Posted on March 5, 2023

Unruly Europe

Mark Bruijn, American Renaissance, April 2013

Today Europe faces a crisis unlike any in the past. It is a slow march towards the precipice, made possible by the treachery of the very people who should be defending Europe. Fortunately, there is a growing sense of what is at stake, and Europeans are taking the first steps towards ensuring their long-term survival.

Betrayal by stealth

In 2004, Europeans were presented with a new constitution for the European Union. It was drafted by Euro-bureaucrats, with no direct input from citizens, and would have greatly increased EU control over many policy areas, including immigration.

Some member countries ratified the new constitution by a vote in parliament, while others put it to a popular vote. Ratification went smoothly in 16 parliaments, and Spain and Luxembourg actually approved it by referendum. In 2005, however, in both France and the Netherlands, the people said “no,” despite pro-Constitution campaigning by all the major parties. By a vote of 61 percent in the Netherlands and 55 percent in France, voters rejected schemes for greater European integration that their rulers would have forced upon them.

Ratification required unanimous member-state approval, so these rejections stopped the process — much to the dismay of European elites. They then decided to shut out the voters by means of a different treaty — the Lisbon Treaty — that would contain many of the same “reforms” but could be ratified more easily.

The EU diversity star.

The EU diversity star.

This time, only Ireland was required, by its own laws, to approve the treaty by popular vote, and in 2008 the Irish rejected the treaty — again to the annoyance of elites. In 2009, badly battered by the economic crisis and somewhat mollified by renegotiations that let Ireland opt out of certain provisions, the Irish people duly approved the treaty in a second referendum. If the treaty had mostly required referenda instead of approval by parliaments, it would surely have failed.

This is the story of Europe: Elites implement centralizing policies over the heads of the people. On matters of immigration — as well as on many others — the EU is always at odds with ordinary Europeans, and the elites always betray their people.

The EU has long used this strategy of stealth, and its proponents occasionally even admit it. In 1999, Jean Claude Juncker, an EU politician from Luxembourg, described how the system works:

We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don’t understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.

Of course, it would be a mistake to blame all of Europe’s troubles on the EU; many local governments have done idiotic things. But after many years of submission, there are clear signs that Europeans have had enough.

Immigration

There was substantial immigration in Europe even in the 1950s. Spaniards, Italians and Greeks found jobs as guest workers in Northern European countries. When the economies of their home countries improved, most of them went home.

After the southern Europeans left there were continued labor shortages, and in the 1960s Western European countries — most notably Germany — sought workers in North Africa and Turkey. France and the Netherlands received large numbers of people from their former colonies. Unlike the southern Europeans, non-white immigrants stayed even after labor shortages had eased. European authorities did not expel them; instead they let them bring in their families, and huge numbers of Third-World immigrants began to arrive in the late 1980s and during the 1990s.

Today, the immigrant stream is increasingly diverse, and there are many different forces pushing non-whites into Europe. The population of Africa is growing rapidly and will probably double by 2036. Millions of Africans want to come to Europe, especially from black Africa, driven by failed governments, famine, disease, and war. The American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have produced a flood of refugees who want to come. The Arab Spring — egged on by European support for rebels in Libya and Syria — destabilized much of North Africa, and sent people streaming North.

Smuggling people into Europe is now as big a business as smuggling people into the United States. Most Africans — black or Arab — usually cross the Mediterranean. People from the Middle East sneak across the Greek-Turkish border. Immigrants pay thousands of Euros to international gangs who promise to deliver them to specific destinations.

Turks

Despite these new influxes, Turks are still the largest non-white group in Europe.

In Germany there are more than four million Turks and German citizens with full or part-Turkish ancestry — or about 5 percent of the population. It is less well known that Turks have spread throughout the rest of Europe. Europe now has more Turks outside of German than in it, for a total of some nine million.

Many Turks are now European-born, but the majority feels Turkish to the core, and many speak only Turkish at home. There was a famous incident in 2008, when Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Cologne, Germany, and told a crowd of 20,000 Turks that although they were living in Europe they were never to forget that they were Turks. “Integrate yourselves into German society but don’t assimilate yourselves,” he said. “No one has the right to deprive us of our culture and our identity.” On that same trip, he also told German Chancellor Angela Merkel that her government should fund Turkish-language schools.

He has also been known to quote lines from a poem that uses a military-religious metaphor for the conquest of Europe: “Mosques are our barracks, minarets our bayonets, the domes our helmets and the believers are our soldiers.”

German polling data for 2010 and 2012 reveals that Turks are feeling increasingly Muslim. To the question “Is Islam the one true religion?” the number of German Turks saying “yes” went from 69 to 72 percent in two years. To the question “Should more mosques be built in Germany?” the “yes” percentage went from 49 to 55 percent. Perhaps most shocking, to the question “Would you like to see a Germany with more Muslims than Christians?” the “yes” percentage grew from 33 to 46 percent.

The number of fanatical Muslims is increasing, and many are on welfare because they cannot support the large families that Islam enjoins. Even if they wanted to work, many Turks are being pushed out of low-paying jobs because more recent arrivals from Romania or Bulgaria are willing to work for even lower wages.

Imams routinely give chauvinist harangues in their mosques, and establish religious and cultural organizations funded by Turkey. Recently a Turkish organization in the Netherlands insisted that the Dutch government provide schooling in Turkish for students of Turkish background.

Very few Europeans are aware that there is obligatory military service of 12 to 15 months for all Turkish men, even those living in Europe and who have dual citizenship. It is possible to buy an exemption from conscription by paying a fee of €10,000 to the Turkish government, but many Turks in Europe consider military service an honor. Recruits swear loyalty to Turkey, and the army bathes them in nationalist propaganda.

It is incomprehensible that European governments permit conscription on their territories by a foreign power. The Turkish army still occupies Cyprus, which is a member of the EU. Furthermore, in times of chaos and war, it is dangerous to be harboring a large, unassimilated ethnic group, loyal to a foreign power, living in the heart of Europe — especially when all the men have had military training.

Expected Muslim population growth.

Expected Muslim population growth.

Expanding the EU

The EU keeps growing. From its original six members, it now has 27 members and a border with Russia. Turkey has been trying to get in for 20 years, despite the fact that it is an Asian country with only 3 percent of its landmass in Europe. Its entry is not assured, however, due to that little matter of its occupation of Cyprus.

Turkey also has human-rights problems that do not sit well with Europeans. There has been a rise in attacks on other religious groups — especially Christians — and the Turkish secret service is observing Jews because of suspected dual loyalty. Honor killings are on the rise. Some suspect that Turkey, which has officially been a secular state since 1928, may be slipping back towards theocracy.

Adding Turkey to the EU would make it the country with the second largest population after Germany. This would give it many seats in the European Parliament and considerable influence. With completely free access to Europe, Turks would flood into the richer countries.

This would add a huge boost to Islam, which is already on the ascendant. In France, there are already 2,000 mosques, and in any given year there are 150 new mosques under construction. By contrast, the French Catholic church built only 20 new churches in the last 20 years, and decommissioned more than 60. Muslims regularly petition the church to make its empty buildings available as mosques. The 2.5 million practicing Muslims in France now outnumber the 1.9 million practicing Catholics.

But Turkey is not the only Muslim country that is a potential member. Kosovo and Albania, which are legitimately European geographically, are majority Muslim. They are also centers of international crime, with the Albanian Mafia especially notorious for the drug trade, prostitution, weapons offenses, and human trafficking. Curiously, Kosovo receives the highest level of EU foreign aid per head of any country in the world: between 1999 and 2007 it got €3.5 billion, a huge figure for a country with a population of just 1.75 million.

Adding these three Muslim countries to the EU would be a death sentence for Europe and its people. Fortunately, there is much popular resistance to the idea of admitting Turkey, and Albania and Kosovo still have many technical hurdles to clear before they could qualify for membership.

Results of immigration

Today, the results of mass immigration are evident across Western Europe. All the major cities are thronged with non-whites, and some neighborhoods in Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, and Berlin are wholly alien. In 2013, white Britons officially became a minority in London, as 600,000 whites fled the city over the previous decade. Whites in Leicester and Rotterdam face the same future.

In Brussels, the capital of the European Union, the Belgian Police are losing control of certain immigrant areas. They fear to enter them — they may face gun fire when they try — but rather than send in the army, the authorities are turning these areas over foreigners. Not surprisingly, crime is on the rise.

European prisons are bursting with foreigners. In Greece, 41.5 percent of the prisoners are foreigners, in Spain, 50 percent. In France around 70 percent of the prison population is Muslim. Attacks by Muslims on Jews are so common that there has been a mass exodus from Oslo and Brussels. Non-white immigration has lead to other spectacular events: the 2005 mass rioting across France, the 2011 riots in England, and the rape epidemic in Sweden. Sweden is now said to have the second highest rape rate after South Africa, with immigrants accounting for more than 70 percent of all rapes.

And, of course, immigration has brought home-grown Muslim terrorism to Europe. These days, the Muslims who wreak havoc are not wild-eyed fanatics from the wilds of Somalia. They are mostly European-born and European-educated; they become radicalized in European mosques. They travel to Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Somalia for weapons training, and may actually do some fighting in Chechnya, Afghanistan, or Syria before they return on missions to Europe.

Thus, most of the men involved in the July 7, 2005 series of suicide attacks in London were born and educated in Britain. The murderer of Islam critique Theo van Geogh had studied at the University of Amsterdam. Mohammed Atta, leader of the September 11 attacks in the United States, had studied at a Hamburg university and had become a radical in a Hamburg mosque. Mohammed Merah, who killed seven French Jews and soldiers last year, was a French-born Muslim.

Once allies, now traitors

It is an irony that two institutions that once valiantly defended the West are now complicit in its betrayal. For 1,000 years the royal houses of Europe and the Catholic Church worked together to defend Europe against Islam and to free the Holy Land. The church, with at least a billion followers worldwide, is still one of the most powerful institutions on earth, and European monarchs still have prestige and influence. Neither group takes serious steps to prevent Europe’s demographic nightmare.

In Belgium, for example, the royal family is widely respected, and it is common for the monarch to speak on days of national importance. Last year, King Albert II gave a Christmas speech on live television, in which he warned against “populism” and referred pointedly to the “catastrophic consequences of the 1930s.” This was a clear attack on the New Flemish Alliance, a political party that wants tighter immigration control and aims to break Flanders away from Belgium to establish a self-consciously Flemish state. It is unusual for a monarch to talk politics, but it is typical that Albert chose a capitulationist theme.

Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands likewise gave a Christmas speech, in which she said that throughout history Holland had been a tolerant country, and that multiculturalism and immigration made it strong. She forgot to mention that it was European immigration that made the country strong, and that non-white immigration started only in the 1960s.

In 2008, on his 60th birthday, Prince Charles of England announced plans to change one of the titles of the British monarch from “defender of the faith” to “defender of faith.” Ever since Henry VIII, the throne has defended the Christian faith, whether Catholic or Church of England. Charles thinks that is too exclusive, and wants to defend all faiths, including that of jihadists who want to conquer Europe. As early as 1986, he was calling for black faces in the elite military units that attend ceremonial events.

There is an occasional exception. In 2005, Queen Margrethe stated that the Denmark must take the challenge of Islam seriously, and that her country had been too lax and tolerant. She was clearly aware of the danger of candor: “We have to run the risk of being labeled in an unflattering way, because there are some things for which we should display no tolerance.”

As for the Catholic Church, most of the hierarchy appears to have no loyalty to Europe. In 1990, before his elevation to pope, Cardinal Ratzinger at a private dinner party reportedly lamented “the slow suicide of Europe” as its population aged and was being replaced by inassimilable immigrants. Once he was pope and speaking in public, however, he denounced the “fear of others, of foreigners,” who “reach our land and appear to threaten what we are.” He said this in Venice in 2011, at a time when North Africans were swarming into southern Italy because of upheaval in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya.

Today, the number of Catholics is declining in Europe while it grows in Africa and Latin America. After Pope Benedict’s resignation this year there was much talk of a possible non-white pope who would reflect the changing face of Catholicism. Such a church is not going to fight to keep Europe European.

The EU, of course, is not a friend to whites. The union’s person in charge of immigration and asylum is Cecilia Mallström, an unabashed leftist from Sweden who is never happier than when welcoming more non-whites into Europe.

At the same time, the EU has its very own $15 billion-a-year foreign aid program. Every year, it gives $750 million of its citizens’ money to . . . Turkey! It has also sent a troupe of Belgians to one of the most down-and-out countries in Africa, Burkina Faso, to teach them how to dance. The EU has even given $13 million to an immigration-advisory office in Mali that is supposed to help Africans find jobs in Europe.

Resistance to immigration

In the early days of European immigration, the Left did not want guest workers. At that time, some left-wing parties actually represented the working-class and did not want competition for jobs and downward pressure on wages. Unions opposed immigration. Things are much different now. The Left now sees immigrants as future voters, and it promotes multiculturalism.

The traditional right-wing parties backed the idea of guest workers because business interests like low-wage labor, and companies were able to convince governments that foreign labor was essential to the economy. Both Right and Left are therefore guilty of promoting the process that is destroying Europe.

During the 1990s there was very little open resistance to immigration, but that is changing. The terrorist attacks in the US in 2001, the Madrid subway attacks in 2004, and the London bombings in 2005 opened many eyes. Support for anti-immigration/nationalist parties is growing, and they have had successes in France, Austria, Greece, and the Netherlands. Nationalist parties also have a substantial presence in Ukraine and Hungary.

Germany still has a hangover from the Second World War and has no real anti-immigration parties. German Chancellor Angela Merkel famously said in 2010 that multiculturalism in Germany has “utterly failed,” but she has done nothing to stop or even reduce immigration.

In Britain, the British National Party collapsed after showing a flash of promise, but the subject of immigration can at least now be discussed. Large majorities of Britons have opposed the influx since at least the 1960s, and about three quarters now say they want less of it. Even the Labour party has admitted it was not “sufficiently alive to people’s concerns,” and the United Kingdom Independence Party is winning votes by promising strong border control. However, most elites are still enamored of multiculturalism and the media — especially the BBC — are parades of political correctness.

Sweden is probably the most political correct country in the world, though it is not clear why. It does not have any of the usual reasons for “white guilt:” It was never a real colonial power and had no part in the slave trade. Still, non-white immigration is soaring, and the arrival of 5,000 Syrians pushed the total number of immigrants in 2012 to 82,600 — a new record. The number of Muslims is expected to double by 2030. In 2010, popular anger over immigration finally propelled a genuinely restrictionist party into Parliament, and the Sweden Democrats now have about 8.5 percent support.

The breakthrough in Sweden led the old Right-wing parties to do what they always do when common sense finally gets a voice: They are edging towards sanity, though they still cooperate with the Left.

Southern Europe faces special challenges. Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece are particularly hard hit by the economic crisis. The EU is sending billions of Euros in bailout money, but there is much resistance to austerity measures. Unrest and strikes are common. There is a great deal of suspicion towards the EU, but governments are utterly fettered by EU aid.

Greece

Greece, which suffers the most, is a particularly interesting case. The unemployment rate is 26 percent, and one in three Greeks are officially poor. The country has already swallowed €240 billion of bailout money, but the crisis is far from over.

Adversity seems to have been boosted nationalism. There are approximately a million illegal immigrants in the country, a huge number for a country with a population of just 11 million. Most of them come from Africa and the Middle East, with a high number of Iraqis and Afghans. Illegal immigration has made many Greek neighborhoods unrecognizable.

The EU invested millions of Euros to build a fence along the Greece/Turkey border but it does not keep out the illegals, whom Greeks increasingly see as a serious threat to the nation. Immigration, combined with the economic crisis, led to gains by both the far Right and Left in the 2012 elections, with the nationalist party “Golden Dawn” entering parliament for the first time.

Golden Dawn is demonized in the media, but this has not held it back. It has solid backing in the police and the army, and is known for distributing free food and clothes — but only to Greeks. Its support comes from all classes of society, and it is helping to inject nationalism into the mainstream. Already, the conservative New Democracy Party is copying some of its positions. The EU is capable of taking harsh measures against Greece if Golden Dawn wins much more popular support, but nationalists hope that its success will stimulate similar action in the rest of southern Europe.

Violent reaction

Recently, non-white immigration has resulted in something new: violent reaction by whites. The most spectacular was Anders Breivik’s rampage in Norway that left 77 dead. The victims were mainly young members of the Socialist Party, which Mr. Breivik considered responsible for the Islamization of Norway.

Although not widely reported outside of Europe, between 2000 and 2007, a German group called the National Socialist Underground killed 10 people, mainly Turks. The group’s existence become known only in 2011, and Germans were shocked to learn that it had operated for so long without detection by the authorities.

In 2012 in Sweden, Peter Mangs was sentenced to life in prison for what became known as the Malmo shootings. Malmo is notorious for its large immigrant population, and during 2009 and 2010, Mr. Mangs shot at dark-skinned people as many 15 times, killing three.

Anders Breivik is prompting imitators. In 2012, police arrested a Polish university researcher named Brunon Kwiecien. He had accumulated several tons of explosives, which he planned to load onto a truck and drive into the parliament building. He was a passionate admirer of Mr. Breivik, and complained that the Polish parliament was run by foreigners. In August 2012, police in the Czech Republic arrested a man who had accumulated weapons and explosives in what was thought to be an attempt to imitate Mr. Breivik.

In response to events of this kind, a lefty British group has set out to monitor “Right-wing extremism.” The Policy Network will keep an eye on nationalist political parties and try to figure out “what influences the transition of a politics of hate into one of violence.”

The arrival of large numbers of non-whites has clearly planted the seeds of violence — mainly by immigrants against European natives — but there are signs of violent resistance to their incursions.

Regional sentiment

The turmoil in Europe has sparked a renaissance in regional sentiment. As the European Union wipes out ever more national distinctions, people are returning to local roots. Many regions now want autonomy and even independence.

The Basques, who straddle the border between Spain and France, have long wanted their own country, and for many years the independence movement in Spain fought a low-level guerrilla war. They’ve since been granted a degree of political autonomy. To the east, the Catalan people have similar ambitions, and their influence is growing through peaceful means: A Catalan separatist was actually elected mayor of Barcelona in 2011.

In Belgium, the Vlaams Belang and its predecessor party, the Vlaams Blok have long fought for an independent Flanders. A more “moderate” independence party called the New Flemish Alliance was established in 2001. It has gone from strength to strength and is now in coalition government in the Flemish parliament. If Flanders were ever to become independent, it would be a headache for the EU because its capital, Brussels, is in Flanders.

Scotland and Wales have independence movements, and approximately 30 percent of Scots say they want an independent Scotland. In Italy, the Lega Nord has long promoted independence for northern Italy, and has seen considerable electoral success. Many eastern European countries have sizable ethnic minorities — such as the Hungarians in Romania — and if any western European independence movement succeeded, it would probably set a pattern.

The parties that promote regional autonomy run the gamut from Left to Right. Some of the leftist parties think strictly in terms of territory rather than people, and pretend to believe that anyone living in Scotland, for example, is a Scot. Separatism is inherently exclusive, however, and many regional parties strongly oppose immigration because it dilutes local character. Regionalism makes it much harder for the EU to impose its uniform federal state, but unless regions gain full control over borders and immigration, they cannot solve the demographic problem — and then, only for their own region.

VlaamsBelang

The signs say “Islam is a threat to your freedom . . . Stop immigration.”

Fleeing Europe

One regrettable but understandable tendency of today’s Europeans is to leave the continent entirely. It has long been popular for pensioners to retire elsewhere in search of a better climate, but now working-age European families have begun to emigrate. Mass Third-World immigration is unquestionably helping push some out. The loss of workers, in combination with the increase in old folks, will give the Left an excuse to push for more non-white immigration.

Popular destinations for young Europeans are Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Many young Spaniards and Portuguese who cannot find jobs go to former colonies such as Brazil and Angola. The flight of these people, especially those with college degrees, will certainly damage the labor force. Here are examples of what is happening:

An estimated 130,000 Spaniards left Spain in 2010, and another 150,000 in 2011. A total of 1.7 million are now living abroad, and the hard times are likely to drive yet more overseas.

More than five and a half million Britons are expatriates, and including people who live or work abroad part time raises that figure to six million. That is about 10 percent of all British citizens. Every year for the last 40 years, an average of 67,500 more Brits left Britain than returned to it. In 2011 the figure was 107,000, or 2,000 people every week.

In the first five months of 2012, 52,000 Dutch citizens left the country, up from 47,000 the year before. Many European Jews are leaving the continent and buying homes in Israel. The outflow has been especially great in France due to high levels of Muslim immigration and rising anti-Semitism.

In Holland, the annual Emigration Fair is a big event. It is staffed by immigration officials from popular destinations, and attracts people from all over Europe.

We must assume that southern Europe, which has been losing the most people, will eventually solve its economic problems, but many of the people who have left will probably never return. If they marry in their new home or have children there, they will be very reluctant to return.

Aside from Jews who say they are leaving because of anti-Semitism, only a few Europeans admit openly that they are forsaking their homelands because of non-white immigration. In this respect they are like American whites who move from southern California to the northern counties but say that it is because of “traffic congestion” or “pollution.”

What Future for Europe?

We thus have a combination of forces that make this a very difficult and complex time for Europeans. In general, Europe has lost any awareness of the need to survive as a homeland for whites. Europeans have a supranational government that wants immigrant-friendly uniformity, and national governments that, for the most part, also promote immigration. Europeans face a low birth rate and are seeing their country — especially their great cities — transformed by prolific non-white immigrants.

Southern Europe, especially, suffers from a terrible economic crisis. This has demoralized Spaniards and prompted many to leave their homeland, but in Greece, it has stiffened the will to survive. All over Europe, we see the slow but unmistakable rise of “far-right” parties that stand, if not in so many words, for a Europe for Europeans. These parties can only increase in influence as they gain respectability, power, and experience, and as the savage consequences of dispossession become ever clearer.

But they will have to work hard. As Guillaume Faye has written, “If the generation of native Europeans that turned 20 between 2000 and 2010 doesn’t act, everything will be lost — forever.”