Summary: Massive immigration, continuing today, has initiated large-scale changes to EU society. Here are some unconventional perspectives on these new challenges and Europe’s responses. This is the third post in this series.
“The health of a people comes only from its inner life — from the life of its soul and its spirit.”
— Words on a granite memorial stone in Berlin marking where Walther Rathenau “fell on this spot by the hand of a murderer.”
This is the voice of global capitalism. Money and people should flow freely.
Europe’s borders didn’t just open. It was a plan.
For example, see the 2012 BBC story “EU should ‘undermine national homogeneity’“, quoting Peter Sutherland. He was a Chairman of Goldman Sachs, BP, and the London School of Economics Council — and the UN’s Special Representative for Migration.
“He told the House of Lords committee migration was a ‘crucial dynamic for economic growth’ in some EU nations ‘however difficult it may be to explain this to the citizens of those states.’ An ageing or declining native population in countries like Germany or southern EU states was the ‘key argument and, I hesitate to the use word because people have attacked it, for the development of multicultural states’, he added.
“’It’s impossible to consider that the degree of homogeneity which is implied by the other argument can survive because states have to become more open states, in terms of the people who inhabit them. Just as the United Kingdom has demonstrated.’ …
“'{we of Europe} still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and difference from others. And that’s precisely what the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine.’”
For more evidence about the intentions of Europe’s leaders, see Europe’s elites use immigration to reshape it.
Europe’s elites want to go beyond nations, so that nothing limits them
Fredrik Reinfeldt is a libertarian economist. He was chairman of Sweden’s conservative Moderate Party from 2003 to 2015 and Prime Minister from 2006 to 2014. As prime minister, in 2014 he called Sweden a “humanitarian superpower” and as his people to “open their hearts.” Afterwards he said…
“What does the word ‘enough’ mean? Is Sweden full? Is the Nordic region full? Are we too many people? We are 25 million people living in the North. I often fly over the Swedish countryside. I would recommend more people to do the same. There are endless fields and forests. There’s as much space as you can imagine. Those who claim that the country is full, they must demonstrate where it is full.”
Reinfeldt has even questioned the right of Sweden to enforce its borders…
“What is Sweden as a country? Is this nation owned by those who have lived here for four generations, or by those who invent some borders? Or is this an open country made up of people who arrive here, in midlife, perhaps born in another country? And it is what they make of Sweden that is Sweden.”
Reinfeldt is wrong. The ancestors of most ethnic Swedes have lived there for hundreds or even thousands of years, not just “four generations.”
A conservative reads
The Strange death of Europe
David Pryce-Jones at National Review reviews The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
“Europe almost committed suicide by means of the two world wars, but managed to survive both times. Douglas Murray holds that a third attempt at suicide is under way. The context is rather straightforward. The order of the Muslim Middle East was always fragile, and hideous power struggles and Islamic rivalries have shattered it beyond recovery. Either fleeing from chaos or taking the chance to better themselves, Muslims numbering in the millions have come to settle in Europe. The initial humanitarian impulse of Europeans to come to the aid of the victims and the dispossessed was only right and proper. …
“The governments of Western Europe decided to admit these migrants more or less unconditionally, taking the simplistic view that they would integrate naturally, the way migrants are supposed to do. As far as is known, nobody in authority had the vision to ask whether it was wise to introduce a minority whose very strong religious faith and culture have a long history of opposition to Christendom and risked keeping them separate from the natives, to put it no more strongly. The failure to set any effective limit on admissions meant that the authorities were giving free rein to a mass movement with which they were already unable to cope. …
“The Labour government of Tony Blair employed a bureaucrat who could have been speaking for every administration in Europe when she said about the task she had been given, ‘There was no policy for integration. We just believed migrants would integrate.’ To welcome into the house people who will then make it unlivable is the stuff of some grim fable of moral instruction.”
Another perspective on Europe’s problems: it’s madness.
“Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.”
— Paraphrase of a line in Sophocles’ “Antigone”(620-623).
Many have asked why Europe’s elites threw open its borders so recklessly, admitting millions of people from radically different cultures (even failed states) into nations with so little ability to assimilate immigrants — putting their social stability. Bill Bonner has an answer. He writes about finance at The Daily Reckoning and author of The New Empire of Debt: The Rise and Fall of an Epic Financial Bubble
“Men do stupid things regularly and mad things occasionally. And sometimes, the impulse to self-destruction is so overwhelming it overtakes an entire nation. …The best a person can hope for when he goes mad is that he runs into a brick wall quickly …before he has a chance to build up speed. That is why success, in war and investing, is often a greater menace than failure.
“…people seem to make such obvious and moronic errors that it seems as if they were driven to it by some instinct of self-destruction — like lemmings periodically exterminating themselves in a march off the cliffs. What’s more, this diabolical instinct seems to report for duty at the very moment when the future seems the brightest — that is, when it is most needed! Just when men are most proud, most confident, most expansive in their ambitions and hopes …that is when they make the most lunkheaded judgments.
“And who but Mother Nature herself would design such a world? Men are encouraged to apply all their strength, will and intelligence to a given situation. They see it yield before their efforts, thereby flattering their pretensions. And thus puffed up do they strut their way towards a humiliating destruction.”
Other posts in this series about Murray’s book
- Martin van Creveld calls out the cowards in Europe.
- Warning of the “Strange Death of Europe.”
- Different perspectives on Europe’s elites project to remold its society.
For More Information
The Gatestone Institute, a far-right advocacy group, is one of the few reporting about this problems of immigrants in Europe. As always with such sources, whether Gatestone or Wikipedia, follow the links to the original sources.
Please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. Also see these posts about rape, about Europe, about immigration, about woman and gender, and especially these…
- Torching Utopia: Sweden tries mass immigration.
- Europe’s elites use immigration to reshape it.
- Stratfor: How immigration will change German politics, which will change Europe.
- Sociologist Wolfgang Streeck explains the politics of the migrant crisis reshaping Europe.
- Stratfor: Is the West Being Overrun by Migrants? — By the famous sociologist and historian Ian Morris.
If only Europe had a better people…
This is a deeply researched look at The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History
“This is a history of modern European cultural pluralism, its current crisis, and its uncertain future.
“In 2010, the leaders of Germany, Britain, and France each declared that multiculturalism had failed in their countries. Over the past decade, a growing consensus in Europe has voiced similar decrees. But what do these ominous proclamations, from across the political spectrum, mean? From the influx of immigrants in the 1950s to contemporary worries about refugees and terrorism, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe examines the historical development of multiculturalism on the Continent.
“Rita Chin argues that there were few efforts to institute state-sponsored policies of multiculturalism, and those that emerged were pronounced failures virtually from their inception. She shows that today’s crisis of support for cultural pluralism isn’t new but actually has its roots in the 1980s.
“Chin looks at the touchstones of European multiculturalism, from the urgent need for laborers after World War II to the public furor over the publication of The Satanic Verses
“While many Muslim immigrants had lived in Europe for decades, in the 1980s they came to be defined by their religion and the public’s preoccupation with gender relations. Acceptance of sexual equality became the critical gauge of Muslims’ compatibility with Western values. The convergence of left and right around the defense of such personal freedoms against a putatively illiberal Islam has threatened to undermine commitment to pluralism as a core ideal. Chin contends that renouncing the principles of diversity brings social costs, particularly for the left, and she considers how Europe might construct an effective political engagement with its varied population.
“Challenging the mounting opposition to a diverse society, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe presents a historical investigation into one continent’s troubled relationship with cultural difference.”
