The Strange Death of Europe

4.5 stars. Eye-opening!
Extremely informative rundown of the recent changes that are transforming Europe. Living in America, this is completely ignored on our news services. I have heard of some of this stuff on the internet, but assumed it was condoned through referendum of the citizens of the various European countries. The truth was eye-opening and a bit frightening, to say the least. And I can see the leadership of this country doing the same thing here in the U.S. if given the opportunity.

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This is stunningly informative and alarming book.

Author Douglas Murray collects together the factual details that make out the case that the Europe we know is dying, actually that it is being murdered by its elites. Murray outlines a recent history that is mostly forgotten and connects that history with the current news in a persuasive argument. He points out that Europeans had advanced notice of they were getting into when Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwah calling on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses.” Since that time, European governments have learned to censor their citizens in the interest of diverting Islamic outrage from themselves. Often times this willingness to censor has been both craven and a betrayal of European liberal values.

Along with adopting a proactive position of censorship, European governments attempted to enforce an aggressive cognitive dissonance on their people. Discussions pertaining to the inimical effects of immigration were ruled off limits as racist. This tactic was repeatedly in danger of breaking down as various political leaders found themselves able to tap into popular resentment. In the Netherlands, Pim Fortuyn created a successful political movement until he was murdered by a Muslim. The extent of Islamic appeasement is demonstrated by the story of Hirsi Ali, who did assimilate European liberal values, but whose opposition to extremist Muslim values left her as a persona non grata in the tolerant Netherlands until she was forced to immigrate to the United States.

Murray's book is also stunning for collating the regular acts of Muslim violence. We live through these experiences, but quickly forget them, until someone like Murray comes along and lines them out for us. Here is one example, involving the rise in anti-Semitic violence:

“According to the body that records attacks in France, the BNVCA (Bureau National de Vigilance Contre l'Antisémitisme), the number of recorded anti-Semitic attacks in France doubled between 2013 and 2014 alone, reaching 851 incidents in that year. Despite accounting for less than 1 per cent of the population, Jews were the victims in almost half of all recorded racist attacks in France: on Bastille Day 2014, worshipers at a synagogue in Paris were barricaded inside by immigrant protesters chanting, among other things, ‘Death to the Jews'; a Muslim gunman shot dead three children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012; another Muslim gunman shot dead four people at the Jewish museum in Brussels in 2014; another Muslim gunman killed four Jews at a kosher Hypercache in Paris in 2015; and yet another Muslim gunman killed a Jewish man on security duty at the Great Synagogue in Copenhagen in 2015. These, killings, among other attacks, caused the issue of Islamic anti-Semitism finally to get discussed.”

The reason for this accommodation is certainly related to Europe's commitment to levels of immigration that are unprecedented. An example of that level of immigration is found in current census results:

“By 2011 Britain had already become a radically different place from the place it had been for centuries. But the response to facts such as that in 23 of London's 33 boroughs ‘white Britons' were now in a minority was greeted with a response almost as telling as the results themselves.2 A spokesman for the Office for National Statistics (ONS) hailed the results as a tremendous demonstration of ‘diversity'.”

Prior to 2011, Muslim immigration was merely unprecedented. By 2015, such immigration became catastrophic when Germany's Angela Merkel signaled Germany's interest in taking in refugees from Syria. This signal set off a wave of migration amounting to millions into Europe, overwhelming the immigration services of constituent European countries and causing Eastern European nations to abandon the borderless internal zone policy of the European Union. Murray is extremely good at describing the comic opera of refugees getting out just far enough to be “rescued” by European navies and then given asylum status whether they are refugees or not.

“By early September 2015 the Hungarian authorities among others announced that they were overwhelmed by the numbers being encouraged to come and declared the situation in their country to be out of control. The Hungarian government tried to prevent the influx by stopping trains from leaving Hungary for Germany. Around 14,000 people were arriving in Munich each day. Over the course of a single weekend 40,000 new arrivals were expected. The German Chancellor had her deputy spokesman announce that Germany would not turn refugees away. And so the migrants headed off on foot along the motorways and train tracks of Hungary. The world watched as huge columns of mainly male migrants surged up through Europe. It was then, during the autumn of 2015, that the European dream of a borderless continent began to end. Having spent decades bringing the borders of Europe down for Europeans, the influx of this unknown number of non-Europeans meant that the borders of Europe began to go back up again.”

The most discouraging fact that Murray documents is the complete bad faith on the part of the elites who played a game of gaslighting the public. Whenever anyone would raise a question about immigration, they would be shouted down as racists and their concerns would be mocked. This occurred constantly as immigration numbers ratcheted up and civil liberties ratcheted down. This bad faith among elites is particularly noteworthy with respect to criminal activities:

“The January before the release of the 2011 census results a gang of nine Muslim men — seven of Pakistani origin, two from North Africa — were convicted and sentenced at the Old Bailey in London for the sex trafficking of children between the ages of 11 and 15. On that occasion one of the victims sold into a form of modern-day slavery was a girl of 11 who was branded with the initial of her ‘owner' abuser: ‘M' for Mohammed. The court heard that Mohammed ‘branded her to make her his property and to ensure others knew about it'. This did not happen in a Saudi or Pakistani backwater, nor even in one of the northern towns that so much of the country had forgotten about and which had seen many similar cases over the same period. This happened in Oxfordshire between 2004 and 2012. Nobody could argue that gang rape or child abuse are the preserve of immigrants, but the development of particular types of child-rape gangs revealed – and a subsequent government-commissioned inquiry confirmed6 – specific cultural ideas and attitudes that were clearly held by some immigrants. These include views about women, specifically non-Muslim women, other religions, races and sexual minorities that were pre-medieval. Fear of accusations of ‘racism' for pointing out such facts, and the small but salutary number of careers like Ray Honeyford's that had been publicly wrecked for saying far less, meant that it took years even for such facts as these to come out. This has a terrorising effect far beyond the nation's television studios, and with far more serious consequences. When these gang-rape cases came to court they did so in spite of local police, councillors and care-workers, many of whom were discovered to have failed to report such crimes involving immigrant gangs for fear of accusations of ‘racism'. The media followed suit, filling their reports with euphemisms as though trying to avoid helping the public to draw any conclusions. So in cases like those in Oxfordshire the gangs were described as ‘Asian' when they almost solely involved Muslim men of Pakistani origin. The fact that their victims were chosen precisely because they were not Muslims was only occasionally mentioned in the courts and rarely dwelt upon by the press. Instead of carrying out their jobs without fear or favour, police, prosecutors and journalists behaved as though their job was to mediate between the public and the facts.

Here is another example of the governmental lies and cognitive dissonance:

“Whereas in 1975 there were 421 rapes reported to the Swedish police, by 2014 the annual number of rapes reported had risen to 6,620.5 By 2015 Sweden had the highest level of rapes per capita of any country in the world after Lesotho. When the Swedish press did report these events they wilfully misreported them. For instance, after the gang rape of a girl on a ferry from Stockholm to Abo, Finland, it was reported that the culprits were ‘Swedish men' when they were in fact Somalis. It was the same story as in all of the neighbouring countries. Research published in Denmark in 2016 showed that Somali men were around twenty-six times more likely to commit rape than Danish men, adjusted for age.6 And yet in Sweden as everywhere else this subject remained unbroachable.”

The public was never consulted on immigration issues, although consistently staked out a position that it wanted a lower immigration rate than the government was regularly permitting. The elite attitude seems to be that of managers of a hotel who don't care who the tenants are so long as the rents keep coming in. Witness this comment for example:

“In October 2015 the government put on a conference in support of its migration policy entitled ‘Sweden Together'. The King and Queen of Sweden were in attendance along with most of the rest of the political establishment. Among the speakers was Ingrid Lomfors, the head of Sweden's ‘Living History Forum' (a Holocaust education body). In her much-praised speech Lomfors insisted upon three things: that immigration to Sweden is nothing new, that everyone is a migrant really, and that in any case there is no such thing as Swedish culture.”

The crows are coming home to roost, however. Currently, a reviled “far right” anti-immigration party leads the polls in Sweden. Although too late for the book, Austria has elected an anti-immigration government, and, in America, profiting from a similar history of government lies on immigration, in 2016, Donald Trump was elected president.

This is a prescient book that explains a lot about why we are where we are today.