The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

My mouth tastes foul now...

This book is to history and society what self-help is to psychology and self-care: a grandiose design, filled with dread and inducing anxiety, and oft promising salvation through a prescribed set of solutions. The malady is that, like the self-help genre, it substantiates none of its claims with evidence.

I am appaled by the number of reviews talking about “facts”, as if the opinion of a largely misguided fear-mongerer was, of itself, fact-making. Facts, my fellow kin, are made so by hard evidence (what a rationalist might call lowering the probability of the opposing non-fact).

As a white European, I suppose I should be running to the hills by now. And by the hills I mean Switzerland, which stands as a bastion of purity in a completely Islamified Europe. Oh my, oh my, run away, the death of Europe is coming! We are completely surrounded and the end is near... Repent!

Oh what the hell Mr. Murray, I'll quote the great Billy Connolly: “fuck off!” It's so difficult to see a learned man succumb to the tactics of the extreme political poles (left and right). Please engage with the vast hordes of foreigners and try to be human for once. This isn't to preach that we should “open the gates” to just about anyone, that isn't the point. But I've met a number of refugees and heard their stories. Many don't want to be here in the first place.

Might I suggest, Mr. Murray — seeing as you're a Brit —, that you look at the past actions of your own country and consider how they are linked to the problems that create refugees in the first place? Oh, but oh well, I am now decrying Europe and falling prey to white guilt, I must be an ultra-leftist hyper-liberal woke anti-Christ. My, oh my, it is truly the end of the continent!

Look at the numbers, look at how migration communities contribute to their host countries, etc. Yes, some apples in the basket were rotten, but you can't burn down the whole orchard as a solution. And you shouldn't invade other countries' orchards either. Or fund the weapons used by the orchard rebels. And so on.

Let the whole of this failing continent's assailed populace cry in unison: Mr. Murray, fuck off.

I want to take a few verses from “An die Freude”, the anthem of a Union Mr. Murray's country has decided to abandon. Perhaps the very words that we hoped to enshrine — which the United Kingdom now disregards due to the force majeure of ‘migrants are terrible!' —, can shine some light on what it could mean to be a true European (a “friend's friend”):

Deine Zauber binden wieder
Was die Mode streng geteilt.
Alle Menschen werden Brüder
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

Alright, now that that's out of the way — and I can pretend I never read this —, I'm going to enjoy my perfectly fine agnostic life. Oh sorry, I meant I'm going to try falling asleep whilst soaked in fear, surrounded by Allah-worshipping demons, in the failed nation of Belgium. I hope Brexit really fixes all of that for ya.