Bruce Bawer writes in Hudson Review (thanks to all who sent this in) a lengthy and absorbing essay about how he came to realize what is really wrong in Europe today. It begins like this, in words that I hope someday will be echoed by every politician and media figure in the Western world:
My learning curve was steep. When I look back, it’s as if one day the whole business wasn’t even on my radar screen, and the next day I understood that it was the most important issue of our time.
Don't fail to read it all. And have you read his book While Europe Slept yet? In a sane world, it would be required reading in all European and American universities.
I think he underestimates Europe and the Europeans, and so do you.
The fact that Europeans are not as loud as Americans does not mean they do not react.
Having said this, I must add: Thank you for your good work. Let's keep rolling.
I have great respect for Bruce Bawer. However, like some other Americans, Bawer in his writings seems to slide neatly between three meanings of "Europe", viz., "Europe" as a geographical entity, "Europe" as the EU, "Europe" as various European nations. Sometimes a generalization is only made plausible by his sliding from one of these meanings to another. It does come over in places as a sleight-of-hand, although I doubt anything like that is intended.
He is also, in my view, again like some other Americans, somewhat naive with regards to "American exceptionalism". His arguments about French Muslims not being integrated are perfectly valid. Over here in the UK, people make very similar observations vis-a-vis French as opposed to British policies. True Britain, like the US, does not have specially constructed cités in which to segregate people, and so on and so forth.
But Britons, and likewise Americans, cannot be too complacent: for this is very much a numbers game, as well. The French population is 60,876,136 (CIA factbook); the US, 298,444,215. France has, I understand, some 8-9 million Muslims. One only has to carry out the arithmetic: if the US had a similar percentage of Muslims to France - some 40-45 million - things would look a little different.
I think the silliest sentence in Bawer's book is this "explanation" of the narrow left-liberal ideology of the media across much of Europe:
Again this is owes more to notions of "American exceptionalism" than to reality. It's simply implausible as an explanation. Bawer himself remarks elsewhere that he considers that the most honest paper in "Europe" is the conservative Daily Telegraph in London. One would think he would make the obvious connections. It's hardly an accident that the English-speaking world is, culturally speaking, as it is.
But this is nitpicking. His book is both excellent and timely, and the new essay is good, too. As an Englishman I'll steer clear of commenting on what he says about France. I fear the French have dug their own grave out of their envy of Anglo-American success and the international triumph of the English language, and I'm not inclined to gloat over something so serious. Instead, I'll say that I'm glad to see Bawer give one of Her Majesty's less-than-loyal subjects (Timothy Garton Ash) a well-deserved fisking. If Bruce Bawer were down my way on the 23rd (St. George's Day) I'd most definitely buy him a pint.
I just bought his book yesterday and have read about two thirds of it. It is a real eye opener. It exposes a Europe that I did not know existed. Americans tend to have a romantic view of Europe. I have visions of the Sound of Music with the Von Trapp family dancing through the Alps.
The Bower book reveals a Europe that has changed dramatically. A very powerful and adversarial alliance has emerged bwtween the Islamists and the socialist left in Europe. They are both antisemitic and anti American. The left in Europe has always been this way, as the United States represents the most successful example of free market capitalism. However, now that muslims have immigrated and reproduced in great numbers, there is now a strategic alliance between the two that controls the European governments, the media and acedemia.
As I was reading this book, I began to question the very purpose of the NATO alliance. NATO was formed to keep the Soviet Union out of Europe. This has long since been accomplished. What is the purpose now of an alliance where most of the population considers George Bush a greater threat to world peace than Saddam Hussein? I cannot see that it would be worth it for one American to die to defend Europe. Enough is enough.
On the subject of international migration Neil Ascherson once wrote, in an Observer article: “The third world is on the march, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.” He seems to think that any attempt to control entry into western countries is simply a King Canute type exercise. Looking at news-clips of African would-be immigrants actually bringing up scaling ladders to try and get across the barbed wire fence surrounding Spain’s north African enclave of Ceuta, or of those 58 Chinese found dead in a container, at Dover, you can see his point. Bawer says that one day all of Europe will know when it is Eid ul-Fitr but it could just as easily be said that in 50 years, all Americans will be discussing how they will celebrate the Day of the Dead. in their national language of Spanish.
I doubt if the ‘Islamicisation of Europe’ is the result of some French plot. I always assumed they had a large Islamic community because of the number of native loyalists they had to pull out of Algeria, along with the pied noirs back in the ‘50’s and they weren’t too enthusiastic about receiving them, at that . At least the French have long since done what the British could have done in 1902, when a national educational act sparked off one of the then perennial ’no popery on the rates’ campaigns - but failed to do - which is separate religion from state education: The religiose Blair‘s foolish promotion of ‘faith schools’ will only reinforce the self segregating tendencies of British Moslems, as though the phenomenon of ‘white flight’ hasn’t already led to enough informal educational separation.