Europe’s Suicide Pact
by
Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas’: HERE.
Are the big three European powers – and a couple of the smaller ones – all collapsing at once?
In the last few days, the titles of YouTube videos about Europe have tended toward the exceedingly agitated: “They’re Destroying France” (October 6); “France Has Collapsed” (Rubin Report, October 8); “We’re Watching France’s End” (October 9); “France Is on Fire” (Triggernometry, October 9); “The Siege of London” (Bill O’Reilly, October 8); “Germany’s Crisis: Why Living Here Is Impossible Now” (October 3).
What a fascinating moment it is in Western European history. Not a happy moment, not a promising moment, but certainly fascinating. Not so very long ago, Germany, France, and Britain were world powers; now all three of them are basket cases, undergoing parallel crises, at the mercy of immigrants from the worst places on the planet. And the mainstream media, in these countries as well as in the U.S., are doing their best to avoid covering these crises, leaving it to YouTubers and other online news reporters and commentators to fill in the gap.
The basic story of the past few decades is simple enough: Western Europe’s political leaders – motivated by a combination of multicultural ideology, contempt for their own countries’ ordinary citizens, and a heady mix of stupidity and cowardice – have pursued policies that have made their countries less Western, less democratic, and less safe. They’ve seemed to care far more about Muslim immigrants, legal or not, whom they’ve lavished with welfare benefits ad infinitum than about hard-working natives who’ve been at once overtaxed and underserved.
Tony Blair was frank about his desire to change the face of Britain. Angela Merkel later confessed that she opened Germany’s floodgates in 2015 in order to drown her political competition in the votes of newly arrived foreigners. For years, while prime ministers of both major parties have come and gone, British voters have made clear their wish to keep Britain British; yet both parties have deliberately kept the illegals pouring in, much as the Biden Administration did, as part of a mischievous program of radical social metamorphosis. While the people have clamored for jobs and housing, for law and order, and for an end to open borders, their rulers have prayed at the altars of climate ideology and transgender ideology, have punished speech in a way no one could have imagined a generation ago, and have treated Islam as a boon and not a bane.
For me, the quintessential symbol of the impotence of the British state is the longtime Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg. Mind you, he’s far from being Britain’s worst politician. Indeed he drives me up a wall because he’s patently intelligent, knowledgeable, eloquent, and, I think, honest and well-meaning. In a recent online debate he wiped the floor with Tucker Carlson. But he’s a maddening figure precisely because he never seems to lose his cool, never acts as if things are as bad as they really are, never displays an iota of passion for the welfare of the British people. He’s chronically unflappable, a “cool, cool, considerate man” (to quote the song from 1776) who perfectly embodies the phlegmatic manner of the classic Victorian public servant, making his way to work every day to keep the world’s greatest empire afloat, confident that in the fullness of time he will pass it along, as powerful as ever, to his sons. What is he, nuts?
Britain’s neighbors, of course, have their own living symbols of political inertia – Sarkozy and Hollande in France, Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Germany. The trouble in all three of these countries – and I’m singling them only because they’re the big boys on the block – has been clear for some time, as has the growing impatience of their natives with the political elites. Support for the Alternative for Germany, for France’s National Front, and for Restore Britain has risen steadily, and more and more people have been daring to speak of returning problematic immigrants to the places they came from.
The example of Donald Trump in the U.S. has obviously played a major role in all this. In a recent speech, Robert Lowe, head of Restore Britain, vowed to “drill, baby, drill,” to “make Javier Milei look like a socialist puppet,” and to “make Britain great again.” His entire text was a battle cry: “We will reverse the Islamification of our country.” “Immigration into Britain from the Third World will end entirely.” “There will be no more Pakistani immigration into Britain.” “We will restore the connection between being a British citizen and being British in any meaningful sense.” He even described the boat people crossing the English channel as “scumbags,” but he pronounced it with such English elegance that it hardly sounded vulgar.