Whenever I read about the European response to the current wave of “migrants” to Europe, one of the first questions that comes to mind is, “Why?”
Why do so many of the countries of Western Europe appear determined to hasten the end of their own national identity by refusing to draw any meaningful limits to the current influx of third-world “refugees”—a significant number of whom are probably not bona fide refugees, and a much smaller but still-worrisome number of whom are probably jihadis bent on the destruction of their new host countries?
This puzzling behavior on the part of so many Western European leaders has many possible overlapping explanations. The first reason for their response is almost certainly economic. Traditional European populations are failing to reproduce themselves, and many European leaders feel they must import newcomers, particularly newcomers who might be willing to work jobs that otherwise might go unfilled.
The second reason is guilt, combined with moral preening to atone for that guilt. This column by Mark Steyn strongly hints at those phenomena when he quotes an article by Richard Orange:
She met the man, whom she called Abdul, shortly after he arrived at Copenhagen’s Central Station from Germany…
Steyn comments as follows:
True, and there are other additional differences between then and now. One is that the attempted migration of Copenhagen’s Jews during WWII was to save European Jews with European roots and European values and principles from an almost certain death at the hands of other Europeans. It was an almost entirely intra-European problem with its genesis in Europe (Germany and Austria initially) and involving citizens of Europe both as perpetrators and as victims, as rescuers and as collaborators.
But Richard Orange is not the only one making these flawed comparisons. There is a continual drumbeat to that effect from the left, a blatant appeal to guilt about the genocide during the war and the need to make restitution for that guilt, which strikes an extra-special chord in Germany and Austria. The pro-migrant leaders of Europe are determined to make the current European population—most of whom were born after World War II—feel guilty for the sins of their parents and grandparents, and to exploit their desire to expiate that guilt by taking in the new “migrants.” The irony of the fact that the present-day migrants are to a rather large extent people who harbor an antipathy for Jews bordering on (and often constituting) hatred may be lost on people like Orange and the left. But then again, perhaps not.
The third reason is related to the second: Guilt again, but this time not about the treatment of Europe’s Jews during WWII, but about the sentiment of nationalism as a whole, with colonialism of the third world as a subset of nationalistic fervor about which to feel guilty. Both world wars are commonly seen, at least in part, as having been caused by nationalism, and their carnage is regarded as having largely discredited nationalism.
This last idea was expressed after World War II by the German expatriate writer Thomas Mann, in his 1947 introduction to the American edition of Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian:
Now Western Europe has gone Mann one better. Not only do the countries of Western Europe seem to be rejecting national individualism, but their leaders seem to want their citizens to reject what Mann called “the European tradition as a whole” in favor of accepting a large number of people from third-world countries without expecting or demanding that they assimilate. What’s more, the Western European leaders are trying to impose both of these renunciations on the countries of Eastern Europe, which are still loath to cooperate. One culture is seen as just as desirable and ethical as another to Western Europeans raised on the gospel of cultural and moral relativism, who have been taught that tolerance almost without limits is the highest good.
That brings us to reason number four, which can be characterized as a combination of inertia and ennui that seems to have taken over much of Western Europe. Here’s Steyn again:
There were more shrugs at Malmö, when I asked a station official about it. He told me that, on the train from Stockholm the other day, a group of “refugees” had looted the café car. The staff were too frightened to resist. “Everyone wants a quiet life,” he offered by way of explanation. Sweden prides itself on accepting more “refugees” per capita than any other European country, and up to a thousand a day are registering for asylum in Malmö.
That last paragraph unites two already-mentioned elements: the lack of energy to change anything, and pride in being the charitable ones who cannot be accused of bigotry. One of the many curious elements of this phenomenon is that, in countries that have relinquished much of Christianity, one thing that seems to remain—like a vestigial organ—is the ideal of self-sacrificing charity minus the devotion to the faith that previously animated and inspired it.
That doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t a sizable number of Europeans who are very angry at what’s going on. The question is whether there will be enough of them to vote to elect people who will seize the reins of power and reverse the trends, whether this might occur before things have gotten even more out of hand, and how ugly the struggle might get.
Jean Kaufman is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at neo-neocon.
