Sunday, May 28, 2006

The Spinelessness Of Europe?

Atlas has an amazing letter written to her by a European man, explaining the European mindset, and why it appears as if Europe will never deal with the Islamofascists in their midst.

It is worth your time to read the whole thing, because it is a brilliant analysis, in my opinion, but, I will excerpt a bit here:


In the context of this Islamic problem, I think the apparent spinelessness of Europeans and their governments is probably best understood as a manifestation of the general sentiment that if these problems are not affecting most people personally, (a) they don't feel any motivation for doing anything about them and (b) largely they don't even see them. Clearly this is an idiotic attitude to adopt, but unlike freedom, which we see as a universal value and we can see as threatened by and in Muslim societies, core French values are particular to France. Likewise with almost every other European society. The lack of any serious emotional commitment to freedom among Europeans means that Europeans simply don't notice or care about future threats to their freedom that are looming on the horizon. What they would care about, however, is actual disruption to their own (myopic and self-indulgent) way of life.

Take an absurd character like De Villepin. If all the little De Villepins in France, who are now growing up and looking forward to attending L'Ecole Nationale d'Administration, found their paths somehow blocked by Muslims they'd be seriously angry. If all the characteristics of the French way of life which one can't avoid noticing when visiting France were to be displaced by Muslim habits and attitudes, the French would be angry. But, because they lack the commitment to the universal outward-looking value of freedom, I bet you your bottom dollar that, unlike us, they wouldn't notice the threat to their own way of life until the threat started manifesting itself in actual disruption to it.

What happens at that point is the issue I was drawing attention to in my post. I think that, were European societies to get to the point where the native population's sense of its own identity was actually being damaged by Muslim influences, there would be a very visceral and violent reaction to those Muslim influences.

This is because it's only at that point that we can expect Europeans to react to Muslims at all. You or I can look at the Taleban (and not just Muslims but also, say, the Chinese) and even from thousands of miles away see them as antipathetic to our whole way of life, and a genuine menace. So long as communists and Islamic fanatics exist, our core value - freedom - is under threat, in a way that Frenchness is not threatened by the existence of those regimes.

I think two consequences flow from this.

1. The likelihood that European societies won't do anything about their Muslim problems until such problems begin to actually disrupt the 'native' European culture means that any attempts to address these problems will take place at a time when there are far more Muslims in Europe than there are today. This is likely to make the eventual 'reckoning' more serious and may lead to some sort of civil conflict.

2. The lack of any real commitment to freedom means that the European reaction to the Muslim problem, when it finally does emerge, will be less restrained than the reaction in the United States.

We can characterise these issues as a fight between freedom and tyranny; the French will only be able to characterise it between Frenchness and an Islamic identity. That would make it more personal and specific to them, and more nation- and racially-based, than looking at it in terms of freedom-tyranny makes it to us.

Same goes for all the European countries, and we know from bitter experience that people fighting to preserve their national or racial identity fight dirty.


I'd love to hear from our European readers on this. Is this guy right?

I have a feeling he is.

I have been saying for quite some time now that the West is not going to lose this war. The question is, will we lose our humanity in winning the war. We, in the West have a long history of "fighting dirty" as this man puts it. Truth is, I pity the poor Muslims once we finally wake the fuck up.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was going to post a comment here, but then I decided to put it up directly at Atlas Shrugs. You can find it there, actually you can find two of them. Basically I say (once more) that it is a mistake to talk about "Europe".