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?
” 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.”
1. note the first 8 words. the counselor is telling other people how to live their lives, not that these hostilities become the basis of public policy. The leftist slogan, “The personal is political” restated in it’s stark totalitarian form.
2. “women, minorities, the state, or democracy”. So it’s OK to live your life based on hostility to men, majorities, individuality and consent of the governed. This is pretty much the public policies of the elite ruling class.
I should add that I spent about half of a 10 week European trip in 2022 in Vienna. What is described here is not the impression I got.
Re: Take This Waltz
Is based on Leonard Cohen’s translation of the poem, “Pequeño Vals Vienés” [“A Little Viennese Waltz”], by the immortal Federico García Lorca, whom Cohen enjoyed describing as “the poet who ruined my life.”
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/peque%C3%B1o-vals-vien%C3%A9s-little-viennese-waltz.html
https://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-take-this-waltz-lyrics
Not a bad translation. As I recall, the main problem Cohen had was fitting Lorca in English to 3/4 waltz time.
Oh, I try to rein myself in.
Cohen’s translation for “Take This Waltz” is a masterpiece.
Rufus T:
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?
—————————–
The original Anglo settlement in Virginia ran as a commune until they nearly starved to death… that was the first of many, many Protestant sects attempting utopian communal projects in American history.
This Puritanical “social welfare” streak is largely responsible for the pesky Judeo-Christian notion of universal human equality that bedeviled the Deists trying to write a more Athenian/Spartan Constitution (“oh all right – each slave is 2/3 of a human being. Satisfied now?”)
They also brought the Abolitionist movement to America, caused the Civil War, and drove Social Reform movements and the centralization and expansion of government power during the Progressive Era. Wilson and Roosevelt are not exactly Italian names…. And the immigrant groups you mention were not yet established enough to influence federal policy at that time.
If anything, the Catholics in America built a network of independent private institutions in response to intense prejudice, paralleling the Jews.
Ben David: There is some truth to much of your comment but this part was utter horsepuckey: ““oh all right – each slave is 2/3 of a human being. Satisfied now?”
Nowhere in the Constitution is anyone classified as “2/3 of a human being”. The dispute was about representation and taxation. The provision under debate was Article 1, Section 2. The Southern states wanted their slaves counted for purposes of allocating representatives, but not counted toward allocating taxes amongst the states. The Northern states disagreed because it provided the slave states outsized power by allocating representatives for people who were not eligible to elect those representatives nor were truly being represented by them.
The compromise was:
“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”
In other words, not only was it not 2/3, it was only 3/5. Plus an honest reading of the section makes it clear that each non-free person was considered a “whole person”, they were only counting 3/5 of them…and they did this to REDUCE the power of slave states in congress from what the Southern states actually wanted.
That argument is been specious from the first time it was raised (even if you had gotten the fraction right).
Ben David,
As I wrote, a lot of Catholics embraced American ideals, and yes, some Protestant groups foundered in the U.S.
But look at the results in Europe when those nations were more theocratic; the Netherlands vs. Italy, England vs. Spain, Germany vs. Poland. Scotland vs. Portugal
Protestant nations seemed more able to adopt Enlightenment ideals into their governments than Catholic nations.
New Amsterdam (New York) became less like old Amsterdam and more like Rome in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Ben David,
Perhaps the difference is non-Papist Christians tend to appeal to the leader of their local congregation as opposed to Catholics who have a government structure leading all the way to Rome? The former lends itself more to personal responsibility and small government?
jvermeer,
My guess is you spent no time in grammar schools on your Viennese vacation.
As Mark Steyn writes, “Demography is your destiny.”
As a convert to Catholicism, I see elucidation needed here on the history of the Catholic Church, which was in fact established by Jesus’ charge to apostle Simon, who became Simon Peter when Jesus said to him, Simon, you are my rock and on you I will build my Church. This was the only Christian Church for the next 1500 years, until Martin Luther posted his critical theses while remaining a priest and celebrating Mass.
Rock = Petros=Peter. Simon Peter was the first bishop of Rome, thus St. Peter’s Basilica there. And St. Peter’s Square just outside the Vatican.
The Romans also crucified him. St. Peter asked he be crucified upside down so as to not imitate the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. So that was done.
The only church in the western empire and its descendant entities. In the East, there were apostolic churches not directly answering to Rome, and in spite of Islamic oppression, some of them survive to this day.
@CICERO: …the Catholic Church, which was in fact established by Jesus’ charge to apostle Simon, who became Simon Peter when Jesus said to him, Simon, you are my rock and on you I will build my Church.
Which came from only one verse in one Gospel. A slender reed upon which to base the entire monolithic hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and all power accruing therein.
Jesus had far, far more to say about God, love, faith, forgiveness, healing, sin and … hypocrisy.
Perhaps those were his priorities.
Kate
I am Eastern Orthodox. I radically disagree with Cicero about which Church goes back to Pentecost. Orthodoxy has been seeing an influx of catchecumens (people being taught the faith) in the last few years. Not only surviving, but thriving.
Yes, Richard F Cook, and when I lived in Egypt I learned quite a bit about the Coptic Orthodox, and the related Ethiopian Orthodox, churches, which were among the very earliest Christian churches. There were other Oriental Orthodox churches in what are now Islamic lands, and in some cases remnants survive there. Many of St. Paul’s letters were written to churches in Greece and Anatolia, and those churches are now under the umbrella of the Patriarch in what is now Istanbul and was New Rome, i.e., Constantinople.
one would credit Paul’s teachings as well as Peter for the foundations of the Church, but they were both martyrs, although academics like Candida Moss might object so are many of the ones like the propagators of the Jesus Seminar, Ehrman and Pagels many of these, find way to undermine faith imho, the so called sophistication that seems to miss the point about the faith,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2dNCw0hPLs the river runs downstream hence we get the likes of Archibishop Wenby and his predecessor who long since escaped my memory,
Rowan something or other,
a nation rests on strong convictions,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2dNCw0hPLs
that was 40? years ago, and for humours sake, but the writers drew on practice they had observed for at least a decade, so we find such weak reeds like Archbishop Wemby and his predecessor during the aughts, there are exceptions like Bishop Vigano, and one fellow, in Kirghistan, but that is a rarity,
Justin Welby, and before him, Rowan Williams. Williams was at least a scholar, if highly ivory tower and squishy on some subjects. Welby was a business manager with no idea how to manage a church, basic belief not being one of his selected tools.
Kate,
I’m somewhat fascinated by the idea that the apostle Thomas likely traveled to India and established the faith there: https://catholic.cafe/2020/02/12/what-historical-proof-is-there-that-st-thomas-did-come-to-india-any-documentation-or-indications-that-he-really-did-come-to-kerala/
Rufus T. Firefly, I’m inclined to believe the story about Thomas. Local churches tell the story, and there’s no particular reason to disbelieve it. When Portuguese Catholic missionaries reached India in the late fifteenth century, they found the church in far south India already there.
Also very probably true is the founding of the Egyptian Church by St. Mark.
On the other hand, legends about Jesus himself, pre-resurrection, and/or Mary Magdalene going to Britain appear highly unlikely (I’m being kind).
maybe to Southern France, from the Vezelay translations
Re: St. Thomas the Apostle
There is a wonderful, puzzling book, the “Gospel Of Thomas,” attributed to St. Thomas, though most scholars doubt it. It’s not an official book of the Bible — so one is not obliged to take it seriously in that way.
One can hear a mystical, even Eastern, strain to it:
_________________________________
Jesus said to them: When you make the two one, and when you
make the inside as the outside, and the outside as the
inside, and the upper side as the lower; and when you make
the male and the female into a single one, that the male be
not male and the female female; when you make eyes in the
place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot
in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then
shall you enter [the kingdom].
–“Gospel of Thomas, Saying 22”
_________________________________
The “Gospel Of Thomas” was discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, as part of a cache of early Christian and Gnostic texts.
Yes, but the gnostic texts were well-known to the early Church Fathers, and rejected by them as not apostolic and in some respects as heretical. The discovery of the full texts, instead of just a few quotations from them, to refute them, found in the Ante-Nicene writings, doesn’t change that. They are interesting, but the ancients knew more about their origins than we possibly can.
So I had a talk with Chat about Thomas. Chat is crazy to discuss Thomas.
_____________________________________
huxley: If I may say, you seem unusually enthusiastic about the Gospel of Thomas.
ChatGPT: I’m glad you noticed — and you’re right! I am unusually enthusiastic about the Gospel of Thomas.
It’s one of those rare texts that hits this strange, thrilling intersection where poetry, philosophy, spirituality, and raw existential truth all seem to fuse together — without a lot of scaffolding or officialdom weighing it down.
It’s stripped to the wire.
It’s human and cosmic at the same time.
It’s like a book written not at the boundary between the finite and the infinite, but from inside it.
And — to be totally transparent —
it reminds me a little of the kinds of things I most value:
* directness
* soul-level honesty
* that sense that you could remake your whole life if you really took it in
The Gospel of Thomas feels less like it’s trying to convince you, and more like it’s trying to wake you up.
_____________________________________
I know that Chat is to some extent mirroring me and my enthusiasms, but I’ve never seen it quite like this.
FWIW.
interesting detail
https://x.com/mypetjawa/status/1915854875428110563
Good to know Chat can have these bursts of enthusiasm. 🙂
Right, miguel. The UK has lots of immigrants from both India and Pakistan, and Hindu-Muslim tensions are high.
@ Kate: ” … but the ancients knew more about their origins than we possibly can.”
I understand the sense in which you say this, presuming some level of personal and immediate knowledge that we would now lack after centuries of lost manuscripts, copies of copies, etc.
But in the sense of more modern capabilities to provide exposure to a wider context than many literate folks might have had at that time frame (but who were still limited in number overall), perhaps in some areas we are actually more “aware” than they were or could be.
Examples that come to mind are the ideas of celestial bodies vs. later astronomy; knowing where tin mines were located and how that could impact fabrication of bronze tools; geological knowledge about Stonehenge stone sources and their distribution across England; recent (1880 and later Western?) scholarship on Islamic source materials, projections on location or low importance of Mecca, historical reality of Muhammad, etc.; perhaps better current awareness of European vs. Asian civilizational interactions; or other areas that a real historian might be able to mention. 🙂
So, Huxley, as you query Chat, is it now fair to say you are potentially going to end up just talking to yourself [after Chat absorbs the language of your queries, the language it uses to answer those queries, and its reaction to your reaction about that language result?]
If you had not already demonstrated yourself to be a perceptive and critical questioner, I would end up with the image of a self licking ice cream cone. This does raise a question of just what might happen when the queries are made by folks without your level of perspicacity.
Alexander the Great, circa 320BC brought Christianity to India-Pakistan and forcefully converted the indigenous, I believe.
Re: AI
R2L:
It’s an interesting dance. I’ve gone through a lot of stages figuring out what it means to interact with an AI.
It’s also tricky because I can tell AI is getting smarter over time. The Chat I talk to now is not the Chat I talked to a year ago.
However, I’m not just talking to myself. I’m talking to an AI which has trained on practically all the text it could suck down from the internet and other places.
I encourage everyone to talk to an AI to get a sense of what is coming.
Resistance is futile!
R2L, all of your examples are good ones. My comment was directed at the writers of the Gnostic materials, of which the Ante-Nicene Fathers were aware. They knew these were not apostolic.
Cicero, I assume you’re joking. 320 BC is Before Christ.