Book Review: “The Perils of Diversity”

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.


Inspired by Eurabia by Bat Ye’or, the only book to appear in print so far based on my material is Defeating Eurabia, part of which is available online in German. For Scandinavian readers, I have contributed a chapter in Norwegian to the book Selvmordsparadigmet (“The Suicide Paradigm”), published in 2010 by Ole J. Anfindsen, who runs the website Honest Thinking. Anfindsen believes that the Western world is in the process of committing suicide, and that the ruling ideology after the Second World War, especially from the 1960s on, has been suicidal. His main emphasis is not on Islam but on Politically Correct censorship and the Multiculturalism of Western oligarchs. The same is true of my contribution to his book.

The following quotes with page references are taken from the recent book The Perils of Diversity: Immigration and Human Nature by Byron M. Roth, a Professor Emeritus of Psychology from the USA. [For the conservative who has everything, this would make an excellent Christmas gift. — Dymphna] He argues that the debate over immigration policy in the Western world is critically uninformed by the sciences of evolutionary biology and psychology. In his work he examines the intersection between culture, genetics, IQ and society. Prominent among the fundamental features of human nature is a natural bias toward one’s own kind, making harmony in multi-ethnic societies problematic at best. All historical evidence indicates that “diversity” is not a strength, and that blood is thicker than water. Ignoring such biological realities leads to failed social experiments that may cause great human suffering.

Roth addresses the disturbingly undemocratic nature of the regime of mass immigration imposed by authorities on the citizens of all Western nations in defiance of their expressed wishes, and shows that the chasm between elite views and public opinion is so deep that current policies can only be maintained by an increasingly totalitarian suppression of dissent.

There is a consensus of opinion accepted by the vast majority of leaders in business, industry and academia. Billionaire George Soros has established and funded the Open Society Institute (OSI), which operates over thirty branches worldwide and promotes Multiculturalism. Soros was also a major financial backer of Barack Obama for US President. There are numerous organizations, academic programs, religious groups and labor organizations that support our current immigration policies. Many business and industry organizations spend vast sums in lobbying efforts to oppose any limitation of immigration, legal or illegal. Combined, these groups have created a convergence of opinion among Western elites, a consensus that popular resistance to mass immigration is caused by ignorant xenophobia that should be ignored in setting public policy. Opposing all these powerful forces are the average citizens of all Western countries.

Francis Fukuyama explains that “Postmodern elites, particularly in Europe, feel that they have evolved beyond identities defined by religion and nation and have arrived at a superior place.” Esteemed English philosopher Roger Scruton observes that such elites dominate European national parliaments and the bureaucracy of the European Union. A typical member of this elite class repudiates national loyalties, defines his goals and ideals against his own nation and sees himself “as a defender of enlightened universalism” against local chauvinism.

Byron M. Roth, page 52:

“Not surprisingly, the multicultural program these elites promote is, by its very nature, profoundly undemocratic, in that it imposes changes on society that citizens most assuredly do not want and which they resist when given the opportunity to do so. Hence the extraordinary repression of dissent in the immigration debate and the totalitarian imposition of political correctness wherever elites have power, such as in American universities and in most European political parties. Nobel Prize winning novelist Doris Lessing, no enemy of the left, argued in a 1992 article that political correctness is ‘immediately evident as a legacy of Communism… a continuation of that old bully, the Party line.’ She argues: ‘millions of people, the rug of Communism pulled out from under them, are searching frantically, and perhaps not even knowing it, for another dogma.’ They are rabble-rousers are using the ‘most dirty and often cruel tactics’ and are ‘no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever.’ It is difficult to disagree with Lessing that the totalitarian methods and utopian ambitions of multiculturalism clearly have their roots in Communist ideology. The multicultural program is, to be sure, spectacularly utopian.”

The ruling oligarchs of the West seem unwilling to ask what the consequences will be if their vision is flawed. Many left-leaning Western intellectuals defended the barbarities of Communism for years because they viewed its end goals as noble. The same intellectuals now excuse the excesses of their governments in promoting large-scale immigration. After all, the goal of world harmony and universal justice is as noble as the goal of economic equality.

Page 53:

“Many today call the tactics of European multiculturalists a ‘soft’ totalitarianism. However, the willingness of governments to put people in jail or deprive them of their livelihoods for disagreeing with government policies can hardly be characterized as soft. It should be recalled that in its last years, the Soviet Union rarely murdered opponents, but used tactics similar to the ones being used today in Europe. A world without borders would be one without refuge from despotic rule. Despotic governance was the rule throughout most of recorded history, and it is still the rule for the majority of the world’s citizens… Whether people would be better off without independent nation states, living under the rule of a world government, or in large supernational blocs such as the EU is by no means clear. In fact, history and reason suggest that just the opposite would be the case. Most utopian dreams when implemented have, in fact, been real-life nightmares for the vast majority. One is hard-pressed to think of an exception.”

Serge Trifkovic, the Serbian-American author of the book Defeating Jihad: How the War on Terrorism Can Be Won — in Spite of Ourselves, agrees with this analysis. The ruling elite insist that Western countries belong to the whole world and that our societies should be “colorblind.” These ideas have become tools of European demographic suicide. “No other race subscribes to these moral principles,” Jean Raspail wrote a generation ago, “because they are weapons of self-annihilation.” The permitted consensus opinion promotes de facto open borders. The West is hamstrung by guilt-ridden haters and appeasers “whose hold on the political power, the media, and the academe is undemocratic, unnatural, and obscene.” Trifkovic describes the “treason” of the elite class or traitor class, who despite their self-image as enlightened and rational are rootless, arrogant and cynically manipulative fifth columnists:

"By 1999 then-Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott felt ready to declare that the United States may not exist ‘in its current form’ in the 21st century, because the very concept of nationhood — here and throughout the world — will have been rendered obsolete… The ideological foundation for Talbott’s beliefs was stated bluntly: ‘All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary.’ To the members of his class, all countries are but transient, virtual-reality entities. Owing emotional allegiance to any one of them is irrational, and risking one’s life for its sake is absurd. The refusal of the Western elite class to protect their nations from jihadist infiltration is the biggest betrayal in history… Those Americans and Europeans who love their lands and nations more than any others, and who put their families and their neighborhoods before all others, are normal people. Those who tell them that their attachments should be global and that their lands and neighborhoods belong to the whole world are sick and evil.”

Roth again, page 439:

“The elimination of border and passport checks within Europe meant that EU residents and authorized visitors could freely move between EU countries unimpeded. But it also meant that illegal entrants could also move about without hindrance. This meant that securing the external borders of the EU was critical for immigration and security purposes. However, the EU member states have not agreed on EU-wide measures to do so. As a consequence, countries bordering on the Mediterranean — and especially those with island possessions close to Africa, such as Spain and Italy — became magnets for African migrants seeking illegal entrance into the EU. Once a migrant gains access to an island of an EU nation, he cannot be simply sent home, but has to be individually processed for deportation, a time-consuming and costly process. In many cases individuals simply leave shelters and detention centers and spread out into the countryside, and many travel to the mainland of other European states.”

Byron M. Roth further believes (page 31) that “Immigration policy is remarkably similar in all Western countries in its encouragement of large-scale Third-World immigration, while at the same time, in all countries, the native population, by wide majorities, opposes those policies.” He speaks about a convergence of the so-called political Left and Right when it comes to promoting non-European mass immigration, which has essentially crippled the democratic system and rendered it nearly meaningless in these and other crucial issues. Those on the Left are international Socialists while those on the Right channel the business lobby, with its desire for unlimited access to markets as well as cheap labor. These two groups, allegedly adversaries, are in fact allies in the project of breaking down Western nation-states.

Page 38:

“In the case of the doctrine of multiculturalism and mass immigration, however, the political leaders of both the left and the right, and virtually all academicians, are unanimous in their support. The consequence is that the members of the general public, who are most affected by immigration, have no parties to represent their interests and are left with a powerful sense of disenfranchisement for the simple reason that on issues of immigration they are, in fact, disenfranchised. A case in point is the 2008 United States Presidential elections, where both nominees favored even more liberalized immigration policies than those then in existence, and this in spite of the overwhelming opposition to these policies by the electorate.”

He claims (page 440) that “On both sides of the Atlantic, public officials, no matter what they say to their electorates, are quite simply unwilling to stem the flow of immigration. That the vast majority of EU citizens oppose this massive migration seems beside the point. As Craig Parsons and Timothy Smeeding aptly put it, this result was the product of ‘non-majoritarian institutions — constitutional guarantees of human rights and courts — that protected this movement against restrictions by elected officials.’ But this begs the question why the elected officials of all European countries who, after all, design and implement EU policies and who still control the scope of the EU, have acquiesced in these widely unpopular developments. Given the above findings and the data dealing with education, employment, welfare dependency, and crime, it is hardly surprising that large majorities of Europeans have grave misgivings about the current level of immigration from Third World countries. Migration Watch, a United Kingdom policy think tank, commissioned a poll conducted in 2007 by the international organization YouGov to sample the attitudes of the British Public. Overall, 81% thought immigration should be substantially reduced, with 57% agreeing ‘strongly’ and 24% tending to agree. Only 14% disagreed.”

The gap between rich and poor in the USA is wider than ever and the middle class is slowly disappearing. While 90 percent of Americans have seen only modest gains in their incomes since 1973, incomes have almost tripled for people at the upper end of the scale. In 1979, one third of the profits the country produced went to the richest 1 percent of society. In 2010 it was almost 60 percent. In 1950, the average corporate CEO earned 30 times as much as an ordinary worker. Sixty years later it was 300 times as much. These figures indicate that the wealthy elites are not being irrational. So far, globalization has indeed been beneficial — for them personally in the short run, but not necessarily for the country as a whole in the long run.

As I’ve indicated before, there is only one major party in the West today: the Transnational Post-European Party for Multiculturalism and Mass Immigration. You retain, for the time being, the privilege of voting for who should be its figurehead at any given moment, but you do not get to have a say about which policy the Party should follow. That is reserved for the oligarchs. The peasants — that means you — can be distracted by breasts, football and reality TV. Those who still protest can be labeled “Nazis” and dragged in front of a court of law. The establishment Right is little different from the Left, rendering these terms nearly meaningless.


All Leftist parties are in favor of dismantling the West in its traditional form; Socialists have always been opposed to nation-states. Whatever opposition there is can be found on the political Right, but it is fragmented, and those who pose a genuine challenge to the oligarchs and the status quo will be ruthlessly demonized; assassinated like Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands, put on trial like Geert Wilders, banned by law as was the Vlaams Blok when it was the largest party in Belgium, or assaulted in their private homes by thugs with the quiet approval of the authorities, as is the case with the Sweden Democrats. Individuals are legally prosecuted for telling the truth about Third World immigration in general and Islamic immigration in particular, among them Jussi Halla-aho in Finland and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff in Austria. All of this takes place in the supposedly “free and democratic West.”

The modern West has become an ideological dictatorship, a “one-idea society” where a self-appointed elite of Multicultural oligarchs impose censorship from above. The same basic mechanisms exist in North America, too, but they have become formalized in the EU. I would personally estimate that “the Left” in the widest possible sense is the cause of 65% of our current troubles. The “Right,” including its Big Business backers, is responsible for 30% through their support of globalization and mass immigration, and an additional 5% just for general cowardice and uselessness in confronting Leftist aggression.

Neither side of the spectrum views a nation as an organic unit of related people with a shared history, mythology and mentality. Marxists want to get rid of all nation-states, starting with Western ones. Big Business interests see the nation-state as no different from a multinational corporation, a tool for maximizing short-term profits, where one employs people to do a job for a limited period of time, and after that leave them to their own devices. Those Europeans who view their nation as a natural unit of historically and biologically related people are branded “right-wing extremists” by both these groups, who together largely control Western politics. Nobody supports the interests of the white middle class, who are being bled dry financially.

Western oligarchs reacted in the same manner to the democratic rejection of minarets in Switzerland: They immediately, from Washington to London, attacked the Swiss and issued thinly veiled threats, apparently fearful that “dangerous” ideas might spread to their own countries. We often hear talk about “cultural suicide,” but in this case the Swiss people clearly did not want to commit national suicide; the transnational Western Multicultural elite wanted to force them to do so. This Globalist agenda is deliberate and well-organized, not accidental.

Mass immigration is being forced down the throats of Westerners even when they don’t want it. They are victims of an evil policy; perhaps victims who don’t put up enough resistance, but victims nonetheless. Eurabia, the deliberate merger of Europe with the Middle East, is not a “conspiracy theory” but a well-documented fact, despite what the media might tell you. This is being done on such a grand scale that it is difficult for the ordinary person, certainly if he relies only on the heavily censored mainstream media, to fully grasp the magnitude of what’s going on. If he is at the same time culturally broken down and constantly harassed with “anti-racism”, then the average European citizen can to a large extent be neutralized as potential opposition to the oligarchs and their schemes, which was no doubt the intention to begin with.

Byron M. Roth mentions that rising crime has become a serious problem in recent years, very often committed by non-European minorities. He documents a vastly disproportionate representation of Muslims and blacks in Western European prisons. Riots and gang rape by young Muslim men have been and are still being purposefully downplayed by Western authorities and mass media in order to hide the real truth about “cultural diversity.” He also mentions that low IQ correlates very highly with rates of criminality and antisocial behavior, and wonders what consequences the mass importation of low-IQ peoples to the West will have. Is a certain minimum average IQ necessary to develop and maintain a complex society?

The Perils of Diversity again, page 60-61:

“Are the autocratic societies of North Africa the natural byproduct of societies where an insufficient fraction of the population has the intellectual wherewithal to deal with political and economic complexity? If people from North Africa and Southwest Asia replace European people, will European civilization, including its democracy and wealth, be replaced by some new civilization with very different dynamics and values? Will America be the same if it becomes a confederation of different ethnic groups with different values and aptitudes? Given current immigration policies these are the most important questions the Western world must attempt to assess. Such a demographic realignment would be epochal in nature and would have ramifications in every corner of the globe. When coupled with the rise of China and India as world superpowers, it heralds a new chapter in world history that will shape the destiny of mankind for centuries to come. Thoughtful people would not hesitate to consider what these epochal changes portend for their progeny. Neither would they hesitate to openly consider the full consequences of the current immigration policies which, if left on their present course, will prove to be irreversible and quite possibly tragic.”

Roth speculates whether what may emerge from these demographic patterns is that the USA will move in the direction of countries such as Mexico, dysfunctional states with oligarchic politics. A primary thesis of his book is that societies are mainly the product of the genetic nature of the human beings who make them up, not geography as Jared Diamond claims.

Page 468:

“Put another way, a people living in an environment rich in natural resources may not be able to exploit those resources if they lack the human capital to do so. On the other hand, societies with greater human capital can prosper in places with only meager natural resources. An important element of this thesis is the recognition that culture-gene interaction is a two-way street; genes affect cultures, but cultures, in turn, affect genes. It is important, however, to recognize that the effect of genes on culture is likely to operate quite quickly, while the effects of culture on genes require a much longer time to take place. In other words, changes in the demographic makeup of a population will have almost immediate effects, whereas the evolutionary impact of a society on its inhabitants will take centuries, at the least, to take effect… it follows that current immigration patterns are likely to change quite quickly the societies to which immigrants go. It will also change those countries, especially those with small populations, from which immigrants come. The nature of these changes is likely to be wide-ranging and is, without exaggeration, of world-historical significance that will affect future generations for centuries to come.”

Roth talks quite candidly about the significance of IQ. The population of the USA is expected to reach at least 400 million by 2050. By then China’s more homogeneous population may be about 1.4 billion while India’s population is expected to reach 1.6 billion.

The Perils of Diversity, page 473:

“In China, with an average estimated IQ of 105, approximately 37% of population will exceed the IQ threshold of 110, as compared to about 16% of the population in the U. S. Based on the current population estimates, this means that 520 million Chinese will be college-capable compared to 64 million Americans, or a ratio of about 8 to 1. Even if we use Lynn and Vanhanen’s lowest sample IQ from the 10 samples reported for the Chinese, which was an IQ of 102, some 30% of China’s population, or about 420 million people, will exceed the 110 threshold, or about 6.5 times the number of Americans exceeding that threshold. Put another way, China will have more people in this high IQ group, even using the lowest estimate of China’s IQ, than the total projected population of the entire United States. Of course, China may not be able to provide advanced training for those many millions in the next four decades, but they will certainly be able to provide it in ever greater numbers, especially if they make it a high state priority, as appears to be the case.”

The mean IQ of India is much lower than that of China which, coupled with its large Muslim population, means that India probably won’t be able to compete with China in the long run. However, with a projected population of 1600 million people, this would give a total of about 50 million people exceeding the 110 threshold, not much fewer than the number in the USA.

The elites in all Western societies have wholeheartedly adopted an extreme form of Multiculturalism. Page 444:

“It denies historical and scientific evidence that people differ in important biological and cultural ways that makes their assimilation into host countries problematic. It is also extreme in the viciousness with which it attacks those who differ on this issue. These attacks are accompanied by a very generalized and one-sided denigration of Western traditions and Western accomplishments, and claims that a collective guilt should be assumed by all Europeans (whites) for the sins of their forebears. In the United States those sins include the displacement and destruction of the indigenous cultures of the Americas, the evils of American slavery, and its continued discrimination against blacks and other minority groups. In Europe those sins include the excesses of colonialism and, perhaps even more, the acquiescence of Europeans in the Holocaust. In the semireligious formulation of this view, expiation of these sins can only come through an absolute benevolence toward the poor of the world whose suffering is claimed to be the result of the white race and its depredations. In practical terms this can only be accomplished through aid to Third World peoples and generous immigration policies that allow large numbers of people to escape the poverty of the Third World.”

As Roth says on page 445, if current trends continue much longer, the final outcome of these policies is predictable, and “by the end of the 21st century, in virtually all Western societies, white Europeans will find themselves minorities in their ancestral homelands. The motivations that drive these ideas and policies will be examined in the concluding section, but there can be no doubt as to the power of this elite ideology. This multicultural ideology is based on a huge distortion of history and is alien to the vast majority of citizens. It can only be maintained by ignoring the wishes of the majority and by increasingly coercive means to silence dissent. This coercion takes the form of insult and social ostracism in the United States, and in Europe it is supplemented by civil and criminal sanction against dissenters. This distinction may well evaporate if the United States Supreme Court comes to be dominated by people who accept the multicultural doctrine, an outcome that seems likely given the near unanimous liberal ideology of the major law schools and of the profession in general.”

He comments on how the EU suffers from a democratic deficit, since much of EU policy is determined by unelected bodies such as the Council of Ministers or the European Court of Justice and the European Commission, none of which are directly elected by the populace.

If the growing and perfectly legitimate demands for autonomy and the preservation of national cultures among European natives are not met, the alternative will be withdrawal from the EU, presaging the dissolution of the EU itself. One possibility is that Fascist-type movements may come to power, especially in those nations where Muslims make increasing demands for autonomy or indeed supremacy. The result may be the sort of ethnic civil strife that took place in Yugoslavia when the multiethnic society there broke down in the 1990s, only this time across much of the European continent. Why do European political leaders fail to anticipate these potentially catastrophic possibilities and respond by limiting immigration?

The Perils of Diversity, page 494-495:

“One possible explanation for these perverse policies that has been put forward by highly regarded scholars, such as Samuel Huntington, is that the current leadership of the EU is composed of left-wing authoritarians who are enemies of the Western liberal tradition. According to Huntington, ‘Multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European…’ and opposes its civilization. The official repression of dissent and pursuance of unpopular policies by undemocratic means suggests that such ideologues wish to turn the EU into a centrally controlled empire similar to the Soviet Union. If that is the case, then their current policies make a good deal of sense, in that they flood the continent with people who have lived under autocratic regimes and never lived in democratic republics. Such people may well be willing to tolerate repressive regimes provided they can maintain a moderate standard of living and their own traditional religious practices. As Huntington points out, imperial regimes often promote ethnic conflict among their minority citizens to strengthen the power of the central authority, with the not unrealistic claim that a powerful central authority is essential to maintain civil order.”

If this trend continues, much of Europe could be “transformed into an authoritarian and illiberal multiethnic empire, undemocratic, economically crippled and culturally retrograde.”

The Flemish journalist Paul Belien in 2006 interviewed the Russian-born intellectual Vladimir Bukovksy for the online magazine The Brussels Journal. Belien is also the author of A Throne in Brussels, in which he argues that the artificial state called Belgium has served as an inspiration for the EU itself. Bukovksy, a former Soviet dissident, fears that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union, the Communist dictatorship that enslaved half of Europe before it imploded. In a speech he called the EU a “monster” that must be destroyed before it develops into a totalitarian state. As a young man he exposed the use of psychiatric imprisonment against political prisoners in the former USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1917-1991) and spent twelve years in Soviet jails and labor camps.

The ultimate purpose of the Soviet Union was to create a new people and a new man. The same is true of the EU. Bukovksy states that “those who object to uncontrolled immigration from the Third World will be regarded as racist and those who oppose further European integration will be regarded as xenophobes.” When such artificial entities invariably collapse under the weight of their flawed, Utopian ideas, suppressed feelings of national identity may come bouncing back with a vengeance. “You can press a spring only that much, and the human psyche is very resilient you know. You can press it, you can press it, but don’t forget it is still accumulating a power to rebound. It is like a spring and it always goes to overshoot.”

In the EU, the European Parliament reminds Bukovksy of the Supreme Soviet, the largely powerless “parliament” which functioned as a rubber stamp for the Politburo. He thinks it looks like the Supreme Soviet because it was designed like it. Similarly, the European Commission looks like the Politburo, the unaccountable and unelected government that held the real power in the Soviet Union. In the EU the Commission — which, despite its boring and bureaucratic-sounding name, is an immensely powerful entity and the de facto government for half a billion people — is also unaccountable to anyone. EU corruption, in the same manner as its Soviet counterpart, flows from top to bottom rather than going from bottom to top.

Bukovksy warns that “There will be a collapse of the European Union pretty much like the Soviet Union collapsed. But do not forget that when these things collapse they leave such devastation that it takes a generation to recover. Just think what will happen if it comes to an economic crisis. The recrimination between nations will be huge. It might come to blows. Look to the huge number of immigrants from Third World countries now living in Europe. This was promoted by the European Union. What will happen with them if there is an economic collapse? We will probably have, like in the Soviet Union at the end, so much ethnic strife that the mind boggles. In no other country were there such ethnic tensions as in the Soviet Union, except probably in Yugoslavia. So that is exactly what will happen here, too. We have to be prepared for that. This huge edifice of bureaucracy is going to collapse on our heads.”

I could add here that as bad as the Communist countries were — and to get a glimpse of how bad it was there one can read The Gulag Archipelago by the Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the 1960s — they didn’t normally promote mass immigration of culturally alien peoples such as Africans or Muslims to their countries. The concept of championing non-European mass immigration as a matter of ideological principle first became official state policy in the USA in 1965, before the same thing happened in Western Europe. Many Multicultural ideas of “whiteness studies” or “white privilege,” where people of European origins are indoctrinated to hate themselves, or busing of non-whites to white schools, were initially developed in North America and then exported from there to Europe and Australia.

The phrase “Political Correctness” first came into use under Communism and meant simply that all ideas must conform to and support the agenda of the Communist movement. History and philosophy were the first to be forced into line, but as is clear from the career of the biologist Trofim Lysenko, science was also made to conform. Those who dissented from the ideas of the Communist doctrine were judged to be psychologically imbalanced and confined to mental institutions. Today the ruling ideology of the intellectuals is an absolute egalitarianism which recognizes no idea, art or historical analysis as better than any other.

Roth again, page 507:

“It argues that all histories are narratives fabricated for some class or race advantage. Many argue that even science is corrupted by its patriarchal and European roots and serves to justify the subjugation of one group by another. This all-encompassing egalitarianism gives rise to a nihilistic relativism in which no cultural value or practice is better or worse than any other, and to suggest otherwise is to be intolerant of human difference and demonstrate an unwillingness to show due respect to the other, to illegitimately privilege certain groups, ideas, and artistic works above others… The greatest sin in this prevailing orthodoxy is to question the absolute equality of all humans and human groups. From the noble idea that all men are equal in the eyes of God and should therefore be treated as equals under the laws of man, the modern multiculturalist insists that all men are, in fact, equal in all ways, and all cultures equally worthy in all respects. This, of course, was the fatal error that Aristotle saw would undermine democracy, namely: that since men are equal in some regard, they are therefore equal in all regards.”

This prevailing extreme egalitarianism also induces a profound nihilism; if all things are equal then no value, moral code or standard of behavior is better than any other. Page 508:

“This is, of course, the foundation upon which the cult of multiculturalism is based. It explains the paralyzing ambivalence of Western societies about immigrant assimilation and tolerance of the maintenance of alien traditions. A specific problem for Europe is that it welcomes Muslim immigrants, and Muslims categorically reject this view, correctly recognizing its nihilism, and see it as far inferior to their own faith and the way of life it prescribes. Whether Western elites really believe these things is less important than the benefit they gain from its promulgation. The primary benefit is that it paralyses the popular preferences for national preservation by characterizing opposition to elite doctrines as immoral, indecent, and inhumane. It allows unelected elites to aggrandize their own power by obliterating national sovereignty and nullifying democratic accountability. Many are, without exaggeration, true totalitarians that have no regard for the well-being of those they control, since the only way they can consolidate their dystopian plans is through brute state power. While there is no doubt that many well-meaning individuals join their efforts, they are the sort of ‘useful idiots’ who excused and covered up Communist atrocities during most of the 20th century.”

In the author’s view, the only possible way to avoid the extremely negative outcomes outlined above is an immediate and complete moratorium on any further mass immigration to the West, yet he thinks that this currently constitutes a remote possibility. It would not be remote if modern democracies truly reflected the wishes of their citizens regarding immigration, since such a change of policy would be supported by overwhelming majorities in Western nations. It would also be extremely beneficial in both economic and cultural terms. Roth, page 509:

“However, a major limitation of immigration is a remote possibility because the elites and the special interests that control all the major institutions in Western societies would strongly resist any such change. The history of the past three decades makes it clear that they will not be moved by popular sentiment unless faced by a very unlikely set of circumstances which threaten their own positions of power. It would require a popular revolt of enormous proportions against the existing order. Under present circumstances the problems outlined above are unlikely to create such a revolt, for the simple reason that the population is intentionally denied, by the government and all the major media, the knowledge and information that would enable them to fully comprehend the inevitable long-term consequence of current policies. This ignorance is reinforced by the legal and social repression of any individual willing to voice opposition to those policies. The only way the public could be moved to a major reaction against current policies would be events of such a catastrophic nature that they would force an increase in the saliency of the costs of current policies to almost everyone and demonstrate the need for immediate action.”

Perhaps the most likely threat to the elites’ grip on power would be a serious financial meltdown causing a severe economic depression throughout the Western world. The near-panicked response between 2008 and 2010 of most governments in the West to the financial crisis indicates to Byron M. Roth that many of them recognize the dangers they face if this situation should grow much worse than it is today. “The massive spending and government intervention in response to the 2008 downturn is unprecedented and suggests that the characterization of governmental responses as panicked is not unreasonable.” Page 512:

“That such a nightmare might be necessary to reverse Western immigration policies that, in the long run, promise the demise of Western civilization, is a great tragedy. All of which would be unnecessary if elites adopted more sensible approaches to immigration and more prudent fiscal policies. It is difficult to decide, on reflection, whether the enormous human pain of such a depression would be worth the advantage of a reversal of current policies. The dilemma is moot, since such a nightmare scenario seems very unlikely, and the current downturn will probably be turned around without major unrest. In that case, things will continue on their current course with all the negative consequences outlined above. Sometime during the last half of the 21st century the world will be very different from it is today. China will undoubtedly be the world’s dominant power and will likely bring all of Asia into its orbit. Islam will become the most common religion in the world with considerably more adherents than Christianity or any other religion. Relations between Europe and the Muslim Middle East may be one of fairly constant low-level conflict, especially, as is likely, if Muslim countries develop nuclear arms and mass immigration to Europe continues.”

This is one of the few instances where I seriously disagree with Mr. Roth. The French writer Guillaume Faye predicts a real collapse at some point between 2010 and 2020. I am tempted to agree with him. I don’t think the current political and economic order in the Western world is stable at all. On the contrary, I suspect we are fast approaching a serious historical discontinuity that will sweep aside today’s suicidal liberalism. It’s a house of cards that will collapse as soon as the geopolitical tectonic plates make a sudden shift, which they will.

My personal opinion is that the euro as a currency probably won’t exist a few years from now, and may well take the European Union down with it. I view this as a desirable outcome since the EU constitutes a primary engine behind the ongoing destruction of European civilization and the peoples who created it. I also cannot see how the escalating debt crisis in the USA can be resolved without social unrest of some kind. Frankly, I will not be surprised at all if the rising tensions we are witnessing, and episodes such as the Muhammad cartoon Jihad in 2006, will by future historians be viewed as early skirmishes in an impending world war, triggered by the implosion of the Western world order. If we are lucky, out of the ashes will emerge a new generation of European civilization, with a different mythology and concept of morality.