"What is about to happen to Europe is BEYOND our wildest imagination..."
His book "The Strange Death of Europe" is an eyewitness account of a continent in self-destruct mode. It includes reporting from across the entire continent, from the places where migrants land to the places they end up, from the people who appear to welcome them in to the places which cannot accept them.
Told from this first-hand perspective, and backed with impressive research and evidence, the book addresses the disappointing failure of multiculturalism, Angela Merkel's U-turn on migration, the lack of repatriation and the Western fixation on guilt.
Murray travels to Berlin, Paris, Scandinavia, Lampedusa and Greece to uncover the malaise at the very heart of the European culture, and to hear the stories of those who have arrived in Europe from far away.
In each chapter he takes a step back to look at the bigger issues which lie behind a continent's death-wish, answering the question of why anyone, let alone an entire civilisation, would do this to themselves? When the last cathedral becomes a mosque, will Europe's progressives still celebrate diversity? Who needs enemies when self-loathing is trending?
He ends with two visions of Europe - one hopeful, one pessimistic - which paint a picture of Europe in crisis and offers a choice as to what, if anything, we can do next: "... many of us will regret this quietly. Others will regret it less quietly. Prisoners of the past and of the present, for Europeans there seem finally to be no decent answers to the future. Which is how the fatal blow will finally land."
"Europe is committing suicide. Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide. Whether the European people choose to go along with this is, naturally, another matter.
When I say that Europe is in the process of killing itself I do not mean that the burden of European Commission regulation has become overbearing or that the European Convention on Human Rights has not done enough to satisfy the demands of a particular community. I mean that the civilisation we know as Europe is in the process of committing suicide and that neither Britain nor any other Western European country can avoid that fate because we all appear to suffer from the same symptoms and maladies. As a result, by the end of the lifespans of most people currently alive Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world we had to call home.
...
... elected officials and bureaucrats continue to do everything they can to make the situation as bad as possible as fast as possible. In October 2015 there was a public meeting in the small city of Kassel in the state of Hesse. Eight hundred immigrants were due to arrive in the following days and concerned residents had a meeting to ask questions of their representatives. As a video recording of the meeting shows, citizens were calm, polite but concerned. Then at a certain point their district president, one Walter Liibcke, calmly informs them that anybody who does not agree with the policy is ‘free to leave Germany’. You can see and hear on the tape the intake of breath, amazed laughter, hoots and finally shouts of anger. Whole new populations are being brought into their country and they are being told that if they don’t like this they are always free to leave? Do no politicians in Europe realise what could happen if they continue to treat the European people like this?
Apparently not. Nor do all of the arrivals. In October 2016 Der Freitag and Huffington Post Deutschland both published an article by an 18-year-old Syrian migrant called Aras Bacho. In the piece he complained that the migrants in Germany were ‘fed up’ with the ‘angry’ German people who ‘insult and agitate’ and are ‘unemployed racists’. Among other imprecations he continued, ‘We refugees ... do not want to live in the same country with you. You can, and I think you should, leave Germany. Germany does not fit you, why do you live here? ... Look for a new home.’
On New Year’s Eve 2016, on the first anniversary of the Cologne rape attacks, there were similar sex attacks in a number of European cities, including Innsbruck and Augsburg. Police in Cologne were heavily criticised by MPs from the SPD and Green parties, among others, for allegedly ‘racially profiling’ those seeking access to the city’s main square in an attempt to prevent a repeat of the previous year’s atrocities. One year after Germany had awoken to part of its new reality, the censors had returned and resumed control. On the same night in France just under 1,000 cars were set alight - a 17% rise on the same night one year before. The French Interior Ministry described the night as having gone off‘without any major incident.’
Day by day the continent of Europe is not only changing but is losing any possibility of a soft landing in response to such change. An entire political class have failed to appreciate that many of us who live in Europe love the Europe that was ours. We do not want our politicians, through weakness, selfhatred, malice, tiredness or abandonment to change our home into an utterly different place. And while Europeans may be almost endlessly compassionate, we may not be boundlessly so. The public may want many contradictory things, but they will not forgive politicians if - whether by accident or design - they change our continent completely. If they do so change it then many of us will regret this quietly. Others will regret it less quietly. Prisoners of the past and of the present, for Europeans there seem finally to be no decent answers to the future. Which is how the fatal blow will finally land."
We are far away from Europe, but this will not stop in Europe because, as Murray writes, "If Australia is forever opening up and apologising for its own past while China remains silent, the impression may eventually be instilled, in children in Australia as much as anywhere else, that Australia is the country with more to apologise for."
As for all that hoped-for assimilation, Murray reminds us that "we know that we Europeans cannot become whatever we like. We cannot become Indian or Chinese, for instance. And yet we are expected to believe that anyone in the world can move to Europe and become European."
If only there were more Douglas Murrays!
