The gates of Vienna 2.0
What could not be accomplished by armed conquest can be achieved by other means. And so we have this:
According to newly released data from the City Council of Vienna for the 2024–2025 academic year, Muslim students now represent 41.2% of the population across primary, secondary, and vocational schools—making them the largest single religious group. By comparison, just 34.5% of students identify as Christian (including 17.5% Catholic and 14.5% Orthodox), while 23% report no religious affiliation.
[In the previous academic year, 39.4% of students were Muslim.]
This significant demographic shift should serve as a wake-up call for Austrians. If current trends continue, the nation may face a profound cultural transformation, with serious implications for its identity and future.
I would say they already face it, as does much of western Europe. And the differential birth rate indicates the disparity will grow more extreme.
More:
Bettina Emmerling, Vienna’s City Councillor for Education and a member of NEOS (the New Austria and Liberal Forum, a liberal political party), offered what many may view as a tone-deaf response to these growing challenges.
She acknowledged that “no one in Vienna should live their life according to the fundamentalist interpretation of religious texts that are hostile to women, minorities, the state, or democracy.”
Nevertheless, Emmerling appears to believe that these deeply rooted issues can be resolved by the addition of a mandatory class to the curriculum. “In light of these developments,” she said, “there is a greater need than ever for a compulsory joint subject, ‘Living in a Democracy,’ for all children starting from primary school. Democracy, values, and ethics education must take place on a common foundation.”
That’s fascinating. It’s the age-old question of how to effect cultural assimilation in a portion of the population that’s newly-arrived and has extremely divergent views from the mainstream population. When I think about cultural assimilation in the US, which has a much longer history of absorbing large numbers of immigrants from other cultures, I wonder whether we ever had the task of assimilating such a sudden influx of such a large population with views so starkly divergent from the mainstream – and in particular, a population many of whose members don’t want to assimilate. I don’t think we ever faced that, in particular the lack of desire to become part of American culture – and in the past we used to force quicker assimilation by not having bilingual education, for example. We have faced the problem more in recent years although on a smaller scale than western Europe for the most part. And we will continue to face it.
NOTE: I notice that, although not planned, the subject matter of this post overlaps slightly with the subject matter of this earlier post from today.
ADDENDUM: And I feel the urge to add this:
The West has boiled its culture down to “it’s all about me.” Whereas Islam, for better or worse, is a culture is the sense decisions have the whole group in mind. The West loves to screw itself. Even during the siege of Vienna, before Sobieski rode to the rescue the amount of infighting was astounding. We can’t think of us. We can only think of me.
It will be interesting to see how successful Austria will be in teaching western ethics, particularly about treatment of women, to people whose religion has quite different teachings. England didn’t even try, and there were rape gangs in cities throughout the country. Germany and Sweden are seeing increases in sexual crimes, mostly by “migrants.”
In the US, so far, we are being more successful in prosecuting these crimes and not excusing them for “ethnic” reasons — but progressives would like us to make exceptions.
Truly depressing.
I don’t think too many Viennese have been converting to Islam, but they have been failing to reproduce themselves and failing to take their traditional faith very seriously while importing foreign Muslims, so there you go.
A nation’s borders do not enclose Magic Dirt. The people who live in a nation are who make it what it is. A nation full of Muslims is a Muslim nation regardless of what name is printed in big letters inside the borders on the map.
We have the same problem here; exactly the same problem, a TFR well under replacement and a governing class that imports foreigners to suppress wages and create a patron-client system.
Who of us here had at least two children? I ask not to accuse, or to make anyone feel bad. The math is what is, and does not care about your feelings, intentions, or good faith efforts: if you didn’t have two, you contributed to this problem, and if your children didn’t have two they are compounding it. I’m sure they all had worthy and understandable reasons but the math does not care.
when you have an dhmmi attitude
https://twitchy.com/justmindy/2025/04/24/jesse-singal-the-jewish-students-ccould-just-walk-around-n2411858
ironically he was nearly ‘lynched’ at the very tolerant
blue sky,
The auto-destroyers of their societies are getting fiendishly clever….
“How an ‘anti-terrorism’ law cancelled a flower show—
“The British state is cracking down harder on community events than on Islamist extremism.”—
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/23/how-an-anti-terrorism-law-cancelled-a-flower-show/
H/T Blazingcatfur blog.
Of course, the idea was first hatched at the universities: jack up the price of hiring an unwanted speaker by forcing the student group that invited that prospective speaker to pay prohibitive “security” costs thus ensuring that THAT student group, totally unable to come up with the necessary funds, cancel the lecture.
Presto!
Barry, we have friends, British, who’ve lived in the US for decades. They just became US citizens last Friday. The insanity in the UK is part of their reasoning.
of course the manchester bombing arose out of this same habit of welcoming scorpions into their minds, in this case, the abedi clan from Libya, who were welcomed into the UK, then the circumstances changed when they allied with Qaddafi,
Bar the period running from 2000 to 2007, Austria’s Christian democratic party has preferred to co-operate with social-liberal, socialist, and green parties rather than with the country’s Euroskeptic party (which is, as we speak, the country’s most popular). You see the ‘with friends like these’ problem all over Europe.
People are unlikely to assimilate into a society which is lacking in cultural self-confidence.
Maybe Winston Churchill had a few thoughts on Islam that the current generation could learn a thing or two from.
So true, David Foster. The current Trumpian effort to restore American culture and confidence may be fruitful — or at least we hope so.
The days of savagery are never that far away.
“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed;
if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may
come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”
The World’s Greatest Statesman
The USA has a major, major problem with the supposed 3rd branch of government, the Judiciary. I read the current Epoch Times online, where the three top headlines feature individual federal district judges’ rulings against the whole Executive branch of the Federal government.
This is surely not conduct anticipated by the crafters of the Constitution. This is in fact treasonous. We are being ruled, in effect, by a handful of tyrants in black robes, way below the Supremes. The day of refusing to respect such rulings draws nigh. This is the rule of judges, not law.
“People are unlikely to assimilate into a society which is lacking in cultural self-confidence….”
Why assimilate? Wait a few more years, and then simply vote away the Democratic institutions, and replace them with theocracy, and let sharia reign.
The problem with representative democratic government is that it relies on a bit of wisdom in leadership, and resolve, and manifest beliefs in freedom as a value. When life gets too comfortable, people stop thinking about participating in societal maintenance.
Through the course of the last 1,400 years, various outspoken Muslim leaders have been very clear about the ultimate aim of Islam and, if you take the time to be informed, and to actually read the three major books of Islam–the Qu’ran, the Sira, and the Hadiths–or to gain even a rudimentary knowledge of the History of Islam–what Muhammad and Islam are all about, the History of Islam, and it’s methods, are crystal clear.
The truth of the matter is that, by their intellectual laziness, lack of awareness, and conflict avoidance, their unwillingness to support, protect, and defend their own culture, religion, and their own basic interests, their choice of leaders–the people in the West have supinely let this Muslim invasion, subversion, and takeover happen.
Their ancient, far more “primitive,” and supposedly far less educated and informed ancestors held against all Muslim attempts at invasion and takeover, and threw them back; this current crew, a total failure.
Today in the West they believe in a largely falsified, imaginary Disney history, all the actual reality, the great animating ideas, the blood and struggle sanitized and left out and, heaven forbid no religion please, we’re atheists or holiday Christians.
Today’s westerners, the majority of the people of Europe,
have no one to blame but themselves.
Continuing on the question of cultural self-confidence: Arthur Koestler (best known for his novel Darkness at Noon) wrote in 1950 an interesting novel of ideas whose subject is the West’s loss of that self-confidence. Not a well-known book, but an important one. I reviewed it here:
Sleeping with the Enemy
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/71237.html
Wow!
neo asks,
In the 19th and 20th centuries there was a significant influx of Catholics to America; Ireland, Italy, Poland…
Many of them embraced America and American ideals, but I sometimes wonder if this didn’t tilt the country more towards, big, centralized government, government welfare programs and social justice?