I could kick myself for missing this book on Europe when it was first published in 2017. But like most Americans, I follow the vagaries of Western European politics only when it hits the front page. As I finally cracked this book, I was as shocked by the contents as if I stumbled across the diary of a favorite, but distant, cousin and discovered a chronic methhead proud of his own addiction.

Europe isn’t being killed, it is committing suicide

Author Douglas Murray’s prose is polished, at times wry. The facts and events he relates paint a picture of cultural self-abnegation. There’s eager willingness among Europe’s political and cultural leaders to try to outdo each other in public self-flagellation.

Murray traveled extensively across Europe to observe first hand what the open-borders policy towards refugees and unrestricted migration has wrought. He is not without sympathy for the people seeking escape from war and starvation. However, Murray points out that the Leftist politics of multiculturalism has produced parallel communities. There are island nations of Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Somalia living in cities from London to Berlin.

People like Germany’s Merkel have internalized the guilt of past sins of imperial Europe. They would rather harm their own citizens than require anything of immigrants.

Although we Europeans acknowledge, for example, that merely by moving to China or India, we cannot actually become Chinese or Indian, we fail to understand that, merely by moving to Europe, anyone who does so will not automatically transform themselves into Europeans

Murray makes the point over and over again that the European political class has decided that European culture and values are not to be celebrated. People who do, like the fully assimilated, pro-Enlightenment migrant, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, will find themselves opposed and silenced.

It was harder to accuse a black woman of racism than it was a white man. Nevertheless, the supporters of the status quo found a way around this by claiming that Hirsi Ali did not know what she was saying because she was “traumatized” by her experiences — experiences they insisted were wholly uncommon.

And we know it was the abject fear of being considered “racist” that kept such horrors as Rotherham covered up for years.

Will America continue to follow Europe?

What rang clear and true as I read this book is that the Leftists of Europe hold the same ideology as Leftists in the United States. For them Western cultural values are to be despised. Christianity needs to be muscularly opposed while no criticism of Islam is to tolerated.

If going by what happens on college and university campuses — Removing Shakespeare’s portrait at U Penn because “diversity” to university courses teaching that objectivity or meritocracy or even science itself are white mythologies — I give us about 25 years until it is too late to pull back from collapse.

We can avoid becoming a methhead like our cousin, it isn’t inevitable. And we have to find the will to do it.

Let it start with reading a book like The Strange Death of Europe and recognizing the con of the Left in this country.
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featured image created by Darleen Click