Genre: Nonfiction--Current Events & Politics
My Rating: 8.0
Summed Up:
Douglas Murray is straight forward when it comes to his opinion regarding Europe’s future: it doesn’t have one. “By the end of the lifespans of most people currently alive Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world we had to call home.” (1) How is this suicide being committed? Unchecked, uncontrolled mass third-world immigration. Murray explains that “In all Western European countries, this process began after the Second World War due to labour shortages. Soon Europe got hooked on the migration and could not stop the flow even it wanted to. The result was that what had been Europe—the home of European peoples—gradually became a home for the entire world. The places that had been European gradually became somewhere else. So place dominated by Pakistani immigrants resembled Pakistan in everything but their location, with the recent arrivals and their children eating the food of their place of origin, speaking the language of their place of origin and worshipping the religion of their place of origin.” (2)
But why is this movement of people destroying Europe? Because the host cultures are sick and unable to assimilate the newcomers. Murray states, “And while the movement of millions of people from other cultures into a strong and assertive culture might have worked, the movement of millions of people into a guilty, jaded and dying culture cannot.” (7) But, the ruling class continues to pretend this could work. Murray states, “It’s like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” (16) The cultures of Europe have lost faith in their beliefs and traditions.
During this entire transformation, the peoples of Europe have been wholly against mass migration and the loss of their cultures. How have politicians responded? With a dismissive, “get over it,” or simply stating that the changes were “inevitable.” Murray comments, “But there is something cold about the tone of such remarks. Not least the absence of any sense that there may be other people out there not willing to simply ‘get over it,’ who dislike the alteration of their society and never asked for it.” (26) Politicians either don’t know or care that the vast majority of their peoples do not want this change to happen.
For those who do disagree with mass migration, it has become dangerous to express this disagreement. As Murray notices, “The upsides of migration have become easy to talk about: to simply nod to them is to express values of openness, tolerance and broad-mindedness. Yet to nod to, let alone express, the downsides of immigration is to invite accusations of closed-mindedness and intolerance, xenophobia and barely disguised racism.” (27-8) Thus, if you embrace the loss of your country you are good, and if you oppose it, you are an evil, racist, bigot. Murray continues later in the book, “in each case the price that local people were made to pay, for taking anything but the most positive attitude towards the arrival in their towns and cities of hundreds of thousands of people from another culture, was just too high. Whole careers not only in politics, but in any walk of life, could be ruined by any recognition of the new facts, never mind any proposed alteration to them. And so the only thing left for people to do—whether locals, officials or politicians—was to ignore the problem and lie about it.” (113)
These attacks against those who oppose immigration have prevented any sane discussions of the issue. Murray states, “It soon became clear that nothing could be learned because nothing could be said.” (224)
One of the most common ways that European leaders dismiss critiques of contemporary immigration policies is by claiming that this is nothing new, that is has all happened before and has been happening forever. “The movement of people in recent years—even before the European migration crisis—was of an entirely different quantity, quality and consistency from anything that had gone before,” Murray says. “Yet despite this fact, it remains one of the most popular ways to cover over the vast changes of recent years to pretend that history was similar to what is happening now. Not the least advantages of this suggestion is that any current problems arising from migration and nothing we haven’t dealt with—and triumphed over—before. It falsely presents any current challenges as normal.” (27)
But, are those benefits of migration really worth it? Murray doesn’t think so. He says, “The reality is that whatever its other benefits, the economic benefits of immigration accrue almost solely to the migrant. It is migrants who are able to access public facilities they have not previously paid for. It is migrants who benefit from a wage higher than they could earn in their home country. And very often the money that they earn—or much of it—is sent to family outside the United Kingdom rather than even being put back into the local economy.” (43) As to the costs of immigration, Murray points out that “A continent which imports the world’s people will also import the world’s problems.” (302)
Deeper down, mass immigration seems to be a result of cultures that have given up on themselves. Proponents have the impending demographic replacement claim that “either that the country of arrival does not have a culture, or that its culture and identity are so especially weak, worn out or bad that if it did disappear then it could hardly be mourned.” (31) Additionally, in the new multicultural Europe, “the only culture that couldn’t be celebrated was the culture that had allowed all these other cultures to be celebrated in the first place.” Thus, newcomers should constantly be encouraged to be proud of their cultures, but the indigenous, native Europeans either have no culture at all, or have one that they should be ashamed of.
A pervasive guilt has seeped into modern Western societies for real or perceived wrongs from the past. Murray claims that “The desire to continue to feel yourself guilty arguable finds its end point in modern European liberal societies: the first societies in human history who, when they are hit, ask what they did to deserve it.” Thus, a culture that is so overwhelmed by its own guilt has no energy to defend itself against invading cultures and peoples. Murray observes that “it is not possible for a society to survive if it routinely suppresses and otherwise fights against its own origins. Just as a nation could not thrive if it forbade any criticism of its past, so no nation can survive if it suppresses everything that is positive about its past.” (305)
In sum, “Europeans are blamed for what is happening to them, are denied any legitimate way to object, and the views of the majority are made to appear not just dangerous but marginal.” (246)
You can read my review of The Strange Death of Europe here.
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