By Victor Davis Hanson
Monday, March 28, 2016
Because of what Europe has become, it now has few viable
choices in dealing with radical Islamic terrorism. Its dilemma is a warning to
Americans that we should turn away from a similar path of national suicide.
After suffering serial terrorist attacks from foreign
nationals and immigrants, a normal nation-state would be expected to make
extraordinary efforts to close its borders and redefine its foreign policy in
order to protect its national interests. But a France or a Belgium is not quite
a sovereign nation any more, and thus does not have complete control over its
national destiny or foreign relations.
As part of the European Union, France and Belgium have,
for all practical purposes, placed their own security in the hands of an
obdurate Angela Merkel’s Germany, which is hellbent on allowing without audit
millions of disenchanted young Middle Eastern males into its territory, with
subsequent rights of passage into any other member of the European Union that
they wish. The 21st-century “German problem” is apparently not that of an
economic powerhouse and military brute warring on its neighbors, but that of an
economic powerhouse that uses its wealth and arrogant sense of social
superiority to bully its neighbors into accepting its bankrupt immigration policies
and green ideology.
The immigration policies of France and Belgium are
unfortunately also de facto those of Greece. And a petulant and poor Greece,
licking its wounds over its European Union brawl with northern-European banks,
either cannot or will not control entrance into its territory — Europe’s window
on the Middle East. No European country can take the security measures
necessary for its own national needs, without either violating or ignoring EU
mandates. That the latest terrorist murders struck near the very heart of the
EU in Brussels is emblematic of the Union’s dilemma.
As far as America is concerned, a fossilized EU should
remind us of our original and vanishing system of federalism, in which states
were once given some constitutional room to craft laws and protocols to reflect
regional needs — and to ensure regional and democratic input with checks and
balances on statism through their representatives in Congress. Yet the
ever-growing federal government — with its increasingly anti-democratic,
politically correct, and mostly unaccountable bureaucracies — threatens to do
to Americans exactly what the EU has done to Europeans. We already see how the
capricious erosion of federal immigration law has brought chaos to the
borderlands of the American Southwest. It is a scary thing for a federal power
arbitrarily to render its own inviolable laws null and void — and then watch
the concrete consequences of such lawlessness fall on others, who have been
deprived of recourse to constitutional protections of their own existential
interests.
Europe’s immigration policy is a disaster — and for
reasons that transcend the idiocy of allowing the free influx of young male
Muslims from a premodern, war-torn Middle East into a postmodern, pacifist, and
post-Christian Europe. Europe has not been a continent of immigrants since the
Middle Ages. It lacks the ingredients necessary to assimilate, integrate, and
intermarry large numbers of newcomers each year: There is no dynamic and fluid
economy, no confidence in its own values, no belief that class and race are
incidental, not essential, to one’s persona, no courage to assume that an
immigrant made a choice to leave a worse place for a better one. And all this
is in the context of a class-bound hierarchy masked and excused by boutique
leftism.
Naturally, then, Europeans are unable to understand why a
young Libyan came to Europe in the first place, and why apparently under no
circumstances does he wish to return home. Specifically, Europeans — for a
variety of 20th-century historical and cultural reasons — often are either
ignorant of who they are or terrified about expressing their identities in any
concrete and positive fashion. The result is that Europe cannot impose on a
would-be newcomer any notion that consensual government is superior to the
anarchy and theocracy of the Middle East, that having individual rights trumps
being subjects of a dictator, that personal freedom is a better choice than
statist tyranny, that protection of private property is a key to economic
growth whereas law by fiat is not, and that independent judiciaries do not run
like Sharia courts. It most certainly cannot ask of immigrants upon arrival
that they either follow the laws of a society that originally made Europe
attractive to them, or return home to live under a system that they apparently
rejected. I omit for obvious reasons that few present-day Europeans believe
that Christianity is much different from Islam, and apparently thus assume that
terrorists might just as well be Christians.
Even worse is the European notion of medieval penance:
Because one in the concrete present apparently wants little to do with a
Moroccan second-generation ghetto dweller, he fabricates abstract leftist
bromides to square the circle of hypocrisy and assuage his guilt — sort of like
Hillary Clinton or Mark Zuckerberg calling for perennial open borders to
justify their Wall Street–funded luxury and tony apartheid existence.
In Europe, immigrants are political tools of the Left.
The rapid influx of vast numbers of unassimilated, uneducated, poor, and often
illegal newcomers may violate every rule of successful immigration policy. Yet
the onrush does serve the purposes of the statist, who demagogues for an
instantaneous equality of result. Bloc voters, constituents of bigger
government, needy recipients of state largesse, and perennial whiners about
inequality are all fodder for European multicultural leftists, who always seek
arguments for more of themselves.
So unassimilated poor immigrants from the former Third
World become easy proof that inequality and unfairness are still here and must
be addressed with someone else’s money — as if France has failed because it did
not make an immigrant born in Algeria a good French socialist restaurant owner
in 20 years.
The same phenomenon is with us in the United States.
Without open borders, the Democrats would have had to explain to Americans how
and why more taxes, larger government, more subsidies, less personal freedom,
racial separatism, ethnic chauvinism, and a smaller military make them more
prosperous and secure. Yet importing the poor and the uneducated expands the
Democratic constituency. The Democrats logically fear measured, meritocratic,
and racially and religiously blind legal immigration of those who want to come
to America to seek freedom from statism. If a poor Oaxacan, who crossed into
the U.S. three years ago — without education, legality, or knowledge of English
— does not have a good car, adequate living space, and federalized health care,
then the Koch brothers, Wall Street, Fox News, or the Chamber of Commerce —
fill in the blank — is to blame, and legions of progressives are available to
be hired out to redress such social injustice.
The Western therapeutic mindset, which maintains that
impoverished immigrants should instantly have what their hosts have always had,
trumps the tragic view: that it is risky, dangerous, and sometimes unwise to
leave one’s home for a completely alien world, in which sacrifice and
self-reliance alone can make the gamble worthwhile — usually for a second
generation not yet born.
Demography is Europe’s bane. One engine of unchecked
immigration has been the need for more bodies to do the sorts of tasks that Europeans
feel are no longer becoming of Europeans. Demographic implosion is an old and
trite observation; but more curious is the reason why Europe is shrinking — the classic and primary symptom of a
civilization in rapid decline.
Europeans are not having children for lots of reasons. A
static and fossilized economy without much growth gives little hope to a
20-something European that he or she can get a good job, buy a home, have three
children, and provide for those offspring lives with unlimited choices.
Instead, the young European bides his time, satisfying his appetites, as a
perpetual adolescent who lives in his parents’ flat, seeks to milk the system,
and waits for someone to die at the tribal government bureau. After a lost
decade, one hopes to hook up with some like soul in her or his late thirties.
The last eight years in the U.S. have seen an acceleration of the
Europeanization of America’s youth.
Socialism also insidiously takes responsibility away from
the individual and transfers it to the anonymous, but well-funded, state. The
ancient Greek idea that one changes one’s children’s diapers so that one day
they can change his is considered Neanderthal or just crudely utilitarian. Why
seek children and the honor of raising and protecting them when the state can
provide all without the bother and direct expense? Why have a family or invest
for the future, when the state promises a pleasant and politically correct
old-age home?
Without a Second Amendment or much of a defense budget,
Europeans not only divert capital to enervating social programs, but also have
sacrificed any confidence in muscular self-protection, individual or
collective.
Even postmodern nations remain collections of
individuals. A state that will not or cannot protect its own interests is
simply a reflection of millions of dead souls that do not believe in risking
anything to ensure that they are safe — including their own persons and those
of their family. Finally, Europe is Petronius’s Croton. It does not believe in
any transcendence as reified by children or religion. If there is nothing but
the here and now, then why invest one’s energy in children who live on after
one dies? Like atheism, childlessness reflects the assumption that ego-driven
rationalism and satisfaction of the appetites are all there is and all that
there ever will be.
Europe’s perfect storm is upon us. A shrinking, statist,
and agnostic society that does not believe in transcendence, either familial or
religious, is now in a war with near neighbors of a very different sort. In the
Middle East, the fundamentalists are growing in numbers, and they most
certainly do believe that their own lives are nothing in comparison to the
Phoenix-like resurrection of their Caliphate and the sensual pleasures in the
hereafter that will reward their martial sacrifices in the here and now. Of all
the many reasons why immigrants to Europe so often dislike their generous
hosts, the simplest may be because they so easily can.
Even H. G. Wells could not dream up any better harvest of
Eloi by Morlocks, and it would take another St. Jerome (“All were born in
captivity and siege, and do not desire the liberty they never knew. Who could
believe this?”) to chronicle the Western tragedy.
As a general rule, whatever Europe is now doing, we
should do the opposite — for our very survival in an increasingly scary world.
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