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Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Problem: death of Western Civilization; Remedy: a return to Christian moral authority?

From:
Is Europe’s adventure in international living about to end?

(The American Conservative) -- by Patrick J. Buchanan --

At Potsdam, Germany, this weekend, Chancellor Angela Merkel told the young conservatives of her Christian Democratic Union that Germany’s attempt to create a multicultural society where people “live side by side and enjoy each other” has “failed, utterly failed.”

Backing up her rueful admission are surveys showing 30 percent of Germans believe the country is overrun by foreigners. An equal number believe the foreigners come to feed off German welfare.

Merkel had in mind the Turks who came as gastarbeiters, guest workers, in the 1960s. Some 2.5 million now live in Germany.

Arabs and East Europeans have come more recently. One survey puts the Muslim population at 5 million.

“Multikulti is dead,” says Horst Seehofer of Merkel’s sister party, the Christian Social Union of Bavaria. He wants no more immigration from “alien cultures.” Turks and other Muslims are not learning the language, he contends, not assimilating, not becoming Germans.

Awareness of deep differences with Turkish neighbors became acute for Germans when, grieving in solidarity with America after 9/11, they learned that Turkish sectors of Berlin were celebrating Islam’s victory with barrages of bottle rockets.

Like all of Europe, Germany grows nervous.

This summer, Thilo Sarrazin, who sat on the Bundesbank board, published “Germany Abolishes Itself,” which sold 300,000 copies in seven weeks. Sarrazin argued that Germany’s Muslim population is intellectually inferior and unable or unwilling to learn the language or culture, and mass immigration is destroying the nation.

No rightist, but a stalwart of the socialist party, Sarrazin was forced out at the Bundesbank. Half his socialist party stood by him.

Across Europe, there is a resurgence of ethnonationalism that is feeding the ranks of populist and anti-immigrant parties that are gaining respectability and reaching for power.

Austrian nationalists triumphed in 2008 when the Freedom Party of Joerg Haider and the Alliance for the Future of Austria together took 29 percent of the vote. The Swiss People’s Party of Christoph Blocher, largest in Bern, was behind the successful referendum to change the constitution to outlaw minarets and prohibit the wearing of burqas.

Hungary’s Jobbik Party, which to the Financial Times “sits squarely in Europe’s most repulsive arch-nationalist tradition and which blames Jews and Roma for the hardships of other Hungarians,” pulled 17 percent of the vote this year and entered parliament with 47 seats, up from zero seats in 2006.

The Sweden Democrats just captured 6 percent of the vote and entered parliament for the first time with 20 seats, joining right-wing folk parties in Norway and Denmark.

Geert Wilders, a rising figure in Dutch politics, was charged with hate speech for equating Islam and Nazism. In June, his Freedom Party swept past the ruling Christian Democrats, who lost half of their strength in parliament. “More security, less crime, less immigration, less Islam — that is what the Netherlands has chosen,” said Wilders.

In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy — one eye on Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, the other on the 2012 elections — rejecting cries of “Nazism” and “Vichyism,” is dismantling Gypsy camps and deporting Gypsies to Romania. Milan is now following the French lead.

What is happening in Europe partakes of a global trend. Multiracial, multi-ethnic, multicultural nations are disintegrating.

Russians battle ethnic Muslim separatists in the North Caucasus. Seventy percent of Americans support an Arizona law to identify and expel illegal aliens. Beijing swamps the homelands of Tibetans and Uighurs with Han Chinese. India fights secession in Kashmir, Nagaland and the Naxalite provinces.

“Wars between nations have given way to wars within nations, ” said Barack Obama in his Nobel Prize address.

Ethnonationalism tore Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union and Josip Tito’s Yugoslavia into 22 separate nations, and is now tugging at the seams of all multi-ethnic states. Globalism is in retreat before tribalism.

But the awakening of Europe’s establishment to the shallow roots of multiculturalism will likely prove frustrating and futile.

With her fertility rate below replacement levels for 40 years, projected to remain so for the next 40 years, Germany will lose 12 million of her 82 million people by 2050. Her median age will rise eight years to 53, and 40 percent of all Germans will be over 60.

Germany’s problem is insoluble. She is running out of Germans.

Yet if her welfare state is to survive and her industries are to remain competitive, Germany will need millions of new workers.

Where are they to come from, if not the Third World? For not one European nation, save Iceland and Albania, has had a birth rate for decades that is not below zero population growth.

Baby boomer Europe decided in the 1960s and 1970s it wanted La Dolce Vita, not the hassle of children. It had that sweet life. Now the bill comes due. And the bill is the end of their tribes and countries as we have known them.

Old Europe is dying, and the populist and nationalist parties, in the poet’s phrase, are simply raging “against the dying of the light.”...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

I agree that Orthodox Islam is ultimately irreconcilable with Western Civilization and Christianity. But then so is Orthodox Judaism. In fact, we’ve seen how even “secular” Judaism is capable of tenacious Israel-first and diaspora Jewish nationalist networking and tribalism, albeit less open and obvious than Islamist tribalism. In fact, this has contributed to the West's wars against Muslim countries, in part on behalf of Israel (as well as liberal capitalist Keynesianism), which has consequently contributed to Islamic emigration to the West from the decimated war zones.

The problem is that each civilization has to have its own cultural and spiritual moral authority, and those of other Abrahamic faiths simply refuse to accept Christian moral authority in the West. Leftists, globalists and “end of history” liberal capitalists tried to bypass this conflict by instructing the West that all that religious tribalism is in the past, and we will all proceed together hand in hand under the “moral authority” of money worship, secular statism, and liberal-capitalist narcissism. The problems is, they never asked the Christian-basis of Western Civilization if this is acceptable, and have found the other faiths even less accommodating to this idea than Christians.

The other problem is that this was only even remotely possible so long as attendant class conflict that goes hand in hand with the “end of history” materialist ideology could be papered over with Keynesian money printing, and the wealth spread around. But as America and the West have lost their economic domination over the world, that state of affairs is coming to an end as well, and the resources that remain are all being gobbled up by the crumbling statist-liberal-capitalist juggernaut and its insatiable string-pullers.

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