The Sick Man in Europe

 
In a comments thread on Little Green Footballs last night, I had an interesting exchange with commenter DP111. Here are excerpts from the thread, redacted and edited for spelling; the initial comment was a response to Fjordman:

	DP111
	I have stopped paying Jizya to the BBC. I can no longer watch BBC news commenters without feelings of revulsion, and don’t feel like paying to be sick.
	---------------------------------
	What we are seeing in the West is the opening salvoes of the continuation of the Jihad against Christendom, that was brought to a close at Vienna in 1683. The new onset has come about as a direct consequence of allowing Muslim immigration to the West. Muslims are mandated to the Jihad and it is foolish of us to expect that they will refrain from doing so. It is our foolishness that gave them the opportunity to do so from within.
	Muslims and their religion are not yet ready to accept pluralism, democracy and free thinking. Democracy is in fact incompatible with islam, as many Muslim imams have openly stated. That is their interpretation of the Koran. It should therefore come as no suprise to us, that muslims in the West are waging Jihad against us. In their eyes, if we didn’t realise that this would happen, the fault lies with us and not them. I agree.
	I do not think our societies, geared as they are to free and open thought, can continue with this continuous assault on freedom. If this assault is not brought to a halt soon, then free society will start to perish, and with that the economy. It may not be evident immediately, but perish it will in the fullness of time. If the current trend of increasing conflict continues, then we are irrevocably headed in the direction of a major armed conflict with the Islamic world. This is also going to lead to a civil war within Europe of unimaginable proportions. Europe’s civil wars (WW 1 and 2) have not exactly been powder-puff affairs.
	Each day brings news of events that seem to bring us to that inevitable reckoning. We do not wish to fight for religion but we are being engaged in a religious conflict, quite against our will. Our politicians find it difficult to imagine that we are in a religious conflict. So passé - that sort of thing went out of fashion in the Middle Ages. It is all so pointless and avoidable. Time is short, and we need to act now to avert a human tragedy, which this commenter just does not wish to see.
	Separation recognises, that at this moment in time, Islam and democracy are irreconcilable. Thus a separation leaves hope for the future for everybody. This is important, as Muslims like all humans will reach a stage in their social development, when they do indeed welcome democracy and pluralism. It is just that at this stage in their history, they are not ready for it. A war, which is where we are headed, will stop their progress, as well as cause a split within humanity, that will be hard to patch up.
	The basic impulse of Islam is to expand into Infidel territory. Unable to do so, it will collapse quite quickly in historic terms, and thus release the 1.2 billion souls in its enslavement and bring about true freedom for them. What more can one ask for?
	Baron Bodissey
	DP111 —
	Boy, you sure do sound like us at “Gates of Vienna”...
	DP111
	I’m flattered.
	I have stated many times over the last couple of years, that we will easily win a full scale war with the Islam. What worries me is that in the event of a nuclear event in the West, we will rapidly go for the THIRD CONJECTURE option. Over the last two years I have stated on LGF and Jihad/Dhimmi Watch, that our inevitable large scale nuclear response, will also shatter the foundations of our own civilisation. Our Judaeo-Christian civilisation has a built-in guilt complex, and we will not be able to sustain the shock of our victory bought at such expense. That is why the war option is not really a good one unless.. unless we can re-define what this war is about.
	To state the obvious, there are two principles in any war. The first is that the home front is secured. The second is to carry the war to the enemy. However, if we do NOT carry the war to the enemy with a correctly defined moral and political purpose, we will not be able to have public backing for the war. The Jihad in the meantime will continue, for in the eyes of the jihadis and the Muslim world, they have a clear moral and religious purpose, and divinely sanctioned to boot.
	The question is how do we carry the war to an enemy whose ideology we recognise as a religion, while ours is multi-culturalism. You see the difficulty here. There is no way we can conduct a war, so long as we subscribe to either one of those two tenets. Even if we discard multi-culturalism, this in itself is not sufficient. This inevitably leads us to ask, can we somehow re-define Islam, in particular for a Western audience, not as a religion but as a political ideology, and one whose tenets are sufficiently evil, so that it merits destruction, much as Nazism. (Note here that I do not recognise that Islam is susceptible to reformation). This construct has to take place so that the Western populace sees it as justifiable to actually give the physical and moral support that is required for such a large scale venture. (In passing it is worth noting the political difficulty that Bush and Blair are having in Iraq in sustaining political support for the war, once they had proclaimed that Islam is a RoP — they had conceded the moral ground). They now have the same problem here in the West, as the bombs go off.
	The jihadis have a clear moral purpose, and thus we too have to define an even more powerful moral argument as to why our cause is more just, more moral and better — not just to our public, whose unwavering support we need, but to many Muslims around the world. Once we have such a clear moral purpose, then indeed we can go to full scale war and even respond to a nuclear attack in an appropriate fashion without being fatally afflicted by guilt.
	Baron Bodissey
	Your arguments are powerful. As you probably know, I’ve touched on this before in “The Enemy Within” posts (links 1 2 3 for those interested), and pretty much come to the conclusion that unless the West “gets religion” in some form, it can’t fight this war with a whole heart, the way the Jihad can. I don’t know what form this religion might take, whether it would be some kind of Jewish-Christian-Hindu amalgam that united the principle victims of the Great Jihad, or some new form that we can’t even imagine.
	But without something that resembles religion, we can’t stand up against our enemy and know that we are in the right. Just think how archaic and atavistic the word “righteous” sounds today; that’s how secular and anti-religious we have become. But righteousness is what we require if we are to win.
	I believe that the American heartland can hold on against it, but I grieve for Europe.

Fjordman expands on the same theme in a post today, “The Second Fall of Rome?”

…the population movements we are witnessing now are the largest and fastest in human history. In Europe, they can only be compared to the period often referred to as the Great Migrations, following the disintegration of the Roman Empire. However, during the 4th and 5th centuries, the total human population of the world was in the order of 200 million. Today, it is 30 times larger than that, and still growing fast. We also have communications that can transport people anywhere on earth within hours, and media that show ordinary people how much better life is in other countries. On top of that, the Romans didn’t have human rights lawyers advocating that millions of barbarians be let into their lands.

Fjordman and I are singing from the same hymnal: he concludes his post by quoting some of the same comments by DP111 that I have listed above.

And he is not sanguine about the prospects for Europe. In a comment here on yesterday’s “Preventable Evils” post, he said:

There will probably be a blood bath in Europe in the not-too-distant future, with massacres and ethnic cleansing across much of the continent. Some of the smaller countries, such as Norway, will probably be lost. Given the huge migrations we are witnessing now, I find it difficult to imagine my own country remaining a place where I want my children to grow up. Scandinavians will be persecuted minorities in our own land. “White Indians”, as one Muslim immigrant put it. In some ways, we already are.

If the rest of the world gets its ideas about America from the mainstream media, it may not realize that there is a vast beating heart in America, one that practices Christianity, is confident in its values, and bears a fierce and steadfast temperament. I live and work among these people every day, and know that they will not got go gentle into the night of dhimmitude. Long after the elite literati in New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Los Angeles have paid the jizya, veiled their women, respected the Prophet, and muzzled their voices, the rednecks of the Heartland will be standing firm and reloading their shotguns as the waves of jihadis come over the barricades.

But grieve for Europe.