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The Strange Death of Europe, Immigration, Identity, Islam

Douglas Murray

THE STRANGE DEATH
OF EUROPE

THE STRANGE DEATH
OF EUROPE

Immigration, Identity, Islam

DOUGLAS MURRAY

CONTENTS

  1. Introduction
  2. 1 The beginning
  3. 2 How we got hooked on immigration
  4. 3 The excuses we told ourselves
  5. 4 ‘Welcome to Europe’
  6. 5 ‘We have seen everything’
  7. 6 Multiculturalism
  8. 7 They are here
  9. 8 Prophets without honour
  10. 9 Early-warning sirens
  11. 10 The tyranny of guilt
  12. 11 The pretence of repatriation
  13. 12 Learning to live with it
  14. 13 Tiredness
  15. 14 We’re stuck with this
  16. 15 Controlling the backlash
  17. 16 The feeling that the story has run out
  18. 17 The end
  19. 18 What might have been
  20. 19 What will be
  21. Notes
  22. Acknowledgements
  23. A Note on the Author
  24. Index

INTRODUCTION

Europe is committing suicide. Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide. Whether the European people choose to go along with this is, naturally, another matter.

When I say that Europe is in the process of killing itself I do not mean that the burden of European Commission regulation has become overbearing or that the European Convention on Human Rights has not done enough to satisfy the demands of a particular community. I mean that the civilisation we know as Europe is in the process of committing suicide and that neither Britain nor any other Western European country can avoid that fate because we all appear to suffer from the same symptoms and maladies. As a result, by the end of the lifespans of most people currently alive Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world we had to call home.

It may be pointed out that proclamations of Europe’s demise have been a staple throughout our history and that Europe would not be Europe without regular predictions of our mortality. Yet some have been more persuasively timed than others. In Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday), first published in 1942, Stefan Zweig wrote of his continent in the years leading up to the Second World War, ‘I felt that Europe, in its state of derangement, had passed its own death sentence – our sacred home of Europe, both the cradle and the Parthenon of Western civilisation.’

One of the few things that gave Zweig any hope even then was that in the countries of South America to which he had finally fled he saw offshoots of his own culture. In Argentina and Brazil he witnessed how a culture can emigrate from one land to another so that even if the tree that gave the culture life has died it can still provide ‘new blossom and new fruit’. Even had Europe at that moment destroyed itself completely, Zweig felt the consolation that ‘What generations had done before us was never entirely lost.’1

Today, largely because of the catastrophe Zweig described, the tree of Europe is finally lost. Europe today has little desire to reproduce itself, fight for itself or even take its own side in an argument. Those in power seem persuaded that it would not matter if the people and culture of Europe were lost to the world. Some have clearly decided (as Bertolt Brecht wrote in his 1953 poem ‘The Solution’) to dissolve the people and elect another because, as a recent Swedish conservative Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt put it, only ‘barbarism’ comes from countries like his whereas only good things come from outside.