Europa på kanten
Mens Helle Thorning Schmidt søger nyt arbejde som eksportør af muslimer, flygtningehøjkommisær hedder den egentlige titel, til Europa, de muslimer som hun under Folketingsvalget lovede at dæmme op for, går det efterhånden op for flere og flere gode mennesker at indvandringen er uholdbar også for de gode menneskers visioner. “[S]elv Bundeskansler, Angela Merkel, nu taler om en decideret flygtningekrise - et begreb, hun ellers indtil for ganske nyligt har undgået at bruge” kan man læse i Ekstra Bladet, der fortæller hvorledes tyske sikkerhedseksperter advarer om et kommende kaos i Tyskland
- Den store tilgang af mennesker fra andre verdensdele vil medføre ustabilitet i Tyskland, siger en kilde advarende til Welt am Sonntag.
Kilden, der på grund af frygt for repressalier er anonym, fortsætter:
- I forbindelse med den enorme tilvandring skabes der ekstremisme. Den centrumborgerlige midte radikaliseres fordi, de i modsætning til den politiske elite, ikke ønsker masseindvandring. Vi vil se, hvordan flere og flere vil vende forbundsstaten ryggen på den baggrund, siger han.
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‘I stedet importeres Islamisk ekstremisme, arabisk antisemitisme, nationale og etniske konflikter, samt ikke mindst en helt anden rets- og samfundsmæssig forståelse’.
Sådan lyder det blandt andet i et internt skriv, der cirkulerer mellem centralt placerede figurer i de tyske sikkerhedsorganer. Skriveriet indeholder følgende klare advarsel:
‘De tyske sikkerhedsmyndigheder er ikke - og vil ikke være - i stand til at løse de problemer, der følger med de importerede sikkerhedsproblemer. Det gælder desuden reaktioner fra den tyske befolkning’.
Om det er for sent? Daniel Greenfield skriver i Frontpage Magazine om det absurde i at se indvandringen som en tiltrængt arbejdskraft. Muslimerne kommer ikke til at tage sig (kærligt) af os i vores alderdom. Istedet udskydes pensionsalderen for europæeren som muslimernes pres på de offentlige kasser øges
European leaders talk about two things these days; preserving European values by taking in Muslim migrants and integrating Muslim migrants into Europe by getting them to adopt European values.
It does not occur to them that their plan to save European values depends on killing European values.
The same European values that require Sweden, a country of less than 10 million, to take in 180,000 Muslim migrants in one year also expects the new “Swedes” to celebrate tolerance, feminism and gay marriage. Instead European values have filled the cities of Europe with Shariah patrols, unemployed angry men waving ISIS flags and the occasional public act of terror.
European countries that refuse to invest money in border security instead find themselves forced to invest money into counterterrorism forces. And those are bad for European values too.
But, as Central European countries are discovering, European values don’t have much to do with the preservation of viable functioning European states. Instead they are about the sort of static Socialism that Bernie Sanders admires from abroad. But even a Socialist welfare state requires people to work for a living. Maine’s generous welfare policies began collapsing once Somali Muslims swarmed in to take advantage of them.
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The Muslim migrants are meant to be the retirement plan for an aging Europe. They’re supposed to keep its ramshackle collection of economic policies, its welfare states and social programs rolling along.
But they’re more like a final solution.
Mohammed is Fritz’s retirement plan. But Mohammed has a very different type of plan. Fritz is counting on Mohammed to work while he relaxes. Mohammed relaxes and expects Fritz to work. Fritz is not related to him and therefore Mohammed sees no reason why he should work to support him.
European social democracy reduces society to a giant insurance plan in which money is pooled together. But insurance is forbidden in Islam which considers it to be gambling. European social democracy expects him to bail it out, but to Mohammed, European values are a crime against Islam.
Mohammed’s Imam will tell him to work off the books because paying into the system is gambling. However taking money out of the system is just Jizya; the money non-Muslims are obligated to pay to Muslims. Under Islamic law, it’s better for Mohammed to sell drugs than to pay taxes.
That’s why drug dealing and petty crime are such popular occupations for Salafis in Europe. It’s preferable to steal from infidels than to participate in the great gamble of the European welfare state.
Mohammed isn’t staking his future on the shaky pensions of European socialism. He invests in what social scientists call social capital. He plans his retirement by having a dozen kids. If this lifestyle is subsidized by infidel social services, so much the better. And when social services collapse, those of his kids who aren’t in prison or in ISIS will be there to look after him in his golden years.
As retirement plans go, it’s older and better than the European model.
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Europe is slowly killing itself in the name of European values. It’s trying to protect its economic setup by bankrupting it. European values have become a suicide pact. Its politicians deliver speeches explaining why European values require mass Muslim migration that make as little sense as a lunatic’s suicide note.
Islamic values are not compatible with European values. Not only free speech and religious freedom, but even the European welfare state is un-Islamic. Muslims have a high birth rate because their approach to the future is fundamentally different than the European one. Europeans have chosen to have few children and many government agencies to take care of them. Muslims choose to have many children and few government agencies. The European values so admired by American leftists have no future.
Europe is drinking rat poison to cure a cold. Instead of changing its values, it’s trying to maintain them by killing itself. The Mohammed retirement plan won’t save European Socialism. It will bury it.
Bret Stephens skrev et par dage tidligere i Wall Street Journal mere om de europæiske værdier, som den europæiske elite og de snakkende klasser ikke vil være ved
Europe is dying because it has become morally incompetent. It isn’t that Europe stands for nothing. It’s that it stands for shallow things, shallowly. Europeans believe in human rights, tolerance, openness, peace, progress, the environment, pleasure. These beliefs are all very nice, but they are also secondary.
What Europeans no longer believe in are the things from which their beliefs spring: Judaism and Christianity; liberalism and the Enlightenment; martial pride and capability; capitalism and wealth. Still less do they believe in fighting or sacrificing or paying or even arguing for these things. Having ignored and undermined their own foundations, they wonder why their house is coming apart.
What is Europe? It is Greece not Persia; Rome not Carthage; Christendom not the caliphate. These distinctions are fundamental. To say that Europe is a civilization apart is not to say it is better or worse. It is merely to say: This is us and that is you. Nor is it to say that Europe ought to be a closed civilization. It merely needs to be one that doesn’t dissolve on contact with the strangers it takes into its midst.
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There are 75 million Turks, whose per capita income doesn’t match that of Panamanians. The country is led by an elected Islamist with an autocratic streak, prone to anti-Semitic outbursts, who openly supports Hamas, denies the Armenian genocide, jails journalists in record numbers, and orchestrates Soviet-style show trials against his political opponents. Turkey also has borders with Syria, Iraq and Iran. These would become Europe’s borders in the event of Turkish membership.
This is the country Ms. Merkel proposes to bring into the bosom of Europe. Her apologists will say she’s being disingenuous, but that only compounds the disgrace of her overture.
It also compounds the danger. Could Europe’s liberal political traditions, its religious and cultural heritage, long survive a massive influx of Muslim immigrants, in the order of tens of millions of people? No. Not given Europe’s frequently unhappy experience with much of its Muslim population. Not when you have immigrant groups that resist assimilation and host countries that make only tentative civic demands.
And not when a heedless immigration policy, conducted in fits of moral self-congratulation, leads to the inevitable reaction.
Den kristne europæiske arv rejste sig på baggrund af en folkevandring og overløb af barbarer. En mindre primitiv folkevandring end den nuværende islamiske, der ikke ejer aspirationer om at forbedre sig selv eller noget som helst. Ikke desto mindre, kristendommen stod i middelalderen mere end fødselshjælper til ideen om Europa med alle de ideer om det rationelle univers og den moderne videnskab,ideer der i dag antages for universelle værdier. Tim O’Neill skriver i Quora om Middelalderen
By the Fifth Century the administrative division between the Latin-speaking Western Empire and the Greek-speaking Eastern Empire became permanent and then became a political divide. The weaker, poorer and more vulnerable Western Empire did not even survive the century, with its final collapse coming in 476 AD after another century of civil wars, invasions and spiralling decline. What followed was centuries of invasions, fragmentation and chaos, with few brief periods of stability and centralised authority. The faltering intellectual tradition, which had already been in decline since the late Second Century, languished to a low ebb.
The institution which managed to keep this faltering tradition from dying out altogether during these centuries of barbarian invasion and disintegration was actually the one the Enlightenment myth (wrongly) blames for causing the decline in the first place. The Christian church came to hold political power when the decline in learning in the west had been under way for over a century, and so could not have been its cause. Initially Christianity was ambivalent toward Greek philosophy and learning, but prominent Christian thinkers who had been trained in philosophy could see it as something to be embraced. God, they argued, was a rational intelligence and had created the universe along rational lines. It made sense, therefore, that humans could and should use reason to understand his creation. Clement of Alexandria argued that just as the Jews had been given a divine gift of special religious revelation, so had the Greeks been given a gift of rational analysis. Both were to be embraced and used.
So when the Western Empire collapsed, the Church had long since come to terms with Greek philosophy and science and found ways to incorporate both and reconcile them with their religion. And it was Christian scholars who saw that the decline of Greek literacy in the west meant much of the original works of Greek learning were being lost. Cassiodorus and Boethius both tried to preserve key works by translating them into Latin. Boethius was executed before he could complete an ambitious plan to translate all the works of Aristotle, but he did manage to translate most of the key works on logic - something which meant that logic and therefore reason took a central role in early Medieval education, even in the darkest centuries of the chaos. The seeds of the Medieval revival of science lay in that stroke of luck.
The Medieval Enshrining of Reason
One writer has compared the long road back from the intellectual catastrophe of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire on learning in western Europe to people after a nuclear holocaust trying to revive modern science with nothing but a few volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a copy of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Scholars in the Eighth or Ninth Centuries had just enough fragments of information to know that they had barely anything at all but not enough to begin reconstructing what had been lost. What is interesting is what they did with the bits they had - they revered them. These ancient writers, mostly pagans, were held up as all-knowing authorities and what elements of their works did survive were studied with immense reverence and painstaking scrutiny.
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By the Eleventh Century the waves of Avar, Magyar, Saracen and Viking invaders had begun to recede, Europe had recovered economically and stabilised politically and was actually on the brink of a period of outward expansion. At the same time there was an expansion of literacy and interest in learning and an increasingly acute awareness of the loss of ancient learning and what scholars of the time lamented as Latinorum penuria (”the poverty of the Latins”). Exactly how intellectually poor the Latin west was is illustrated by an exchange of letters between two early Eleventh Century scholars, Ragimbold of Cologne and Radolf of Liege, about some mathematical problems that would not bother a high school student today. Here were two clearly intelligent men who were seen as leading scholars of their day (the letters were copied and widely circulated) competing to solve some basic geometry problems but being forced to do so using scraps of geometry from old Roman surveying manuals and from a Sixth Century encyclopaedia that did little more than define a few terms. It’s an illustration both of how much had been lost in the cataclysm and how eager people were to recover lost learning.
The idea that the cosmos was rational and could be analysed via reason was certainly resisted by some conservatives, but a new guard of scholars came increasingly to the fore, including William of Conches, Honorius of Autun, Bernard Silvester, Adelard of Bath, Thierry of Chartres and Clarenbold of Arras. William of Conches wrote with scorn of those who were suspicious of this worship of reason and rational analysis:
Ignorant themselves of the forces of nature and wanting to have company in their ignorance, they do not want people to look into anything; they want us to believe like peasants and not ask the reason behind things …. But we say the reason behind everything should be sought out!
(William of Conches (c. 1090-1154 AD), Philosophia mundi)Intellectuals like William were increasingly attracting communities of students and gathering together with these students to share ideas, laying the foundations of the schools that were to become universities. The stage was set for a genuine revival and flowering of learning, all Europe still lacked were the lost books of the Greeks and Romans.
The New Learning and the Universities
By the early Eleventh Century European scholars were not just aware of how much western Europe had lost, but they were also aware that many of these works survived and could be regained.
Måske en slutning. Måske et håb om en genfødsel? Men jeg tror ikke det kommer så langt at Europa vil lade sig overløbe. EU bryder sammen, volden vil eksplodere her og der, flere stater vil stramme grebet om friheden og måske slå ned på egen befolkning for at hindre et nationalt selvforsvar. Det bliver slemt. Men vi skal nok klare det.