, as your young piano prodigy wisely observed.
Speaking of which, I first noticed that attack myself in my early days in college, when reading review type literature, which seemed to espouse the view that melody was emblematic of all that was wrong with oppressive western civilization. Too rational on the one hand, too sentimental on the other; too otherworldly, too mundane; too lily white in outlook, too emotionally wan; too clumsy and too soporific … too whatever dog the angry critic wished to flog.
Mentally ill cranks with a pen and a printing press.
We should make a edifying list of progressive intellectuals who have died by their own hands, or suffered the gruesome results of heeding their own rotten advice. It might not give the answers, but it will show where they do not lie. Shulamith Firestone, the children of Karl Marx; Jacques Hébert; Ruth Benedict; The Singing Nun whatever her name was … Hell must be boiling over with them.
You don’t need to confine it to intellectuals, you can start with the Kennedy Klan and their family values.
One begins to wonder what’s left to save. Certainly not a “commitment to a shared fate” above all else, as Rawls would have us believe.
You must be talking about cordials and brandies, and wines and sherries and all that stuff: not just milk and lemonade.
Well … it’s true that a dry martini served in the bottom of an 8 inch tall, dishwasher scratched water tumbler, does leave something to be desired.
Though a lightweight double old fashioned glass will do well enough. LOL
Ideologies dont work and the point of the elite is to keep trying to change the laws of nature by force, by killing, by fear…
it cant work, ideologies never work as no mind can incompass the past as well as the present and know the future… just look how the kids prepared by public schools for manufacturing have no work as the jobs went away and they were schooled for a future that the elites trained them for that never came cause they were wrong..
and one maladaptive thing on top of another is the order of the day when elites are in charge and reality is held at bay that would align them and with feedback create stability!!!!
this Way of the Universe could not be adequately described in words, and that it would be insulting both to its unlimited power and to the intelligent human mind to attempt to do so. Still, its nature could be understood, and those who cared the most about it, and the life from which it was inseparable, understood it best
🙂
That reference to the history of Gondor from carl is apropos, I think. Tolkien didn’t really go too much into the culture of Gondor as an entity distinct from its old Numenorean roots, but I wondered sometimes at how the people eventually adapted to that long, long grind of millennia of war and watch against the Dark Tower and its cronies. It’s interesting that the only thing in our civilizational experience that really compares to that is indeed the West vs. Islam. And even then, I think Americans wouldn’t feel that comparison as much because of our relatively recent national encounter with it.
I looked up the Evangelischer Kirchentag meeting that expat mentioned, what with His Majesty about to appear there. Not that it surprises me. I attended one once as a representative of the evangelical student group of which I was part when I lived there. Walking around and taking things in while I was off shift, some of the ideas represented there are, while mostly harmless, rather fringe. I think I still have some of the brochures I collected somewhere.
Bedford-Strohm’s quote in the press release captures a good chunk of the problem: he asserts “Anyone who is pious has to be politically minded.” Why? Really, why? Do the monks on Mt. Athos or in the Thebaid somehow come up lacking because they aren’t out being activists? And of course, it’s understood that it has to be the “right kind” of politics in order to count.
Thinking of taking a trip to Europe before things go sideways, Hungary has made it onto my short list largely because of Orban. I may go next year – this year is off the table for various reasons. But I take some comfort that, precisely because we have the Visegrad Four, there is Europe and then there is Europe. It’s not just one place that’s all of the same mind, thank God.
parker–“What I can not wrap my head around is the idea that those wanting to escape 3rd world failed states have any right to enter successful societies and suck them dry while committing rape and murder. Why should Europe or the rest of the West accept them? These ‘refugees’ bring with them the same attitudes that made their former states a failure. We see this same problem when liberals leave high tax, crazy California for Colorado only to agitate for the same policies they fled.”
On my 15 minute drive into the office here in the San Fernando Valley, I see furniture and myriad items thrown out onto parkways; traverse pothole/poorly managed streets; see abandoned carts dotting the landscape. This and many other unhappy realities, the result of unabated illegal alien migration. We haven’t begun to experience what will be the result of welcoming those that wear burkas (now seen in our local Costco) compliments of the US taxpayer. Ignorance of the constructs that were put in place by our forbears will have its consequences. A veteran recently pointed out that many of those that fought our country’s wars, died and in these recent times, the ones that stayed behind went to college, and became the administrators and instructors at the college; hence the foolishness abounding.
“where the far-left and far-right draw upon a relatively recent fascist and communist past”
But the Fascists and Communists were all socialists.
“Fascist” is ill-used, usually out of ignorance and for Leftist propaganda purposes. What was “fascist”? Only Italy.
Communism is the great evil, and we seem headed there, or to an equal form of universally oppressive dictatorship. We will all be equally unhappy, though whites will be more unhappy than melanotics.
That World War I should be attributed to nationalism is rather bizarre. Nationalism was the use of national slogans and symbols (e.g. Uncle Sam) to promote civilian approbation of the war. WWI was the result of the European Ruling Class being broken into two conflicting groups. Recall that it was the assassination of the Archduke of Austria in Sarajevo by an upstart, an anarchist, that started the cascade into industrialized slaughter of millions of conscripts. And that the elite Woodrow Wilson, after campaigning against American involvement and winning his 2nd term, who put America into the war.
On the whole, I favor the Far Right. Francisco Franco saved Spain from the revolutionary Left, and of course got little credit for that. Pinochet saved Chile from Allende, and was hounded by European justice warriors for that. Batista’s Cuba was a much better place for most Cubans than the Castro regime.
So it goes.
Geoffrey B for the win:
Bingo.
Can’t have “Western” society – democratic, respecting the individual and their property – without widespread acceptance of the Judeo-Christian view of humans as children of One divinity, given free will by that divinity.
“Liberals” have created a false narrative in which liberal, Western societies have progressed beyond – or somehow can jettison – the free West’s religious roots while maintaining the secular structure of freedom-n-democracy. Some even think Western liberal humanism is a triumph over nasty, judgmental Judaism and Christianity.
We are now witnessing a neo-pagan revolution (devolution? recession?) that starts with Westerner elites no longer viewing themselves and G-d’s children, or society as a Judeo-Christian brotherhood.
The following list of “progressive” issues is more accurately read as a catalog the attack on transcendent Judeo Christian personhood – and the limitation of government power against that individual person:
Legalization of prostitution (and importing Eastern-European sex slaves)
Abortion on demand
Euthanasia – now being forced on the elderly and minors.
Normalization of homosexuality and gender disphoria
Return of concubinage/Severing of father’s connection to children (AKA “it takes a village” – a pagan village!)
Inequality before the law replacing equality as the goal of racial/victim group politics
I’ve now read the Totten article, and his apparently, or superficially, or hopefully, (take your pick of adverb) evenhanded dealing with the situation.
And after finishing, I cannot grasp what real point he is trying to make nor what he would see done. He prefers vanilla to chocolate, and thinks we should too? Or maybe he suggests we should but would not be so bold as to say one is better than the other … objectively speaking that is.
Yeah, well, people vote their interests as they see them, or they don’t. They stand up for their own lives, offspring, and aims, or they don’t. They buy into the secular redemption-through-masochism meme, or they don’t. They get shivers of satisfaction up their spines and thrilling tingles down their legs at the thought of being socially buggered for the sake of ‘Human Solidarity Without Limits” â„¢, or they think it is stupid … or at least pointless.
He’s diagnosed the problem currently afoot, but he has no cure to offer. Or none that everyone is interested in buying; since some see no problem, and the others having already been there, and done that, think it turned out for crap.
And of the latter, their response has been to say, “Fu*k this sh*t; and them; and the horse they rode in on. And I don’t care any more.”.
And since we are all just purposeless beings in a meaningless universe, expressing our creative impulses in what is an objectively value-free reality … why, it’s all good (or equally not) which ever way it turns out.
So why worry?
Ben David says:
Yes, well, western elites have not viewed themselves as God’s children for a long long time. They were however able to use the inertia of the past, and to direct rhetorical appeals using natural law and biblical language at the hoi polloi in order to peddle a human solidarity theme which they personally found socially advantageous; even though the words in their mouths were devoid of any substantive content.
I do not know what the Jewish vision of the human body is, or even if there is one enunciated in the Pentateuch; but a certain Jew of around 30 AD is reputed to have referred to the body as the temple of the spirit; and thus framed the way in which man should understand his material being.
Madonna, she of current fame that is, and not the Madonna of Renaissance art, has, cuing off of this sacred principle, cleverly announced that her body is not a temple of the spirit, but a playground.
Albeit one obviously going to seed.
Grant her for the sake of argument, her principle. What, upon thoughtful consideration is there as residuum, when you look upon … it …?
This thread also brought this book to mind:
From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life
By Jacques Barzun [Published less than four months before 9/11/2001]
A review from Booklist:
“Others have written about the end of Western culture, but none with more cogent erudition than Barzun. With a poise borne of decades of distinguished scholarship, Barzun recounts the religious, political, artistic, and social revolutions that shaped Western culture. But far more than a chronicle of events, this magisterial history highlights the earliest emergence of seminal new ideas and impulses. Thus, though Barzun offers deft and often shrewd portrayals of such giants as Luther, Montesquieu, and Shaw, it is concepts–including individualism, emancipation, primitivism, and self-consciousness–that form the unifying threads running through the tapestry of the centuries. In scrutinizing the last few decades, Barzun sees the threads unraveling, and the weavers despairing. No new ideas inspire fresh or meaningful patterns. Signs of decadence abound. Absurdity pervades the arts. Empty slogans dominate politics. Violence replaces thought. Barzun expects and even invites disagreement. But he advances his views with an intellectual capaciousness that will win admiration even from those who reject his conclusions. An impressive culmination to a lifetime of serious reflection.” – Bryce Christensen
Carl-I read the Barzun book a number of years ago. A prescient warning by way of looking at history.
Always meant to read that book.
Created a bit of a stir when it came out: A respected intellectual saying things that should not be mentioned.
A few days ago three young refugee boys in Twin Falls, Idaho pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a five year old girl. Google it. I’ll bet the locals are pulling up the welcome mat.
The Fascists seem to be quite in style today. Have you noticed that the democrat street thugs have ditched their traditional white gowns and hoods for the more stylish fascist black shirts and hoods?
@Ben David, well said.
The Christian Capitalist West is full of elites who are anti-Christian and anti-capitalist.
The perfect being the enemy of the good — where our mostly good Western Civ is, for the elites, NOT good enough.
MJT is missing the cultural religious element almost totally.
The “immorality revolution”, starting with sex, doesn’t end just sexual morality. Democracy fails without common morals.
Thumbs up to Ben David and Tom G comments. I am meeting w/a retired Bishop from time to time to talk about issues. I printed out Ben David’s comment for our next meeting.
In the best case, the destiny of the West (Europe, at least) is fascism. The only alternative, which is hundred times worse, is islamization. Let us hope that fascists will win.
Until “former” communist Merkel and her allies threw away their borders the idea that “the origin, kind, and number of foreigners allowed to enter a country” was once an idea of the center. Now it is far-right.
@F
Having read “The Black Book of Communism” Europeans still seem to think, “wow, that’s way cool.” Until the EU treats communism as it treats nazism, European cannot change.