The Strange Death of Europe - A book review

In 2015, during a September UN luncheon, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel was recorded on an unbeknownst live microphone, telling Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, that something must be done by his social media platform to stop people from posting anti-immigration posts. “Are you working on this?” she demanded. Zuckerberg replied in the affirmative.

Douglas Murray, journalist and author, points to this little episode as symptomatic of what is wrong with the West’s handling of the migrant crisis facing Europe. What's more, it's a symptom of a deeper affliction, one of the European 'soul'.

His book, The Strange Death of Europe, published by Bloomsbury in June 2017, is a history of the present. With feline grace, first-hand accounts, statistics and an analysis of the history, psyche and philosophical underpinnings, Murray presents to the reader an unhappy but truthful, insightful and much underreported reality of Europe and her discontents.

There is too much to summarise without doing the book a disservice, but here are some contradictions and ironies, much of which is tackled in more detail in the book, to savour, which will hopefully induce at least some questions if not answers.

The Present Reality

‘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.’

Douglas Murray

The Strange Death of Europe

In the recent migrant crisis facing Europe, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel can be said to be the figure-head that dragged the continent to the rocky shores from which an about-turn is proving to be very difficult.

In 2015, her open door policy, tremendously inefficient screening system and almost complete inability to expatriate anyone, even criminals, meant that Germany alone saw well over 1 million migrants enter – around 2% of its population and quadrupling the intake of 2014.

The overwhelming and enormously predictable negative results – socially, economically, and in terms of law and order, of her and her party’s decision quickly meant that Germany, along with several Eastern European countries, and Sweden, which also took in 2% of its population, were forced to reinstated border control as quietly as possible.

Just to quickly discard a straw-man that's often brought up: to say immigration at this unprecedented level is troubling is not the same as being anti-immigration in principle. Too much water can kill you, but telling people not to over-indulge, as this poor woman did, does not make you anti-water. To keep coming across this lazy 'argument' says something about the level of discourse on this complex and important topic.

But even now, during the 2017 German election, Merkel still defends her decision. While half conceding that it was a mistake that would ‘never be repeated’. She told Welt am Sonntag newspaper: “Germany acted humanely and correctly in a very difficult situation.”

Except, as Murray points out in his book, Germany, like so many other European countries, has been experiencing mass immigration for years. 2015 was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Furthermore, the EU Chief Frans Timmermans, with the pro-immigration EU’s own data from Frontex, was forced to admit that the majority (>60%) of those flooding Europe has no rightful claim to asylum but are economic migrants taking advantage of the open-doors that Merkel and other have left wantonly ajar to the world.

While immigration from any culture at this rate would prove problematic, the fundamentalist Islamist aspect is proving particularly difficult to digest for the host societies. Putting aside other frictions caused by differences in cultures, Jihadist terrorist attacks are probably the sharpest edge of all the ramifications of mass migration, mostly from Islamic countries.

Islamist terrorist attacks have risen in Europe from four in 2014 to 17 in 2015, with the number of people killed escalating from four to 150, with 2015 ending in the abhorrent Paris attacks that saw 130 killed.

In 2016, 10 completed terrorist plots killed 135 people, including the Nice attack on Bastille day, which killed 86. Five attacks occurred in Germany that year, culminating in the Berlin Christmas market attack that killed 12 and injured 56.

2017 is not nearly over but sadly the trend looks to be going upwards, with 12 attacks killing 57 people, the latest being in London, where a home-made bomb injured 29 people in the Tube. This doesn’t take into account the foiled plots and unheard of arrests behind the scenes.

While the majority of Muslims are, of course, not jihadists, violent extremism will increase with millions of people flooding in from countries where these ideologies originate. The uncomfortable fact is that many of the perpetrators are migrants or recent migrants. Terrorists also use the free movement in the Schengen area and the migrant stream to freely move in and out of European countries. Recently, Interpol has circulated a list of 50 suspected IS fighters believed to have landed in Italy during the latter half of 2017 and on their way to the rest of Europe - the current policy and porous borders making it impossible to manage such infiltration. 

In the UK, The Times recently reported that British Intelligence estimates around 23,000 jihadist extremists are living in the UK and have been identified as potential risks, with MI5 only able to investigate 3,000 individuals at one time. Murray points out a sobering statistic – that “by 2015 more British Muslims were fighting for Isis than for the British armed forces.” Despite all this, the EU is calling for countries to lift border controls and return to open borders.

Ex post facto lies

‘Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him.’

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Brothers Karamazov

While Merkel and her supporters may have begun the push for the open door policy from a place of good intention in the face of the Syrian refugee crisis, the terrifically short-sighted and inept way it was handled is reprehensible. What is worse however, is the total lack of contrition and the mendacious way those who brought the problems to Europe dealt and are still dealing with criticism.

Murray spends a chapter addressing the various post facto and increasingly feeble excuses that the government dealt out one by one to justify its drowning policies.

Economic – It has been argued that migrants makes the host country richer. This is patently false. Highly developed countries like Sweden and Germany do not need low skill workers who don’t speak the language. The generous welfare also depends on generations of people paying into the system. Newly arrived migrants, for obvious reasons, will be taking out of the system for a long time before they even begin to pay into the system. The pressure on an already stressed housing market is also not addressed, let alone schools, hospitals etc. As Murray wrote: ‘with immigration at the rate it has been in recent years the UK needs to build a city the size of Liverpool every year.’

In eviscerating a widely publicised 2013 study by the University College London, which claimed that migrants since 2000 has been a net positive financially to the UK, Murray removes the spin spun by the usual leftist media (BBC, Guardian, Huffington post etc) and highlights that the UCL’s own study says that non-EEA (European Economic Area) migrants had actually taken out between £114-159 billion more in services than they had paid in.  

Aging population – when the bribe of the economic argument is quashed, the next is usually the threat of the impending aging population in Europe. The argument goes that Europeans are not procreating enough to ensure the retirees will be kept in the style they have grown to be accustomed.

Putting aside the point that an aging population is not only a problem, and even skipping over the rather self-evident fact that immigrants will also age, Murray put forth the proposition that the most obvious solution is not to import the next generation from Eretria or Pakistan.

The obvious thing might be to look at the reasons why, despite the urges to have more than the 2.1 children that will maintain a population at replacement level being expressed by the vast majority of women surveyed by the Office for National Statistics in the UK, people are unable to afford to. The government should look inwardly to see what they can do to facilitate their citizens from being able to raise the number of children they desire.

Another remedy might be to raise retirement age. The easy living enjoyed by Western Europeans, with high social welfare, high life expectancy and low retirement age means that up to a third of life would be lived in relative luxury and paid by the state – or rather, increasingly by future generations. The stagnation of Europe’s economics, despite its defence needs taken care of by the US, is a reflection of ever-enlarging and unsustainable social welfare. To fix this structural problem would in the long run ensure Europe’s prosperity for generations.

Even if nations like Germany and Sweden would insist on importing the labour force, then why not import the up to 40% of unemployed youths from Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Ireland? Not only would this fulfill the apparent solidarity of the EU nations, solve a large foment of unrest and fill gaps in the labour market, people from Spain, Italy and Greece would suffer far less culture shock and integrate much more easily than people from sub-Saharan Africa or the middle east, thereby avoiding much social friction and crimes.

Diversity – Of all the excuses, this might be the most disingenuous. As Murray summarised: ‘Just as most cultures have good and interesting things to say for themselves, all have some bad and disagreeable things about them too. And while the positives can be stressed and exaggerated from the outset, any negative take years to admit, if they are admitted at all.’

To take an example, a 2009 Gallup poll in Britain found exactly zero percent of British Muslims interviewed thought that homosexuality was morally acceptable. A 2016 survey found that 52% of British Muslims thought homosexuality should be made illegal.

Regarding women, the thoughts of portions of the Muslim communities are ‘diverse’ too. For years, the white working-class and Sikhs, mostly in the north of England, have been reporting organised grooming gangs of often underage, non-Muslim, girls, by Muslim men from North African and Pakistani background. The girls were given drugs, brutally raped and threatened with violence. The media finally picked up the stories in the early 2000’s. It was eventually uncovered that not only were thousands of girls victims to these gangs, the local police were often too scared to look into the issue for fear of backlash. I touched on this issue in a previous essay.

While these heinous crimes were of course committed by only a small segment of the Muslim community, the fact that these criminals come disproportionately from this community deserves attention and honest discussions. Especially if one takes the trouble to know a little of the theology and cultural norms that dogmatic fundamentalist Islamists impose in many countries around the world where women are second class citizens. Predictably and boringly, those who dared point out the religiosity of those involved are also often derided, berated and stigmatised as ‘racists’ or ‘Islamophobic’. If anyone has seen the photos of Iranian women before and after the 1979 revolution, they would know that it has nothing to do with race but everything to do with ideology and, in particular, a fundamental idea of how a society is to be structured. The recent spate of protests, especially among women, in Iran is in part undoubtedly fueled by the memories of pre-1979 Iran and the freedoms women enjoyed. What the reactionary apologists for the worst versions of Islam are doing is therefore not defending Muslims, but instead defending the most medieval versions of Islam that Muslims themselves are fighting in their own countries, in an attempt to reclaim what the self-righteous Western 'leftists' are enjoying as a matter of course - personal liberty and dignity. 

Young women in Tehran  in the early 70's

Iranian women protesting against mandatory hijab law shortly after the revolution of 1979

The Jewish people are in many ways history’s canary down the mine, and antisemitism is on the increase in Europe. It is an irony that Germany, driven in part by the guilt of its anti-Semitic past, has welcomed in a large population of people mandated by their holy book to hate the Jews. In response, Jews are leaving Europe for Israel in large numbers.

As Murray reports, in the third largest city in Sweden: ‘[a]s the Muslim population in the city of Malmö grew, so the number of Jews in the city began to dwindle. Jewish buildings, […] were fire-bombed and by 2010 when the city’s Jewish community had fallen to under a thousand, as many as one in ten local Jews were harassed in a single year. Non-Jewish locals took to escorting kippah-wearing Jews to and from services and other community events.’ In a European survey, it was found that 70% of European Jews said they would avoid attending synagogue for fear of anti-Semitism and attacks.

Indeed these actions are quite diverse; in fact, one might say so diverse as to be opposite of Western liberal ideals. It takes generations to assimilate people with radically different world views and it's nigh on impossible at the speed with which Europe is taking in migrants.

A key mistake when looking at this issue is to see it as 'right' vs 'wrong' or 'good' vs 'evil'. It is rather a tragic situation in the Hegelian sense of when two virtues collide. In this case, as Murray points out, it is a collision between mercy and justice. In blind pursuit of a mutated 'mercy', Merkel and her ilk abandoned justice for the citizens they profess to represent. 

Enforcing consent/silencing opposition

‘Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.’

Sigmund Freud

Civilization and Its Discontents

Given the realities, wonderfully etched in Murray’s leading chapters where he visited the points of entry such as Lampedusa and the Greek islands and described the life-changing alterations to the lives of the residents, as well as the hardships and stories from the migrants themselves, seldom heard in the media, it is perfectly reasonable for the citizens of Europe to be worried and to voice their concerns.

However, if you cast your mind back to Frau Merkel and Zuckerberg at lunch, the most iniquitous aspect of the European authority’s handling of the immigration issue is its continued wilful deception of the public and censure of oppositional voices. Murray suggests that it is because if they do acknowledge criticism, the questions that will follow will strip them of any semblance of decency let alone authority and will force them to take responsibility. 

The political authorities in Germany, Sweden and elsewhere have been caught out pressuring the police to downplay the sharp increase in crimes committed by migrants (made up of disproportionately young men), the most infamous being sex crimes, which the authorities are enabling by their lack of will to confront let alone combat. After the Cologne new year mass sex assault, similar attacks in Sweden, the Rotherham sex ring and the recent Newcastle sex trafficking ring, the response from the media and authorities is to be silent, to obfuscate, and to excuse. Like Iphegenia or Andromeda, the young girls and women of Europe are offered as sacrifice by the government least they are shown to have been so wrong for so long.

Over two chapters, Murray outlined the sad history of many Cassandras who were ignored, elided, maligned, made pariahs or killed for simply raising the conversation.

These include Pym Fortuyn, the gay, charismatic, Marxist Dutch politician who voiced concerns over integration issues of the Muslim community in Dutch society. He was assassinated by an extreme leftist in 2002. It is hard to argue that the hyper-inflated rhetoric, calling him Hitler and Nazi, did not queue up the gullible and pave the road for his assassination.

The famous Italian journalist and firebrand Oriana Fallaci, a life-long anti-fascist, was called a right-wing extremist for her criticism of Islam after 9/11.

Bruce Bawer, a gay-rights advocate who raised concern about violence towards gays from the Muslim community in the early 2000s, was defamed for voicing his concerns, often by his former ‘liberal’ allies.

Theo van Gogh, who co-wrote a short film raising concerns over the rights of women in Islam with the Somali refugee and ex-Muslim human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was brutally shot, stabbed and beheaded on his way to work in Amsterdam in 2004 by an Islamist.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the perfect model of a migrant and a brave campaigner for personal liberty, especially that for women in the Islamic world, was ‘let go’ by the Netherlands and became what Salman Rushdie termed ‘probably the first refugee to the US from a first world country since WWII.’

The Danish cartoon crisis in 2005 was another surreal incident that I previously wrote about, the backstory of which is worth savouring. One of the very few publications that even dared to show the cartoons in question in the Western media, Charlie Hebdo, was firebombed in 2011. In 2015, assassins massacred almost the entire editorial staff. As Murray notes, before this, and on top of living with continued threats for depicting the Prophet Muhammad, ‘the editors of Charlie Hebdo had also spent years being dragged through the French courts by the Muslim organisations of France.’

Further to failing to support and insist on liberal rights of those in question, the instinct to silence those brave enough to speak and brush the question away in appeasement while squandering away the Liberal inheritance of the Western culture is still deeply ingrained in political and media tactics. I outlined some in a previous essay.

Salman Rushdie said that ‘Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence.’ The establishment on the other hand seems to be determined to douse any spark, however legitimate, using any method they see fit.  

It is very ironic that this tactic of enforcing consensus is used by Merkel who, in 2010, in a famous speech, conceded that ‘multiculturalism has absolutely failed’. Having made this large concession, followed by Cameron in the UK and Sarkozy in France in 2011, why did she implement policies that ramped up immigration?

Murray notes that ‘their priority has been not to clamp down on the thing to which the public are objecting but, rather, to the objecting public. If anybody wanted a textbook case on how politics goes wrong, here is one.’

And he is exactly right. One cannot help but be reminded of Bertolt Brecht’s searingly satirical poem Die Lösung (The Solution), written to mock the East German government’s violent quashing of the 1953 mass protest over centralised and expanding government:

[…] the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Turning of the tide?

‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

The Leopard

The most outstanding aspect of Murray’s book in my opinion is his diagnosis of the malady in the European soul. Because the largest challenge facing Europe is not jihadists but an inability to rouse itself, its self confidence and identity, and reach for higher things like previous generations.

The Germans have a word – Geschichtsmüde, which describe a ‘weariness of history’. Partly driven by the weight of history that has been amplified by people with either too little knowledge or too much animosity, and partly due to a certain listlessness, ennui or feeling of rudderlessness in the hustle and bustle of the post-Christian, post-modern world, Europe’s self-identity has been eroding for many decades.  

Murray quotes, among others, Nietzsche, who detected this early. He wrote in his notebook: ‘we are no longer accumulating. We are squandering the capital of our forebears, even in our way of knowing.’

Murray dives into the frivolousness and unbearably shallow offerings of modern life, in art, music, literature and the distractions that many people take to be the meaningful pursuits of life. There is, not surprisingly, an abandon of objective standards in the understanding and appreciation of many of the fundamental and unique principles underpinning Western culture that made it the birthplace of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance and the best place to be a citizen. 

Driven in large part by the Frankfurt School of thought, it is why many are so relativistic and ready to spurn their own cultural heritage while lapping up, for example, Orientalism as some sort of deep, mysterious and wise substitute. It is what the philosopher Roger Scruton calls the ‘culture of self-repudiation’.

The inability to articulate, let alone defend Western culture, while at the same time taking in so many people from a very different culture with a very strong assertiveness, would inevitably mean that the host culture will be diluted. Like the paradox of the Ship of Theseus, when is the ship no longer the same ship as its component parts are replaced by very different things? 

In a 2007 piece by the late Christopher Hitchens, he contemplates and analyses the changing features of Finsbury Park, an area of London where he once lived. In it he recalls being 'haunted by a challenge that was offered on the BBC by a Muslim activist named Anjem Choudary: a man who has praised the 9/11 murders as “magnificent” and proclaimed that “Britain belongs to Allah.” When asked if he might prefer to move to a country which practices Shari’a, he replied: “Who says you own Britain anyway?” A question that will have to be answered one way or another.'


Murray, in a Spectator piece, pointed out a fact that summarises the masochism in the situation that Europe is in: Choudary, a seditious extremist who has links to the 7/7 London bomber, was paid more through government handouts than Drummer Lee Rigby, the 25 year old soldier who was butchered on the streets of London by Islamic extremists, whom Choudary also praised. 

The actual life experienced by the citizens and the picture the media and politicians try to paint is too divergent not to notice. A recent survey by Chatham House of over 10,000 people found that in eight out of ten European countries surveyed, including Germany, the majority of people, when confronted with the statement 'All further migration from mainly Muslim countries should be stopped', agreed. In the UK, where 47% agreed, those who disagreed was only 23%. 

Leaving aside the wisdom of such sentiments, the widening gap between the authority and the people is alarming. If one side insists on a view that is not true, and deny that their critics have any merit at all, they will inevitably produce an opposition force which will also insist on untruths. If you take away people's right to talk, then the only recourse left is violence. This is a powder-keg ready to blow. 

With the recent shifts in European politics (outlined in my previous essay), it is apparent that many people of Europe have seen through the arrogance, mendacity and prejudical way that the establishment has behaved towards its own people. The latest German election is another example. While Merkel won her fourth term, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, a new, right-wing party continuously maligned as extreme right wing, has won 13% of the vote and has 94 seats in the Bundestag, making it the third largest party in Germany. The Eastern European countries, such as Hungary and Slovakia have stood firm against the EU mandate to open their borders. While we should be skeptical and watch these swings of the pendulum with caution, it is an unfailing sign that across Europe, the movement against the status quo is gathering momentum.

As Murray warns, the opening for a soft landing on the issue of mass migration is getting smaller each day. His book is almost a dirge. But civilizational decline is a choice, it always is. For those who appreciate Europe for what she is and what she has offered the world despite her failings, we can only hope this apparent push back is not too late.