Posted on May 2, 2020

Christoper Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

Morris V. de Camp, Counter-Currents, April 16, 2020

Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, New York: Random House, 2009

Europe’s immigration problem starts with Nazi Germany’s World War II labor policy. Then, according to Allied propaganda, “slave” laborers were brought in from outside Germany to work the factories and mines while the German laborers who normally worked those jobs went off to fight. When the war ended, Europe’s manpower shortage remained, but the proof-of-concept for “guest workers” was established and it spread to the rest of Europe. By the 1950s a considerable body of Third World “guest workers” had established themselves in various settlements across Europe.

Initially, these colonists were not seen as a threat. Many of the immigrants had served in the militaries of the French or British Empires. Their presence in Europe was seen as temporary. It wasn’t until 1968 when Enoch Powell gave his famous Rivers of Blood speech that immigration as a problem became officially noticed. Enoch Powell was alarmed by the fact that Britain was in the midst of a racial/demographic revolution and he was concerned that Britain would be saddled with an intractable racial problem such as in America. Indeed, this racial revolution had spread across all of Western Europe.

Christopher Caldwell wrote about the immigration situation in Europe in 2009. As one can imagine, events have moved along a great deal in the last decade, but on the whole, the book gives an outstanding picture of the foundations of the disaster.

Caldwell writes: “All British discussion since [Rivers of Blood] has been, essentially, an argument over whether or not Enoch Powell was right. It has been a sterile argument because those who engage in it tend to mix up two senses of the word right — the moral sense and the factual sense.” We know that Powell was factually correct. The real question is if he was morally correct.

I’d never heard of this book until Greg Johnson asked me to review it. What is striking is that Christopher Caldwell, until very recently, was the editor for the neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard. {snip}

Neoconservative propaganda was also supportive of Islam and immigrants in many ways. “Islam,” according to President Bush, “was the religion of peace.” {snip}

Caldwell’s book discussing the problem with immigrants in Europe is a defection from that sort of neoconservatism. It is also a foreshadowing of his recent rejection of the morality of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in his recent book, The Age of Entitlement. {snip}

By the 1970s, it was clear that the economic justification for immigration into Europe no longer applied. Laws were passed which ended economic immigration, and yet immigrants continued to arrive.

The reason for this was multifold. One reason was that the Cold War altered everything. Not only was one half of Europe cut off from the other part, the belligerents of the Cold War felt required to help out the Third World in various ways and allowing immigration was one such way. Additionally, the immigrants themselves started to figure out how to game the system. Once they were in, they carried out swindles like “family reunification” and importing “religious workers.”

Most importantly was the “civil rights” situation in the United States. How “civil rights” happened in America is beyond the scope of this article, but because the Americans were the biggest power in Western Europe, American problems transmitted to Europe.

“Civil rights” failed to carry out its promises of equalizing Africans with whites, yet the policy was so powerful a social victory that no person could possibly criticize it even as Africans burned down cities and white liberals fled integration. There are two more issues with “civil rights” that need to be addressed. First, “civil rights” created an ideology of tolerance. This ideology broadened. Under this expanded definition of “civil rights,” any group able to analogize as Africans in the United States became privileged.

“Second,” writes Caldwell, “the ideology hardened. It developed real powers of enforcement, partially because it was codified into law, and partially because non-governmental groups acted as freelance enforcers. Offenses against the ideology of tolerance now not just brought criticism and ostracism but the possibility of lost livelihoods and encounters with public authorities.” Immigrants in Europe, especially non-white ones, easily became privileged by analogies to American “civil rights” policies.

Another reason immigration continued to be allowed was that European governments shifted the rationale for allowing it. Immigration was not an economic necessity, but a moral necessity. The immigrants, so the reasoning went, were fleeing “brutal civil wars” or other such problems.

This proved to be a line of reasoning difficult to defeat. Again, the circumstances of the Cold War and American power in Europe respectively were and remain a big part of the problem. America’s founding narrative contains sympathy for refugees. The Pilgrims of the Mayflower were refugees of a sort. Additionally, it was Cold War policy in Western Europe to accept refugees from the Communist Eastern Bloc.

The American and Cold War refugee narratives need to be deconstructed. Most of the early American colonists were seeking refuge, but they were doing it by creating their own society. Much of the idea that refugees are a blessing comes from the story of the Huguenots, who were a blessing to England, America, Holland, and South Africa. Likewise, those fleeing Communism were a blessing, but for the most part, they were fleeing into areas populated by those like themselves and they carried with them considerable skills.

Refugees, though, are a mixed bag. It all depends on the impact they make upon the society that receives them. Huguenots, for example, weren’t a blessing for Spain. Since the end of the Cold War, refugees have become entirely a burden upon their receiving society. Much of the reason for this is the fact that refugees into Europe are from the Third Word and they practice Islam.

Islam: As Dangerous in Europe as Hydrophobia in a Dog

Caldwell is completely frank about the relationship between Islam and Europe. For generations, the Mediterranean Sea was a zone for Islamic slave-catchers and pirates. The Islamic Ottoman Turks threatened Vienna and Islamic Moors occupied Spain. Islamic immigrants entered Europe at a time when Europeans were so distracted by the World Wars and Cold War that they’d forgotten what a danger Muslims were.

The understanding of the problem of Islam was confined to the 1960s political fringe and mostly hypothetical; such as Enoch Powell’s widowed constituent who had “excreta pushed through her letterbox.” The Muslim problem became apparent to the European mainstream the same time year that Communism started to fall apart — in 1989. This is when Islamic clerics issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie — an Indian of Muslim background who lived in Britain and wrote a turgid book that could be seen as anti-Islam called The Satanic Verses. Since then there’s been a steady drip, drip, drip of terrorist attacks and an undeniable spike in crime. Almost all crime in Europe is caused by Muslim immigrants or Muslims of immigrant stock.

Additionally, a bizarre situation has grown up across the continent, from Malmö in Sweden to the suburbs of Paris where large zones of immigrants, nearly all non-white and mostly Muslims, live in modernist buildings designed or inspired by a Swiss architect named Le Corbusier (1887 — 1965). Le Corbusier’s designs are actually pretty functional, beautiful even, but when peopled by Third Worlders these buildings become castles of savagery.

Caldwell uses the “tragic dirt” logical fallacy when describing Le Corbusier-style housing projects and their occupants. The immigrants in these areas are far from places with jobs and the design of things, such as the stairwells and elevators, make natural choke-points for the young and strong to rob their weaker fellow non-whites in the building. In the early 2000s, it was revealed that North African boys often gang-raped the girls of these projects. Of course, the problem is the cultural negatives of the immigrants themselves as well as their low IQs. These immigrants are unemployable. The design and location of their accommodations has nothing to do with anything.

Meanwhile, the populations of these ghettos are wholly hostile to the European societies which host them. In 2005, a terrible riot developed in a suburb of Paris called Clinchy-sous-Bois. The rioting spread to every non-white area of France and it was characterized by cars being burned by the non-white rioters. Caldwell argues that this rioting was in no small part due to a rising Islamist ideology connected with a deep antipathy to French society. Again with the North American cultural forms; many of the rioters made the same simian gestures that minstrel-show gangsta rappers make.

Caldwell describes the radicalization process for Muslims living in Europe. Essentially, these unfortunate people are adrift in a land that is not their own, and disconnected from their native culture. Meanwhile Western Europe’s pockets of North Africans, Pakistanis, Syrians, etc. are all becoming a new “Muslim” group. Additionally, Caldwell examines Islamic theology, and argues that yes, there is a point to be made that the Koran does indeed call for violence against non-Muslims. In 2009, this was a bold statement for a neoconservative white man in the mainstream to make.

Caldwell, therefore, argues that it is not unreasonable to call for greater caution towards Muslims as a group. It is also not unreasonable to consider white terrorism and spree killings as one-offs. Caldwell writes:

There was no substantial body of white Americans who applauded [Oklahoma City bomber] McVeigh’s act or said that although his means were wrong, the injustices he named were real, and to ignore his message was to invite retribution.

Ten Years On — Europe’s Muslims, The British, & the Obama Administration

Reflections is a book that’s more than a decade old as this article goes to print. What, if anything, has happened, and what, if anything, can be done? First, it is clear that none of the predictions of peace and harmony multicultural advocates — backed by state power — so loudly made occurred. Europe’s Muslims have continued to attack European whites pretty much anywhere they are for almost any reason. Indeed, in the United States, one Muslim terrorist had no trouble murdering Hispanics. (Of course, nearly all Hispanics are Christian and many are white.) The biggest event that Europe’s Muslims participated in since this book was published was the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The most vicious of that insane asylum’s killers were foreign-born fighters from Europe.

Europe’s Muslims thus have caused a great many problems, not just in Europe, but in the Middle East also. However, more things have broken than the infrastructure of eastern Syria. One thing I’ve noticed in my career is that a subset of the social victory that was the “civil rights” movement is that a white or group of whites in one organization who notice a problem with the non-whites of another organization disingenuously attack the other whites. In other words, if Section A has a problem with Dindu Nuffins in Section B, Section A’s white leader will make life a living hell for Section B’s white leader until some change comes about. Such a thing has happened in Europe.

One instance of this phenomenon occurred in Norway in 2011. That’s when Anders Breivik murdered white children attending a leftist political camp. The reason? Islamic immigration. More recently, the British voted to leave the European Union — twice — and then left that Union in no small part due to Islamic immigration. While many reading this applaud Brexit, one should reflect that the EU had provided a great deal of prosperity to a continent that a generation ago was very hostile and divided indeed. I propose that honesty is a better policy, but due to “civil rights” and the ideology of tolerance backed by the police, honesty in this matter is difficult.

The Obama administration’s relationship with “civil rights” and Islam is also critical to consider. Although Obama was not an American black in the strictest sense, his wife was and his career’s purpose was to advance the interest of American blacks. One could say Obama was the First Soldier of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He was also a Democrat, and since the 1940s, that Party is subject to a protection racket scheme carried out by the African community in the United States. When Democrats own the White House, blacks are tempted to riot to get some payoff.

During Obama’s dismal second term, it was clear that Muslims in Europe, the Middle East, and America were tempted to go jihad alongside Negro rioters. After Trump won the election with the promise of a Muslim Travel Ban, Muslim terror slowed considerably and black rioting stopped entirely. Additionally, ISIS folded so fast after Trump’s election that it is not unreasonable to conclude there was some sort of under-the-table support for ISIS or tolerance for those who supported ISIS on the part of members of the Obama administration.

Blacks are an implacable problem in the United States. They don’t fit in, many are unemployable, and nearly all crime is due to their activity. Muslims in Europe occupy the same niche that Negroes occupy in the States. Because the 1964 Civil Rights Act is an illicit second constitution whose ideology is easily transferred to any group that can be analogized as an African in the United States, it is clear that Muslims in Europe will continue to infect that continent until the 1964 Civil Rights Act is struck down.

In the meantime, at a minimum, Europeans need to adopt American-style crime laws where the types of crimes typically carried out by non-whites come with long-term jail sentences. Additionally, Europe needs the ability to trial non-white children as adults with adult-level sentences. Europeans need to make life as difficult for Third World immigrants as they possibly can while they gather strength. Finally, Europe’s whites must organize and Europe’s whites must have children. The game is not over.