Conservative friends and associates in Britain tell us they despair of saving the Kingdom from becoming an Islamic state.

Even if Britain comes out of the EU – which is highly possible at last if the promised referendum goes the right way next year – it is unlikely to be able save itself from its looming fate.

Mark Steyn writes:

Canadians are dead, and so is satire. Six Quebeckers get slaughtered by Islamic terrorists in Burkina Faso, and to honor their memory Prime Minister Justin Trudeau leads a moment of silence … at a mosque.

Speaking of prime ministers, having spent his entire premiership assuring us that whatever happens in the news headlines is nothing to do with Islam, David Cameron has suddenly discovered a few things that are to do with Islam. The opening paragraph from Mr Cameron’s column in the London Times:

Where in the world do you think the following things are happening? School governors’ meetings where male governors sit in the meeting room and the women have to sit out of sight in the corridor. Young women only allowed to leave their house in the company of a male relative. Religious councils that openly discriminate against women and prevent them from leaving abusive marriages. The answer, I’m sorry to say, is Britain.

Ah, right. And who in Britain bears responsibility for letting a parallel self-segregating society incubate and grow these last 20 years?

Much more than 20 years. Nearer to 50 years. See our post Europe betrayed, February 11, 2010 here, where we give an account of how and why the first twenty million Muslims were imported into Europe. 

Mr Cameron has just noticed that 22 per cent of Muslim women in the United Kingdom speak little or no English, despite having lived there for decades. If you’re a Muslim female, the moment of silence can last for decades.

So what’s Cameron proposing to do about it? Well, that’s all a bit more iffy:

Forcing all migrants to learn English and ending gender segregation will show we’re serious about creating One Nation.

Fifty years ago, aside from a few querulous Scots, Welsh and Ulster Catholics, you didn’t need to “create” One Nation, because you already had one. Anointing the most “gender segregating” culture on earth as your principal source of population growth is why you no longer have “One Nation”, and why you’re back starting from scratch. Good luck with that.

Mr Cameron has no serious intention of slowing the right of entry of masses of primitive misogynists into Britain, but in an hour or so he and his fellow MPs will be debating whether to ban Donald Trump. Like I said, satire is dead.

Do some people in Britain really want to ban a possible future president of the United Sates from entering their country? Yes. Because he suggested it might be a good idea to ban Muslims from entering the US since Muslims are committing acts of terrorism on US soil. Our guess is that most of the petitioners to have Trump banned are Muslims.

And any number of primitive misogynistic Muslims are allowed to enter Britain. Bringing sharia law with them.

As for “gender segregation” in the Muslim world, let’s go back to that Peterborough [Canada] mosque where Justin Trudeau had his moment of silence to dishonor the Canadian dead at Islam’s hands. The mosque is run by Imam Shazim Khan …

Who is all for gender segregation:

“Gender segregation”? Bring it on!

There is no need for her [a wife] to go out. There is no need for her to call anybody. There is no need for her to talk to anybody … She only makes available herself to her husband and she protects herself and she stays away from everything that her husband doesn’t like in order to please him and to make the marriage work …

Incidentally, Trudeau’s imam says that, if David Cameron thinks “gender segregation” is bad now, wait till the hereafter:

The Prophet PBUH said because of this ingratitude [of the wives towards their husbands] that is why most inhabitants of hell are women.

Cameron isn’t serious about “assimilating” the likes of Imam Khan, and Trudeau kisses his ass.

Speaking of European leaders, most of them would dearly like to impose a moment of silence on Milos Zeman, the President of the Czech Republic. Mr Zeman has a different take on all this:

The experience of Western European countries which have ghettos and excluded localities shows that the integration of the Muslim community is practically impossible … Let them have their culture in their countries and not take it to Europe, otherwise it will end up like Cologne.

… referring to the mass New Year’s Eve assaults on women in Germany and elsewhere.

President Zeman is a leftie, but not a suicidal one.

Zeman, Cameron, Trudeau: Which of these guys has a better handle on reality?

It will end up as even worse than Cologne. Much worse. Already hundreds of British girls have been made sex-slaves by Muslim men. The British authorities did nothing whatever to put a stop to it.

Well before the end of this century, Britain and most of Europe will end up like Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Later maybe Canada will too.

Just 68 years ago, Britain still possessed the greatest empire in history.

Now it is submitting to weak, primitive Islam.

Angered by the rape of hundreds of victims by gangs of Muslims in Cologne and other European cities, Pat Condell speaks out about Europe’s betrayal of women in this new video:

Today we have posted the last essay, number 18, in the series by Jillian Becker titled The Darkness of This World. 

Find it in full under Pages in our margin.

Here is part of it:

18

Conclusion

America the Last Best Hope?

A multitude of enlightened Europeans cultivated reason, and built a culture that was innovative, prosperous, powerful, and humane. Other Europeans wanted to destroy all that, and succeeded. Rebels from and against the prosperous educated classes – philosophers and poets, artists and politicians – taught generations to intoxicate themselves with fantasies of destruction, spoliation, and atrocity that could, and at times did, inspire real events of vast horror, suffering, and death. From each of them Europe seemed to recover for a while. But at the time of this writing, the rebels have triumphed. The dark vision prevails. Europe is rotten. Multitudes of Europeans, seeing nothing in their culture worth preserving and no point in its survival, reluctant even to beget children, are yielding to immigrating hordes of aliens from the Third World who lust for conquest and are governed by laws devised in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula in the Dark Ages.

So must the greatness of Europe be altogether lost? Surely not! Surely in the states of America, united on Enlightenment principles of liberty, reason, tolerance, and participatory government, European civilization will be preserved and enhanced? There where every citizen is free to pursue his own happiness, to hold property securely, to have his say in a government of limited powers, the United States will continue to prosper and advance? America, it is said, is a forward-looking “can do” society – innovative, prosperous, powerful and humane. “The last best hope of earth.” [As President Lincoln said of his country in a message to Congress on 1 December, 1862.]

And for a while yet it may continue to be so. But the seed of the evil flowers of the culture – Marxism, political sadism, and most potently poisonous of all, the political philosophies of the New Left – have found as fertile soil in America as in Europe.

The mainly bourgeois “anti-bourgeois” terrorist groups that rose with the “sixty-eight” protest movement in America, did evil just as intentionally as their European counterparts. And went in for the same posturing and frivolity. The US was at war in Vietnam, and the anti-draft demonstrations on university campuses gave a serious aspect to the American rebellion, but the war and the draft were pretexts rather reasons for it, as two leaders of the young radicals, Peter Collier and David Horowitz, confessed years later in their book – the best I have found on the subject – Destructive Generation: “The war in Vietnam was a gift of chance that allowed radical leaders to convince others of a need for a social apocalypse and of the necessity for their destructive strategies.”

These authors, long since cured of the romantic radicalism of their youth, look back   and “wince” at the “homemade hankerings for Armageddon”. The Sixties, they write, was a time of “monumental idealism”, when “dewy-eyed young people in the throes of a moral passion … sought only to remake the world”. They would do this by destroying “the evil empire of ‘Amerika’” and freeing “the captive peoples of the world”. It was a time, they say, “when innocence quickly became cynical “ and “when a gang of ghetto thugs like the Black Panthers might be anointed as political visionaries”.

The Black Panthers and many of the “dewy-eyed” rebels intended to do what they fully recognized as evil in pursuit of their ideals. For instance, a man known as J. J. – a member of the white middle-class group that became the terrorist organization called Weatherman and later Weather Underground – was notable for “his [drug augmented] high energy, his nonstop, almost demonic chatter, his ability to carry listeners with him by the sheer force of his words rather than their depth”. And J. J.’s idea “was not to create a perfect state operating by the clockwork principles of Marxist law but to promote a chaos that would cripple America and ultimately cast it into a receivership that would be administered by the morally superior Third World. Unafraid to pursue his theme to its logical end, J. J. would add that people shouldn’t expect the revolution to achieve a Kingdom of Freedom ; more likely, it would produce a Dark Ages.” J. J. “[laid] out the ‘White Devil’ theory of world history. ‘We’re against everything that’s “good and decent” in honky America. … We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmares!’”

As in West Germany, France and Italy, the terrorist bombers of America demanded their rights under the law that they broke, mocked, and abominated. “Despite their incessant complaints of police brutality, Sixties radicals lived for the most part in a no-fault system, demanding their constitutional rights at the same time as they were abusing and denouncing the Constitution. They knew they had the option, which many of them ultimately used, of diving back into the System [and their comfy bourgeois lives] when they tired of being extrinsic. (For this reason New Leftism, although discredited in politics, continues to thrive in the ‘academic work’ of former radicals who returned for postgraduate degrees to the universities they had earlier tried to destroy.) It was an example of the cynicism that marked the decade – counting on the fact that America was exactly the sort of flexible and forgiving society they were condemning it for failing to be.”

The evil was done not only to shock their bourgeois parents, as their drugs, promiscuous sex, and bombs were meant to do and did, but for a very much higher good, of course. The very much higher good: “social justice”; “ending oppression” in the forms of “ racism”, “sexism”, “homophobia”, “classism”, “imperialism”, “colonialism”; all of which required the destruction of “the capitalist system”.

Most of them did not, however, describe themselves as Communists. Without reading the works of Marx, or of Marxists, Trotskyites, or New Left political philosophers, they all – in harmony with their European counterparts – looked forward to a political apocalypse; a revolution that they considered themselves to be hastening, that would change everything and replace the earthly Hell of oppression and social injustice with a Heaven of … something yet to be defined.

Collier and Horowitz write of   “the decade’s transcendental conviction that there was something apocalyptic lurking behind the veil of the ordinary, and that just a little more pressure was needed to pierce the last remaining membrane – of civility, bourgeois consciousness, corporate liberalism, sexual uptightness, or whatever else prevented us all from breaking through to the other side”. And: “Again it was that hunger to reach the apocalypse just beyond, the essential act that would make them real revolutionaries.” And “the Weatherpeople, like all parvenus, spent considerable time working on a genealogy that would connect them with noble [sic] forbears: Russian narodniki and European anarchists, Cuban fidelistas and Vietnamese guerrillas.”

A work of fiction that impressively conveys the real evil of the 60s rebels is American Pastoral by Philip Roth. A percipient discussion of it and the issues it raised was published in Commentary magazine by Carol Iannone. I summarize the plot and quote her most illuminating comments relevant to my theme:

An only child – cheerful, affectionate, charming as a little girl – of a business man who in his youth had been an athlete and a Marine, and his beauty queen wife, grows up to be “overtaken by the 60s”, sets a bomb in a post office and kills a local doctor. She goes underground and kills three more people in another bombing.

“In his manly way” (Carol Iannone writes) the father “ tries to see where his own responsibility lies for what has happened to his much loved daughter … only to be forced again and again to confront the blazing chaotic irrationality of it all. What he cannot understand … is her hatred of America. ‘How could she “hate” this country when she had no conception of this country? How could a child of his be so blind as to revile the “rotten system” that had given her own family every opportunity to succeed? To revile her “capitalist” parents as though their wealth were the product of anything other than the unstinting industry of three generations …’”

“The 60s, in brief, are not just about the bomber young and their war with ‘Amerika’; in the 60s, ‘the indigenous American berserk’, have entered the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, touching everything and everyone with their ‘mockery of human integrity, every ethical obligation destroyed’.”

It entered the academies, and through them the mind of the nation, until the counter-culture has become The Culture. Collier and Horowitz write: “[N]owhere is the entrenchment of the Sixties mentality more complete or more destructive than in the university. That the Left should now dominate the academy involves a savage irony, of course. It was only after failing in their intent to burn down the university in the Sixties that radicals decided to get on the tenure track in the Seventies. Unimpeded in their long march through these institutions by fair-minded centrists of the sort they themselves now refuse to hire, these Leftists have brought a postmodern Dark Age to higher education – “deconstructing” objective truths to pave the way for chic academic nihilism: creating a curriculum of contempt for American history and culture; and transforming many classrooms into chambers of inquisition and indoctrination.”

The demonic achievements of the rebels were crowned by the election, in 2008, to the presidency of the United States of one of their own: Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a 60s counter-culturist mother and an African father who was both a Communist and a Muslim; and was associated eventually in the son’s mind with “colonial and imperial oppression” of his ancestral land, Kenya, when it was under British rule.

President Obama acceded to the White House with all his ideological baggage intact: the credo of the New Left plus admiration of Islam. And this at a time when Islam was becoming the main enemy of the Western world, practicing terrorism on a large scale, waging open warfare in the Middle East, and launching a migrant invasion of Europe that European governments allowed, encouraged, and all too willingly submitted to. Obama’s policies facilitated the European calamity, and he took steps to help Islamic Iran, which constantly reiterates its intention to destroy America and conquer the non-Muslim world, to become a nuclear power. He has lowered America in the eyes of the world. He and his minions treat the Constitution with contempt.

In the universities the counter-culture has become the orthodoxy. A majority of instructors indoctrinate students rather than educate them, teaching them what to think rather than how to think. Some Leftist representatives in Congress have passed a resolution to curb free speech. And the spirit of free enterprise, which made America rich and mighty, has been all but crushed by tyrannical regulation. Wealth has been taken from those who have earned it and given to those who have not. In short, the New Left has triumphed – though without attaining its heaven on earth.

Can the harm it has done be undone? At present the dark stream of unreason flows strongly. The resistance to it should be the vigorous self-interest inherent in human nature, the desire in most of us to succeed; and the lure of science, technology, all they give us for the betterment of our lives. Only as long as free personal endeavor and innovation continue to characterize America, will there be hope – if not the last, certainly the best – for our splendid civilization to survive in this, our only world.

At the time of this writing, 129 people are known to have been killed today, Friday November 13, 2015, in co-ordinated terrorist attacks in France. [Update Sunday 11/15/2015: 132 killed.]

The attacks by IS/ISIS/ISIL on six crowded public places in Paris must have taken a lot of organizing. There must have been a few hundred operatives involved in the plot and an immense amount of “chatter” about it on cell phones and the social media for weeks and probably months beforehand. And yet the French police caught not a whiff of it? Not a whisper on the wind?

The attacks are an intelligence failure of monstrous proportions. Or was there monstrous corruption? Always a possibility.

ISIS  – the Islamic State – is of course primarily responsible for the deaths, injuries, and terror. But the French government – which like the German government, the Swedish government and all the other European governments have let in and are letting in millions of Muslims – must be held responsible for preparing the conditions that ISIS takes advantage of to spread its savage war.

There will certainly be more such attacks in Europe.

And in America?

Shortly before the hour when the attacks in Paris began, President Obama ridiculously declared that ISIS was “contained”.

He also continues to maintain that the Islamic State “has nothing to do with Islam”. So clearly, in the blind and stupid stakes, Obama keeps up with the front runners.

However, according to Judicial Watch, “the FBI has nearly 1000 active ISIS probes inside the US”. If that is so, they are doing a lot better than the French police.

ISIS will act in America. It is just possible that they will find it more difficult than in Europe. But not very difficult. Not when Obama is importing tens of thousands of Muslim “refugees” from the Middle East, unvetted and unvettable. And not when any terrorist can cross the southern border illegally, be met by a bus, and be driven to a welcome center where he can start collecting cash and goods.

And getting busy on his cellphone to organize the murder of Americans.

American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor explains how African boat people exploit the humanitarianism of Europeans. He concludes that Europeans have a choice: “Wake up or die”.

Let’s start with a quotation from the New York Times – not an organ we often go to for support of our arguments:

SUMTE, Germany — This bucolic, one-street settlement of handsome redbrick farmhouses may for the moment have many more cows than people, but next week it will become one of the fastest growing places in Europe. Not that anyone in Sumte is very excited about it. In early October, the district government informed Sumte’s mayor, Christian Fabel, by email that his village of 102 people just over the border in what was once Communist East Germany would take in 1,000 asylum seekers.

His wife, the mayor said, assured him it must be a hoax. “It certainly can’t be true” that such a small, isolated place would be asked to accommodate nearly 10 times as many migrants as it had residents, she told him. “She thought it was a joke,” he said.

But it was not. Sumte has become a showcase of the extreme pressures bearing down on Germany …

What is happening in Sumte is just one small instance of what is happening all over Germany.

Muslim immigration into the European states had been going on for decades, sending crime rates up, and draining national treasuries as welfare support was lavishly granted to the newcomers. The Muslims were not expected to become Europeans. They were not required to learn the language of the people they settled among. They could have their own law courts and enforce their own laws, which were not only different from those of the host countries, but entirely incompatible with them. They formed states within the states. And it was the native populations who were expected to adapt to the values and customs of the foreigners.

This strange development in European history was called “multiculturalism”.

At last, in October 2010,  one European leader – the one whose voice carried most weight in the European Union –  the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, dared to say that it was not good for her country. Addressing an audience of her own party, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she declared that the multiculturalist project had “utterly failed”.  “The concept,” she said, “that we are now living side by side and are happy about it does not work.” Immigrants should integrate and adopt Germany’s culture and values.

That statement should have resounded through the continent. It should have launched a change of policy throughout the EU. The mass immigration of Muslims should have stopped.

But none of those things happened.

And a few years later, in 2015, Angela Merkel changed her mind, reversed her judgment.

It is largely due to Chancellor Angela Merkel that a huge tidal wave of Muslims is now flooding over Europe.

The immigrants are now called “refugees”, and though they come from many miserable Islamic countries in Asia and Africa, the pretense is that they are victims of the warring factions in Syria.

Again just one leader of a European nation can clearly see the Muslim invasion for what it is, as he tries to keep it out of his country. This time it is the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, who dares to speak out in defense of European civilization.

We quote from Gatestone, where Soeren Kern writes:

Speaking at an October 22 [2015]  gathering of the European People’s Party in Madrid, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán warned of the consequences of Merkel’s immigration policies. He said:

We are in deep trouble. The migration crisis has the potential to destabilize governments, countries and the whole European continent. … What we have been facing is not a refugee crisis. This is a migratory movement composed of economic migrants, refugees and also foreign fighters. …

I also want to underline that there is an unlimited source of supply of people, after Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Africa is now also on the move. The dimension and the volume of the danger is well above our expectations. …

Neither the German, Austrian nor the Hungarian way of life is a basic right of all people on the Earth. It is only a right of those ones who have contributed to it. Europe is not able to accept everyone who wants a better life. ….

We cannot avoid speaking about the quality of our democracies.

Democracies, he reminds them, in which freedom of speech has long been an essential value; and a value the media have exploited and betrayed by trying to hide the truth about the invasion rather than revealing it to the public.

Is it freedom of information and speech when the media usually show women and children [as “refugees”], while 70% of the migrants are young men and they look like an army? How could it happen that our people feel that their opinion is not being taken into consideration? And we have to address the question of whether our people want what has been happening. Did we get authorization from them to allow millions of migrants to enter our continent? … No, distinguished delegates, we did not.

He puts the blame squarely on “the European left” – though Merkel’s government is a conservative coalition, and other conservative governments have acquiesced in the policy of admitting unlimited numbers of the “refugees”:

We cannot hide the fact that the European left has a clear agenda. They are supportive of migration. They actually import future leftist voters to Europe hiding behind [the excuse of] humanism. It is an old trick but I do not understand why we have to accept it. They consider registration and protection of borders as bureaucratic, nationalist and against human rights. They have a dream about the politically constructed world societywithout religious traditions, without borders, without nations. They attack core values of our European identity: family, nation, subsidiarity and responsibility.”

To all of which Chancellor Angela Merkel remains purposefully deaf.

Most of the invaders want to go to Germany. And Merkel wants them to be warmly welcomed there.

According to the president of the Bavarian Association of Municipalities, Uwe Brandl, Germany is now on track to have “20 million Muslims by 2020”. The surge in Germany’s Muslim population represents a demographic shift of epic proportions, one that will change the face of Germany forever, “but we are just standing by, watching it happen”. 

Addressing an expo in Nuremburg on October 14, Brandl warned that untrammeled migration will entail heavy costs for German taxpayers and may also lead to social unrest. He said:

A four-member refugee family receives up to 1,200 euros per month in transfer payments. Plus accommodation and meals. Now go to an unemployed German family man who has worked maybe 30 years, and now with his family receives only marginally more. These people are asking us whether we politicians really see this as fair and just.

Brandl said this also applies to the electronic health card, which provides asylum seekers with the same benefits as Germans who have paid into the health insurance system for many years. To criticize this as unfair has “nothing to do with racism or right-wing extremism”.

“Racism” and “right-wing extremism” are what any protestor against the invasion is accused of, as we’ll demonstrate below.

Brandl’s concerns are echoed in a leaked intelligence document, which warns that the influx of more than one million migrants from the Muslim world this year will lead to increasing political instability in Germany.

The document – portions of which were published by Die Welt on October 25 – reveals growing alarm within the highest echelons of Germany’s intelligence and security apparatus about the consequences of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door immigration policy.

The so-called non-paper (the author of the document remains anonymous) warns that the “integration of hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants will be impossible given the large numbers involved and the already-existing Muslim parallel societies in Germany”. The document adds:

We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples, as well as a different understanding of society and law. German security agencies are unable to deal with these imported security problems, and the resulting reactions from the German population.

An unidentified high-ranking security official told Die Welt:

The high influx of people from other parts of the world will lead to the instability of our country. By allowing this mass migration, we are producing extremists. Mainstream society is radicalizing because the majority does not want migration, which is being forced by the political elites. In the future, many Germans will turn away from the constitutional state.

But to all this Merkel still remains deaf.

And most of the German media try to keep all such warnings from the public.

Why? Why is Merkel doing this? What changed her mind? Why is she – a conservative – being helped to destroy Germany by the left-leaning media?

It is from Spiegel Online that we get an answer, and a very telling answer it is.

The article begins:

Even as an image of a Germany taking great pains to welcome hundreds of thousands of refugees has bolstered the country’s image abroad … [Our emphasis]

So the important news magazine Spiegel (once the German eqivalent of Time magazine, deliberately designed to resemble it, and now still flourishing when its model has long since grown specter-thin and almost died), assumes, and delights in its assumption, that by letting in the Muslim hordes it is bolstering Germany’s image abroad.

The Spiegel article is chiefly concerned with accusing any individual or group  expressing opposition to Merkel’s policy, of being guilty of  “racism”, “xenophobia”,  and “right-wing extremism”, even finding shreds of evidence (for instance among comments on certain blogs) that such opposition is an incipient revival of Nazism.

As more and more Germans express their fear, disgust, anger, whether emotionally or rationally, the Spiegel can only see them as in the grip of pitiless, inhumane, even cruel impulses, which might negate the claim Germany now feels entitled to make on the world’s admiration of it as a compassionate nation.

This reaction to the Islamic invasion – not the invasion itself – is what the Spiegel sees as the problem:

… it has also been accompanied by a wave of hatred that cannot be played down.

At the center of this second, disturbing narrative is Patriots against the Islamization of the West, or Pegida, a xenophobic grassroots movement that has manifested itself with demonstrations each Monday mostly in Dresden in the east, but also in other parts of Germany. But Pegida is only one part of a much larger problem …

Germany these days, it seems, is a place where people feel entirely uninhibited about expressing their hatred and xenophobia. Images from around the country show a level of brutalization that hasn’t been witnessed for some time, and attest to primitive instincts long believed to have been relegated to the past in Germany. The examples are as myriad as they are shocking, and include … the mock gallows for Angela Merkel and her deputy Sigmar Gabriel carried by a demonstrator at a Pegida rally in Dresden on Oct. 12,  [and] the abuse shouted at the German chancellor when she visited a refugee hostel in Heidenau near Dresden in August, where she was called a “slut” and other insults, [and] the placards held aloft by demonstrators on the first anniversary of the Pegida rallies listing the supposed “enemies of the German state” – Merkel, Gabriel and their “accomplices”. …

So the Spiegel sees the “myriad” protests. But so what, it implies, if they are spontaneous expressions by ever-growing numbers of Germans against the invasion of their country by a very dark force? The popular will is evil, it echoes Germany’s evil past, it cannot be allowed.

As the authorities will not listen to popular protest, some Germans are resorting to violence against the invaders:

There have been more than twice as many attacks on refugee hostels during the first nine months of this year as in the whole of 2014.

So now the rising tide of protest – called by the Spiegel a “rising tide of hatred” – is at last getting the attention of the politicians:

The rising tide of hatred is now reaching the politicians many hold responsible for the perceived chaos besetting Germany.

Those evil protestors “perceive” chaos. The implication is that chaos is not really there – the Spiegel denying it even as it describes it.

The national headquarters of Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union party in Berlin fields thousands of hate mails every week. As the architect of the “we can do it” policy of allowing masses of refugees into the country, Chancellor Merkel is their primary target. …

The article includes many individual examples of expression of protest, or “hate”, aimed at the policy and those who are responsible for it. It all amounts to a a spreading, deepening resistance of very large number of Germans. But to the Spiegel it has no legitimacy. It is wrong.

The hatred comes in many forms. It’s expressed on the streets and on the Internet. Sometimes it’s loud. Other times it’s unspoken. It eminates from every class and every section of society. According to studies conducted by Andreas Zick, the respected head of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence at the University of Bielefeld, who has been researching German prejudices against different groups for many years, almost 50 percent of Germans harbor misanthropic views. Zick warns of a shift in norms that will be difficult to get back under control.

So it is prejudice. And there has been “a shift in norms”. No recognition that the normal has been changed radically.

How does the Spiegel think the politicians in this so-called democracy should respond? By changing the policy that “almost 50 per cent” of Germans don’t like? Absolutely not.

Politicians need to find a way of dealing with rampant hatred. Dialogue and compromise – the bedrock of Germany’s culture of debate – no longer appear to be working at the moment. It’s hard to get through to people who have been consumed with a hysterical degree of hatred.

Hatred for which the Spiegel, and Merkel, and the Left can see absolutely no good reason!

Rather than heed the voice of the people, get the security agencies on the job. Revive the Stasi. Or import the Saudi Arabian idea of a Moral Police Force.

The country’s security agencies also need to take a decisive stance. Are they once again being too slow in monitoring and clamping down on this new radical scene?

Because you see, it is just like the rise of Nazism all over again.

And so it is. But the Nazi-like thinking is not on the part of the protestors – it is on the part of Spiegel, Merkel, and the Left.

Happily, there is a sign of some moral health in the German states, in that not all the forces of law and order look at what’s happening in the same way:

In most states, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency is not keeping tabs on Pegida. Theoretically, however, police and public prosecutors do have the tools to take action to squash troublemakers. …

Even as the organized far-right is exploiting public unease about the refugee crisis and frustrated citizens are venting their anger in hate mails, the authorities’ response has been astonishingly weak. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière might describe Pegida’s leaders as “hard-core right-wing extremists” but the domestic intelligence service he oversees states that it isn’t even monitoring the movement — so far, it says, there has been insufficient reason to do so.

Gordian Meyer-Plath, president of the Saxony branch of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, also seems reluctant to take on the increasingly radical movement. “We’re not watching it,” he says, because the argument that it is harmless has so far prevailed. Its organizers distanced themselves from violence, for example. “People held up pictures of Merkel in an SA uniform at the demonstrations,” says Meyer-Plath. “Real neo-Nazis would never do that.” So far, he maintains, it’s a “populist far-right movement rooted in anger but not a threat to German’s freedom and democracy.”

“We cannot label every anti-asylum-seeker protest as being far-right,” he says.

So sense is prevailing in places where it counts.

But not everywhere. The Spiegel is happy to find that in some of the states the intelligence services share its view:

But intelligence services in other states beg to differ. Pegida movements in Duisburg, Düsseldorf and Thuringia are officially being watched, with authorities concluding that the majority of organizers and speakers belong to the far-right scene.

And now comes the most revealing paragraph in the whole article. Revealing of the mental acrobatics the Left has to put itself through in order to find some evidence in the real world for its preferred version of reality:

The authorities were even stymied by the blog Politically Incorrect, deciding that although it propagates anti-Islamic and often racist propaganda, “it does not use typical far-right argumentation” – as the authorities put it in response to an inquiry from the Left Party. The authors of the blog have so far managed to out-manoeuver the authorities by using two simple tricks. Firstly, its stance is overtly pro-American and pro-Israeli, which appears to confuse the German bureaucrats, who assume that to be a neo-Nazi is to be anti-Semitic. Secondly, the most egregious expressions of vitriol appear in the comments, for which the blog’s authors cannot be held responsible.

So there is a blog, encouragingly called Politically Incorrect (PI), which is anti-Islamic, and pro-Israeli, and pro-American – views that are “typically far-right” in the Spiegel’s view. And according to the Spiegel, it says it is pro-American and pro-Israel, not because it is, but only as a trick, to throw dust in the eyes of the Spiegel-Merkel School of Pro-Islam Thought. These bloggers are disguising their neo-Nazism by pretending not to be anti-Semitic so they will cunningly deceive the naive bureaucrats into believing they are not neo-Nazi!

For the Left, all opposition to the Muslim mass immigration must be neo-Nazi.

These wicked pro-America and pro-Israel bloggers have been under surveillance for a couple of years now:

In 2013, the Bavarian intelligence service became the first to start observing PI, a move prompted by the blog’s industrious Munich chapter, headed up by the rabidly anti-Islamic Michael Stürzenberger, a frequent speaker at Pegida rallies. …

To be anti-Islam is to be rabid. Mad like a rabid dog. What sane person can possibly find cause to take an unfavorable view of Islam?

To the Spiegel’s regret, even some politicians close to Merkel are beginning to sense that her policy of opening the door to unlimited numbers of Muslims might have its down side.

But now, as if a different writer were taking over at this point in the article, a new picture emerges:

After months of attacking critics of Merkel’s immigration policies as right-wing xenophobes, Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier conceded that the migration crisis risks tearing German society apart. In a joint essay published by Der Spiegel, the two wrote: “We cannot indefinitely absorb and integrate more than one million refugees each year.”

One million! Each year! That’s a small number?

Bavarian Finance Minister Markus Söder said: “We need to be clear that there must be limits and quotas for immigration — we cannot save the whole world. The refugee influx will not be stopped unless we secure our borders and send a clear signal that not everyone can come to Germany.”

Former Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich described Merkel’s immigration policy as an “unprecedented political blunder” that will have “devastating long-term consequences”. He said the job of politics is to think beyond the present and make decisions for the future. In view of the massive flows of migrants into Germany without any police checks, Friedrich concluded: “We have lost control.” He added:

It is totally irresponsible that tens of thousands of people are flowing into the country uncontrolled and unregistered, and we can only unreliably estimate exactly how many of them are Islamic State fighters or Islamist sleepers. I am convinced that no other country in the world would be so naive and starry-eyed to expose itself to such a risk.

Except perhaps the US under Obama.

CDU lawmaker Michael Stübgen said: “The disagreement [with Merkel] is fundamental. Our capacities are exhausted and there is concern that the system will implode if we do not regain control of our borders. But the chancellor disagrees and so the conflict is unsolved.”

On October 21, more than 200 mayors in North-Rhine Westphalia signed an open letter to Merkel, in which they warned they were no longer capable of taking in any more migrants. The letter states:

We are seriously concerned for our country and the cities and towns we represent. The reason: the massive and mostly uncontrolled flow of migrants to Germany and our cities and towns. All available housing possibilities are exhausted, including tents and shipping containers. Managing the migrant shelters is so time intensive that our personnel can no longer attend to other municipal responsibilities.” …

So is Merkel defeated? Has she blown it? Is her time over?

In an October 26 column for the Financial Times, titled The End of the Merkel Era is Within Sight, Gideon Rachman wrote:

The refugee crisis that has broken over Germany is likely to spell the end of the Merkel era. With the country in line to receive more than a million asylum-seekers this year alone, public anxiety is mounting — and so is criticism of Ms. Merkel, from within her own party. Some of her close political allies acknowledge that it is now distinctly possible that the chancellor will have to leave office, before the next general election in 2017. Even if she sees out a full term, the notion of a fourth Merkel administration, widely discussed a few months ago, now seems improbable… The trouble is that Ms. Merkel’s government has clearly lost control of the situation. German officials publicly endorse the chancellor’s declaration that “We can do this'”. But there is panic just beneath the surface: costs are mounting, social services are creaking, Ms. Merkel’s poll ratings are falling and far-right violence is on the rise.

So, although this journalist records that the voters will probably reject Merkel’s re-election because she has done this catastrophic thing to Germany, the violent reaction is still to be called “far-right”.

As the placid surface of German society is disturbed, so arguments about the positive economic and demographic impact of immigration are losing their impact. Instead, fears about the long-term social and political effect of taking in so many newcomers — particularly from the imploding Middle East — are gaining ground. Meanwhile, refugees are still heading into Germany — at a rate of around 10,000 a day. (By contrast, Britain is volunteering to accept 20,000 Syrian refugees over four years.)…

Some voters seem to have concluded that Mutti [“Mummy” – Merkel’s affectionate nickname] has gone mad — flinging open Germany’s borders to the wretched of the earth...

The refugee crisis marks a turning point. The decade after Ms. Merkel first came to power in 2005 now looks like a blessed period for Germany, in which the country was able to enjoy peace, prosperity and international respect, while keeping the troubles of the world at a safe distance. That golden era is now over.

Merkel has made her case for opening the floodgates of Germany  – and of Europe – to a hostile and destructive force on the grounds of “humanitarian concern”. (The leftist British newspaper The Guardian sets out the case here.)

Let’s assume they really are refugees. And let’s accept that what European leaders like Merkel want to do is extend humanitarian assistance to them. Is there no other way of doing that than by letting them come and live in Europe?

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in his Madrid speech: ” Our moral responsibility is to give back these people their homes and their countries. It can’t be our objective to provide them with a new European life. Right to human dignity and security are basic rights [so] we have to help them to get back their own lives with dignity and we have to send them back to their own countries.”

But that idea made no impression on Angela Merkel. “Humanitarian concern” is plainly her motive. She has given no other reason. Her need to do this would not be satisfied by returning the “refugees” to their countries of origin. She needs to do far more than help them regain “dignity and security”. She needs to embrace them, take them into Germany, and lavish loving care on them.

The Spiegel (the “Mirror”) reflects this need when it claims that letting in the Muslim masses is good for “the country’s image abroad”.

Why should a need to show “humanitaran concern” with such hospitality override all other considerations?

Why should a German leader need to show, as a paramount cause, that her country is humane?

Do we need to ask? Germany was a prime mover in the wildly unrealistic scheme of creating a united Europe, and the reason why was its need to dissolve its guilt for the Holocaust by becoming part of a larger entity. And it seems that a fog of guilt or shame still hangs over the German psyche. Or over the psyches of many Germans.

Show the world how compassionate we really are. Wipe out the stain of the Holocaust. Import millions of “refugees” from the Third World, and maybe we will at last be forgiven – or forgive ourselves – for  having massacred our Jewish citizens and attempted genocide throughout Europe. Is that what is moving Angela Merkel?

But what Merkel and Spiegel and all the rest of the bien pensants who are putting on their haloes may not have intended, may not have let themselves foresee, is that their self-serving action must destroy Germany.

And Europe – its union of nations and the nations themselves.

But if national suicide is a just penance for Germany, is it just  – you might ask – that Germany should destroy the rest of Europe too?

And we might reply: Well, didn’t most of the rest of Europe collaborate with them in their genocide?

Now we do not think that Europe should destroy itself because it became too morally atrocious to deserve to survive.

But there are those who are murmuring that the great goddess Nemesis – in whom of course we do not believe – seems to be of a different opinion.

“It’s time for the people of Europe to claim asylum from the European Union,” Pat Condell says at the end of this video in which he talks about the Muslim invasion of Europe.

Islam is invading Europe and will conquer it without firing a shot.

European political leaders not only refuse to resist the Islamization of their countries, increasingly they positively encourage it. Add to this a high Muslim fertility rate and a very low rate among indigenous Europeans, and you may be certain Muslims will become a majority on the continent in this century unless something – civil war, perhaps – interrupts the processes already set in motion.

From Gatestone, by Guy Millière:

The flow of illegal migrants does not stop. They land on the Greek islands along the Turkish coast. They still try to get into Hungary, despite a razor wire fence and mobilized army. Their destination is Germany or Scandinavia, sometimes France or the UK. Some of them still arrive from Libya. Since the beginning of January, more than 620,000 have arrived by sea alone. There will undoubtedly be many more: a leaked secret document estimates that by the end of December, there might be 1.5 million.

Journalists in Western Europe continue to depict them as “refugees” fleeing war in Syria. The description is false. According to statistics released by the European Union, only twenty-five percent of them come from Syria; the true number is probably lower. The Syrian government sells passports and birth certificates at affordable prices. The vast majority of migrants come from other countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Eritrea, Somalia, and Nigeria.

Many do not seem to have left in a hurry. Many bring new high-end smartphones and large sums of cash, ten or twenty thousand euros, sometimes more. Many have no passports, no ID, and refuse to give fingerprints.

Whenever people flee to survive, the men come with whole families: women, children, elders. Here, instead, more than 75% of those who arrive are men under 50; few are women, children or elders.

As Christians are now the main targets of Islamists (the Jews fled or were forced out decades ago), the people escaping the war in Syria should be largely composed of Christians. But Christians are a small minority among those who arrive, and they often hide that they are Christians.

Those who enter Europe are almost all Muslims, and behave as some Muslims often do in the Muslim world: they harass Christians and attack women. In reception centers, harassing Christians and attacking women are workaday incidents. European women and girls who live near reception centers are advised to take care and cover up. Rapes, assaults, stabbings and other crimes are on the rise.

Western European political leaders could tell the truth and act accordingly. They do not. They talk of “solidarity”,  “humanitarian duty”, “compassion”. From the beginning, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said that illegal migrants were welcome: she seemed to change her mind for a moment, but quickly slid back. In France, President François Hollande says the same things as Angela Merkel.

After the heartbreaking image of a dead child being carried on a Turkish beach was published, thousands of Germans and French initially spoke the same way as their leaders. Their enthusiasm seems to have faded fast.

The people of Central Europe were not enthusiastic from the beginning. Their leaders seem to share the feelings of their populations. None spoke as explicitly as Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary. He said out loud what many of his countrymen seemed to think.

Orbán decribed the “massive and brutal” entry of the migrants into his country as an “invasion”, and  said that “a country has the right to decide who is allowed to enter its territory, and to guard its borders”. He also dared to point out that the invaders are from a “different culture”, and that Islamic values “might not be compatible” with European values.

To which Western European leaders reacted with predictable (and surely irrational or even insane) fury.

Western European political leaders harshly condemned his remarks and the attitude of Central Europe in general. They decided to take a hard line approach, including: forcing recalcitrant countries to welcome immigrants, setting up mandatory quotas that define how many immigrants each EU country must receive, and threatening those countries that declined to obey. Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament, said that Europe was built in a spirit of “burden sharing”, and that EU breakup was a risk that could not be excluded.

An acute division, in fact, is emerging between the leaders of Western Europe and the leaders of Central Europe. Another division is growing between the populations of Western Europe and their leaders. …

Any criticism of Islam in Europe is treated as a form of racism, and “Islamophobia” is considered a crime or a sign of mental illness.

Islam … is creating increasingly distressing problems that are almost never brought to light. Muslim criminality across Europe is high. Consequently, the percentage of Muslims in prisons in Europe is high. In France, which has the largest Muslim population in Europe, the prison population is 70% Muslim. Many European prisons have become recruitment centers for future jihadis.

Muslim riots may occur for any reason: police upholding the law, a Soccer League celebration, or in support of a cause.

Populations of Western Europe increasingly think that … their leaders speak and act as if they have no awareness of what is happening.

Central European leaders and their people, who have directly experienced authoritarian rule, seem to be thinking that entering the European Union was a huge mistake. When the Soviet Union collapsed, they became members of the EU to join what was called then the “free world”.  They do not seem willing to be subjected again to coercive decisions made by outsiders.

After living under the Soviet yoke, they preserved their desire for freedom and self-government, and evidently will not now agree to give them up. They know what submission to Islam could mean. Bulgaria and Romania were occupied by the Ottoman Empire until 1878. Hungary was under the boot of Ottoman rule for more than a hundred and fifty years (1541-1699).

Polls show that a majority of Muslims living in Europe want the application of sharia law and clearly reject any idea of assimilation.

Hundreds of thousands of Muslims living in Europe have joined fundamentalist Islamic organizations. Thousands have joined jihadist movements and are now fighting in Syria or Yemen. Many have returned and are ready to act against Europe.

Illegal Muslim migrants are likely to join the Muslims already living in Europe; and they will remain Muslim. They will live on social benefits until the bankruptcy of welfare states. They will reside in the “no-go zones,” and the “no-go zones” will continue to grow. Their occupants come from countries where Christians and women are mistreated; in Europe, they are already mistreating Christians and women.

They come from countries where Western civilization is despised and where hatred of Jews is inescapable — and this remains so among Muslims already living in Europe. For more than two decades, almost all assaults against Jews in Europe were committed by Muslims. …

A project to overwhelm Europe by a huge wave of migration was described by the Islamic State in documents discovered this February. It is hard to rule out that the Islamic State plays a role in what is happening. Turkish authorities are ignoring the massive departures taking place from their coast. If they really wanted the current process to stop, they could stop it. That is clearly not what they do. The Islamic State could not survive without Turkish help. Daily flights on Turkish Airlines bring illegal migrants to Istanbul; they continue unhindered to Europe. …

In all 28 countries of the European Union, birth rates are low and the population is aging. People under thirty account for only 16% of the population, or 80 million people. In the 22 Arab countries, plus Turkey and Iran, people under thirty account for 70% of the population, or 350 million people.

Jews are fleeing Europe in increasing numbers. “Native” Europeans are starting to flee as well.

In 1972, in his book The Camp of the Saints, French writer Jean Raspail described flooding Europe with Muslim migrants crossing the Mediterranean. At the time, the book was a work of fiction. Today, it is reality.

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal titled A Path Out of the Middle East Collapse, Henry Kissinger wrote:

ISIS’s claim has given the millennium-old split between the Shiite and Sunni sects of Islam an apocalyptic dimension. The remaining Sunni states feel threatened by both the religious fervor of ISIS as well as by Shiite Iran, potentially the most powerful state in the region. Iran compounds its menace by presenting itself in a dual capacity. On one level, Iran acts as a legitimate Westphalian state conducting traditional diplomacy, even invoking the safeguards of the international system. At the same time, it organizes and guides nonstate actors seeking regional hegemony based on jihadist principles: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria; Hamas in Gaza; the Houthis in Yemen. Thus the Sunni Middle East risks engulfment by four concurrent sources: Shiite-governed Iran and its legacy of Persian imperialism; ideologically and religiously radical movements striving to overthrow prevalent political structures; conflicts within each state between ethnic and religious groups arbitrarily assembled after World War I into (now collapsing) states; and domestic pressures stemming from detrimental political, social and economic domestic policies … The U.S. should be prepared for a dialogue with an Iran returning to its role as a Westphalian state within its established borders.

What was Kissinger talking about? What did he mean by “a legitimate Westphalian state”? What does “Westphalian” mean?

Commander J. E. Dyer views what is happening in the Middle East – and so in the world – very much as we do (though she approaches it from a different angle). She discusses Kissinger’s article and explains what is meant by “Westphalian”.

She writes:

Reading Henry Kissinger’s typically well-considered and intelligent article for the Wall Street Journal this weekend (“A Path out of the Middle East Collapse”), I had a growing sense that it isn’t so much a prescription for the future as a description of the past.

We wholly agree. Dr. Kissinger is not seeing the world as it is. He has not grasped – or been hit by – the import of the events that are unfolding: millions of Sunni Muslims, terrified of the power America has put in the hands of Shia Iran, flowing in a great tidal wave out of the Middle East to break on Europe’s shores and swamp the continent.

The sense began with the first paragraph, in which Kissinger defines the scope of what’s collapsing, and dates it only to 1973, when the U.S. moved to stabilize the Middle East during the Yom Kippur War.

But far more than recent U.S. policy on the Middle East is collapsing today.  What we’re seeing is more like the collapse of “Rome” itself:  the organization of Western power as a Europe-centric territorial phenomenon, setting unbreachable boundaries north, south, and west of a restless and perennially “unorganizable” Middle East.

Last year, we might have said that it was “Sykes-Picot” that was collapsing: a popular shorthand reference to the European colonial disposition of Middle Eastern boundaries at the end of World War I.  But that was last year.  Now it’s 2015, and with the utter paralysis of Western nations in the face of massive and unforeseen, unarmed migration, it’s clear that Roman Europe itself is no longer a meaningful reality.

Consider:  the Roman Empire in its heyday would not have tolerated this migration.  Neither would the Europe of muscular Christendom, or the Europe of trading monarchies, of the Westphalian nation-state era, of the “concert of Europe” era, or of the Cold War.  As long as Europe had a civilizational idea of defending and preserving itself, the legacy of Rome was alive.  Altered, perhaps, with the passage of time and the emergence of new ideas, but still kicking.

Today, the legacy of Rome looks to be an empty shell.  There is territory left, of course – but there is no idea.  In fact, the West has spent much of the last 50 years apologizing for ever having had its signature idea, and vowing to no longer have it.

Without that idea, the West has no motive to organize itself against destruction, either internal or from an external source.  The idea of the West is ultimately what has collapsed, at least as an organizing principle that preserved for many centuries, and for multiple purposes, the security boundaries of “Rome.”

And with that collapse goes the whole structure of expectations that made Dr. Kissinger’s prescription for American policy possible.

This point crystallized for me at the end of his article, when he wrote these words (emphasis added):

The U.S. role in such a Middle East [i.e., with a stability structure supported by U.S. policy] would be to implement the military assurances in the traditional Sunni states that the administration promised during the debate on the Iranian nuclear agreement, and which its critics have demanded.

In this context, Iran’s role can be critical. The U.S. should be prepared for a dialogue with an Iran returning to its role as a Westphalian state within its established borders.

But that’s just the problem.  Without a dominant European idea – the civilizationally confident Europe of “Rome” – there is no such thing as a Westphalian state.  There is no form of power or authority that can enforce Westphalian rules.  Nor is there any great nation with a motive to enforce them.

This is too big a subject to bite off all of in a single blog post.

We found that too. This is a vast, deep, and overwhelmingly important subject. It will take much thinking about, beyond the bewilderment of the present moment.

So let me just look at two aspects of the proposition here.  One is Westphalianism itself, and why we should recognize that it must be under assault from today’s events.

Ultimately, what we call Westphalianism, after the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, is an attempt to enable nation-states to coexist pragmatically – a good in itself, enshrined as the “advantage of the other,” or the “common good” – without settling theological questions. …

The nations of 1648 had no intention of ceasing to see themselves as Christian organizations on the earth.  What they intended to do was cease making theological disputes (i.e., Protestant versus Catholic disputes, which were the main ones among the belligerents at the time) a casus belli between them.

Westphalia was a watershed statement … that the armed might of the state should not be used, implicitly against the common good, to vindicate or enforce specific theological interpretations of God. The genius of Westphalianism is that the scope of national sovereignty is held to be not limitless, but limited. …  Westphalianism leaves the things of God to God, and attends to the things of Caesar.  Westphalianism is based on a moral assumption, but is essentially an idea of pragmatism.

This is why the resurgence of apocalyptic Islam is antithetical to Westphalianism. … Predatory Shia Iran and the rise of Sunni state-Islamism – not only in the form of ISIS, but in the form of the longer-organized Muslim Brotherhood – are real and meaningful evidence that the bloody, thrashing Islamism of today is not Westphalian, and cannot be. … 

Which is to say, “is not tolerant, and cannot be”.

The premise of Westphalianism is that all the nations are trying to get along, and need a modus vivendi to regularize things.

The premise of Islamism is that nationhood itself doesn’t matter – indeed, is there to thwart Islamic unity, and must be overset.

These two premises can’t coexist.  The Treaty of Westphalia was signed by a group of nations that all agreed on nationhood.  Even internationalist Communism, the horseman of apocalypse in the 20th century, had uses for nationhood that could keep it pragmatically satisfied for decades.  Communism was willing to accept that the state would eventually wither away, but still act like a state in the meantime.

Islamism sees the nation-state as a rampart of evil, blocking the path of the caliphate.  Islamism has the excuse of belief for not respecting the rules of state sovereignty under Westphalianism.

We can’t assume away the strength or pervasiveness of the Islamist challenge to Westphalianism.  Maybe as recently as 2014, it was possible to be complacent about that.  But the earthquake of migration into Europe has reached a level that is proving against Europe, on a daily basis, that Westphalianism is not even in operation anymore.  This is the second aspect of the problem that we have to consider.

The current migration crisis means Westphalianism is dead.

If Westphalianism were still in operation, the migrant crisis wouldn’t have reached its current proportions.  Westphalian states would see it, properly, as something to defend themselves against, and would take pragmatic measures to stem the tide.  Those measures would include intervention abroad, to stabilize foreign conditions, and paying other nations to take the migrants, as well as setting strict limits on immigration and advertising clearly that the doors were closed.  Deportation and physical barriers would be seen as regrettable, perhaps, but hardly as moral evils.

The Westphalian view is clear that humaneness doesn’t demand sacrificing the benefits of national sovereignty for hundreds of millions of people.  Yet that self-abnegating idea is the default proposition governing the response of Europe – and even of the United States – to the current migration crisis.

If the West won’t enforce Westphalianism in defense of its own territory and communities, there’s no reason to think Westphalianism will be enforced on Iran.  The unenforceability of the JCPOA on Iran’s nuclear program arises from the same deficit of Western confidence in the use of state power.

And because the fundamental clash going on is between Islamism and a collapsing idea of Western civilization, this dynamic is too big to be put in balance by a mere restoration to the framework of 1973 or 1919.  That’s not actually possible, in any case – and even 1818 and 1648 don’t go far enough back. Those dates were about Christian states proving things to themselves.

It’s Islamism to which the evolutionary Western idea of multilateralism, limited sovereignty, and freedom of conscience for peoples has now to be proven.  This is a real geopolitical crisis point, not an abstraction.  If necessary, the Western idea has to prove itself over Islamism.

In the process of doing that, “Westphalianism” will inevitably evolve, to some extent.  We will end up rewriting it.  I think we’ll preserve most of it, but it will have to find a way to stand, and not give way, before a religious concept that negates Westphalianism’s very foundation; i.e., the limited-sovereignty nation-state.  I’m not sure we can foresee at the moment what it will all look like when we’re done.

One thing we can say as we part here, however, is that this tremendous crisis in world affairs represents an opportunity, for people who love limited government, freedom, and hope.  

Only with that last sentence we disagree. Commander Dyer’s website is called the Optimistic Conservative. Ours, at this point, though similarly conservative, is pessimistic.

We see the world changing for the worse. We see the idea of liberty slipping away, because the liberal democracies of the West no longer want it. 

We do not understand why they don’t want it, but it seems plain enough that they don’t.

So this man, Barack Hussein Obama, the son of an American hippie and a Communist member of the Luo tribe of East Africa …

educated for a few years in an Indonesian madrassa …

then in America promoted through affirmative action to position after position beyond his abilities …

all the way to being elected to the presidency of the United States of America,  and so nominally to the leadership of the free world ….

has had, as a result of his inadequacy of understanding, his pusillanimity of character, his political puerility …

an enormous effect on the direction history is taking.

He has not just voluntarily but insistently surrendered the West to the mullahs of Shia Iran, empowering and enriching them to such an extent that millions of Sunnis are fleeing their homes and making for Europe in fear of them.

And the Europeans have no idea what to do about it. They dither about being humane, welcoming refugees, sharing what they have with their Muslim brothers and sisters. Christian-style. Self abnegation. Self-sacrifice. Not resisting evil. Forgiving. Not being racist. Caring. It  makes them feel good. They probably even expect gratitude …

… And, as nations, they are dying.

Already ISIS, who seized territory from the erstwhile and short-lived states of Iraq and Syria, has announced that Sweden will be the first European country to come under its caliphate.

This drift of populations, this overwhelming of the liberal democracies, is no longer hypothetical.  It is WHAT IS HAPPENING.

And it is not only changing geopolitical conditions, but also the very ideas on which Western political order and civilization are built.

The European leaders who are letting it happen, are all at sea. They don’t know what they’ve done or what the consequences will be.

Nothing anyone says will change their minds. But reality will. Reality has a nasty way of continuing to accrue consequences regardless  of whether it is reckoned with or not. The result is the end of the liberal democratic nation-state.

Who are the people who have let this happen?

They are the bien pensants, the Great and the Good; climate alarmists plotting world government; and the people who meet at Bilderberg get-togethers (like Peter Sutherland, the man we wrote about and quoted yesterday), who believe that they are the natural movers and shakers, the best qualified to steer the good ship Mankind.

They have steered it to shipwreck.