Europe is a continent adrift
By David Semple
Europe is a dying civilisation. Not only are Europeans no longer having enough children to sustain the respective populations of the nation states therein, especially Spain, Italy, France and Germany, but there is a massive transformation of the demographic and cultural character of these European nations taking place, a change of a magnitude unseen since the barbarian invasions in the final years of the Roman Empire.
Bernard Lewis, the Middle Eastern and Islamic scholar who turned 100 years old last month, has been saying for some years that Islam could become the dominant force in Europe thanks to the rise of left-wing political correctness, which has abdicated the battle for cultural and religious control.
The Muslims “seem to be about to take over Europe,” Lewis told a special briefing with the editorial staff of The Jerusalem Post nine years ago. Asked what this meant for the continent’s Jews, he responded, “The outlook for the Jewish communities of Europe is dim.” Soon, he warned, the only pertinent question regarding Europe’s future would be, “Will it be an Islamised Europe or Europeanised Islam?”
The growing sway of Islam in Europe was of particular concern given the rising support within the Islamic world for extremist and terrorist movements, said Lewis.
“Europeans are losing their own loyalties and their own self-confidence,” he said. “They have no respect for their own culture.” Europeans had “surrendered” on every issue with regard to Islam in a mood of “self-abasement,” “political correctness” and “multi-culturalism.”
The post-Christian, post-Western continent now dominated completely by the European Union has only declined more rapidly during the decade since Professor Lewis’ predictions. Today, the euro currency has decimated the economies of Mediterranean Europe, especially Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy and also France. Today, Europe is more Islamised that at any time since the Turkish invasions of the 11th-17th centuries and the ending of the Muslim occupation of Spain in the 1490s. Jews are leaving Paris and Malmo to escape the anti-Jewish persecution that arises from the Islamisation of these cities.
The West’s military victory at the gates of Vienna on September 11th 1683 is only just over three centuries ago. During those three centuries, European civilisation came first to dominate the world, then imploded during the two world wars of the 20th century. Europe had to be rescued from totalitarianism by the United States and Britain in 1945. However, Europe is no longer important to the defence of the West. That role has been taken up by the United States. Indeed, the New World is now more Christian and Western than Europe.
Europe, on the other hand, gives priority to expanding its welfare states and has abdicated responsibility for its own defence. Apart from Britain and France, Europe is a military weakling on the world stage, unable to defend itself from invasion by Russia or Turkey or some other foreign power without the assistance of the United States.
Ethnic and political transformations in Europe like those taking place today occurred during the period we now call the Early Middle, or Dark Ages. The rise of Christianity and the fall of the Roman Empire transferred Western civilisation from the ancient world centred on the Mediterranean Sea to northern and western Europe. This transformation in England took place after the Romans left ancient Britain and the Anglo-Saxon invasions created a unified kingdom out of the former Roman-occupied parts of the island. The Celtic languages of the Ancient Britons disappeared, while most of them were ethnically cleansed or become Anglo-Saxon in culture themselves.
The Norman Conquest brought the foundation of the aristocratic class that have run the country for the almost thousand year period since 1066. Today, in new the democratic age, with the British ruling class mere a shadow of their former selves, lacking the confidence with which they created the British Empire, the middle and working classes have elected governments that have, over the last fifty years, transformed the political culture of the nation. England is becoming a left-leaning welfarist state wherein individualism (the same Anglo-Saxon individualism which created the modern world) is out of fashion and collectivist thinking defines politics of the age. That’s why Edward Heath took the British people into the Common Market in 1973. Europe represented a new bureaucratic way of politics. Forty years later and we can now see the new ideologies of political correctness, open borders and multiculturalism dominant in British political culture.
The British people, however, have not transformed their way of thinking entirely in that direction. Margaret Thatcher was the only British leader since the end of the Second World War to try to revive the spirit of British individualism and run against the postwar decline into collectivism. She failed, after being thrown out of office by the Heathites within her own party. She was allowed to reform certain British institutions, but when it came to Europe, the formation of the European Union out of the European Common Market, they stopped her.
Europe had been the Holy Grail of British politics since early 1960s. Mrs Thatcher, however, realised that Europe was going in a collectivist dirigiste direction which would eventually and fatally undermine the long tradition of Anglo-Saxon freedom and parliamentary democracy. Her successors took Britain further down the road of European integration whereby the majority of new laws originate in Brussels.
The British establishment, including Tony Blair and David Cameron, live in fear of a revolt by the British public against the European Holy Grail. Thus, mass inward immigration since the 1990s has become the new weapon of the Labour and Conservative establishments to undermine British nationalism. David Cameron prefers to rule a nation of communities, rather than a nation with a strong British identity which could undermine membership of the European Holy Grail. Thus, today we have community identity instead of national identity. Every week we see government ministers addressing the Muslim community, the Hindu community, the LBGT community, the Bengali community, the Turkish community and the African community.
The British people (or at least half of them) have finally woken up to what their governments have done to the country, in particular the administrations of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. As Europe is ceasing to be European, so Britain is ceasing to be British. Thus, America, Canada and Australia still cling to their British constitutional legacy as David Cameron’s Britain wants to abandon this legacy to the rule of European Union law. And the Europe that Mr Cameron wants to attach his sails to is the post-Christian, post-Western Europe which is fast losing its European and modern identity.
If the Brexit side wins the EU referendum, it will be only because the British working classes have revolted against the Europeanisation and Islamisation of Britain. There has not been a revolution in England since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a revolution which rejected the threat of a return of medieval Papism by the Stuart monarchy and embraced the Protestant worldview of freedom and capitalism which was blossoming in the English colonies of America. This revolution was an aristocratic revolution, but it was so successful that Scotland united with England in 1707.
The revolution that today would accompany a Brexit from the European Union could be Britain’s first peaceful revolution for democracy, thereby returning political sovereignty to Westminster for the first time since January 1st 1973. This will have to be accompanied by changes that increase the power and wealth of the working classes. This means rejecting socialism on the one hand and European-style corporatism on the other. For Britain to become a free and prosperous nation, it must throw off the shackles of EU-style big government and embrace classic economic liberalism.
David Semple is a Manchester Tory and film maker/broadcaster from Canada. He is currently writing a book called Jerusalem and the Fall of British Imperialism. With JMA’s Richard Mather he is co-writing a radio play called Jerusalem 2017: Imperial Sunset.
