France is dissolving into chaos under the leadership of President Emmanuel Macron, an authoritarian when dealing with the suffering of the indigenous people of his country, but a submissive indulgent weakling when he has to deal with violent Antifa mobs and the ever-growing hordes of Muslim invaders.

Professor Guy Millière describes it at Gatestone:

France today is a country adrift. Unrest and lawlessness continue to gain ground. Disorder has become part of daily life. Polls show that a large majority reject President Macron. They seem to hate his arrogance and be inclined not to forgive him. They seem to resent his contempt for the poor; the way he crushed the “yellow vest” movement …

The “yellow vests” seem finally to have stopped demonstrating and given up: too many were maimed or hurt. Their discontent, however, is still there. It seems waiting to explode again.

The French police appear ferocious when dealing with peaceful protesters, but barely able to prevent groups such as “Antifa” from causing violence. Therefore, now at the end of each demonstration, “Antifa” show up. The French police seem particularly cautious when having to deal with young Arabs and illegal migrants. …

President Macron looks like an authoritarian leader when he faces the disgruntled poor. He never says he is sorry for those who have lost an eye or a hand or suffered irreversible brain damage from extreme police brutality. Instead, he asked the French parliament to pass a law that almost completely abolishes the right to protest [and] the presumption of innocence and that allows the arrest of anyone, anywhere, even without cause. The law was passed.

In June, the French parliament passed another law, severely punishing anyone who says or writes something that might contain “hate speech”. The law is so vague that an American legal scholar, Jonathan Turley, felt compelled to react. “France has now become one of the biggest international threats to freedom of speech“, he wrote.

Macron does not appear authoritarian, however, with violent anarchists. When facing young Arabs and illegal migrants, he looks positively weak. …

Macron knows that the partition of France already exists. Most Arabs and Africans live in no-go zones, apart from the rest of the population, where they accept the presence of non-Arabs and non-Africans less and less. They do not define themselves as French, except when they say that France will belong to them. Reports show that most seem filled with a deep rejection of France and Western civilization. An increasing number seem to place their religion above their citizenship; many seem radicalized and ready to fight.

Macron seems not to want to fight. Instead, he has chosen to appease them. He is single-mindedly pursuing his plans to institutionalize Islam in France.

Three months ago, the Muslim Association for Islam of France (AMIF) was created. One branch will handle the cultural expansion of Islam and take charge of “the fight against anti-Muslim racism”. Another branch will be responsible for programs that train imams and build mosques. This autumn, a “Council of Imams of France” will be established. The main leaders of the AMIF are (or were until recently) members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement designated as a terrorist organization in Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – but not in France.

Macron is aware of the demographic data. They show that the Muslim population in France will grow significantly in the coming years. (The economist Charles Gave wrote recently that by 2057, France will have a Muslim majority). Macron can see that it will soon be impossible for anyone to be elected President without relying on the Muslim vote, so he acts accordingly. …

The French economy is not creating jobs. Poverty remains extremely high: 14% of the population earn less than 855 euros ($950) a month.

The educational system is crumbling. An increasing percentage of students graduate from high school without knowing how to write a sentence free of errors that make incomprehensible anything they write. …

The main concern of Macron and the French government … is climate change. Although the amount of France’s carbon dioxide emissions is infinitesimal (less than 1% of the global total), combatting “human-induced climate change” appears Macron’s absolute priority.

A Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, age 16, – nevertheless the guru of the “fight for the climate” in Europe – was recently invited to the French National Assembly by members of parliament who support Macron.

Of that autistic and intensely irritating kid, Andrew Bolt wrote in the Australian paper the Herald Sun:

Thunberg … is one of the most astonishing Messianic figures in world history — and I don’t mean that in a good way.

I have never seen a girl so young and with so many mental disorders treated by so many adults as a guru.

Which created a storm of fury among climatistas and psychobabblers – and generally, the Left – everywhere. (So much so, that his article has been made inaccessible by Google. If you follow the link to the source of our quotation, you will not be able to read the whole article; the Herald Sun’s link fails.)

Guy Millière continues:

She delivered a speech, promising that the “irreversible destruction” of the planet will begin very soon. She added that political leaders “are not mature enough” and need lessons from children. MPs who support Macron applauded warmly. She received a Prize of Freedom, just created, which will be given each year to people “fighting for the values ​​of those who landed in Normandy in 1944 to liberate Europe”. It is probably reasonable to assume that not one of those who landed in Normandy in 1944 thought he was fighting to save the climate. Such minor details, however, seem beyond Macron and the parliamentarians who support him.

Macron and the French government also seem unconcerned that Jews – driven by the rise of anti-Semitism, and understandably worried about court decisions infused with the spirit of submission to violent Islam – continue to flee from France.

Kobili Traore, the man who murdered Sarah Halimi [an elderly Jewish widow] in 2017 while chanting suras from the Qur’an and shouting that the Jews are Sheitan (Arabic for “Satan”) was found not guilty. Traore had apparently smoked cannabis before the murder, so the judges decided that he was not responsible for his acts. Traore will soon be released from prison; what happens if he smokes cannabis again?

A few weeks after the murder of Halimi, three members of a Jewish family were assaulted, tortured and held hostage in their home by a group of five men who said that “Jews have money” and “Jews must pay”. The men were arrested; all were Muslim. The judge who indicted them announced that their actions were “not anti-Semitic”.

On July 25, 2019 when the Israeli soccer team Maccabi Haifa was competing in Strasbourg, the French government limited the number of Israeli supporters in the stadium to 600, not one more. A thousand had bought plane tickets to come to France to attend the match. The French government also banned the waving of Israeli flags at the game or anywhere in the city. Nonetheless, in the name of “free speech”, the French Department of the Interior permitted anti-Israeli demonstrations in front of the stadium, and Palestinian flags and banners saying “Death to Israel” were there. …

And yet, despite all that …

Although Macron is widely unpopular and widely hated, he will probably use the same slogans as in 2017: that he is the last bastion of hope against “chaos” and “fascism”. He has a strong chance of being elected again. [Even though] anyone who reads the political program of the National Rally can see that [his most serious rival] Marine Le Pen is not a fascist. Also, anyone who looks at the situation in France may wonder if France has not already begun to sink into chaos.

And France is not an exception to most of the other countries of Western Europe.

The sad situation that reigns in France is not all that different from that in many other European countries.

Down, down goes Europe into chaos – and the tyranny of the most oppressive of all extant religions.

In the dark ages before the Internet, what did the masses of the hellish Third World know about the First World?

Not much, unless the First World came colonizing, which turned parts of the hellholes into pockets of civilization.

The Internet changed everything. The dwellers in darkness saw the light. From their huts, their slums, their shanty towns, their hovels, they viewed the great cities of the West, the goods in the stores, the size of the houses, the millions of cars on smooth roads; they saw the plenty, the ease, the pleasantness, the manifest wealth. And they wanted to go and live there.

So they did, by the thousands and tens of thousands. And so they continue to do.

Tides of people are flowing from the lands of poverty into the lands of plenty. They flow from south to north, into the lands of “the West”. (And into its branch, Australia.) They will not ebb away again.

What fools they would be not to go where the grass really is greener.

I, the migrant, know that the journey will not be easy. I have a perilous sea to cross. Or a desert.

I may have to work and save for years to pay for a passage over the sea or a guide over the desert.

I know that I risk drowning. Of dying of heat and exhaustion. Of being robbed. If I, the migrant, am a woman I will almost certainly be sexually assaulted.

But it is worth taking the risks to get there.

If I can just get there, it will not be hard to get in. There are no barriers to speak of.

There, I will be given a house, and money without working for it. There, my children will go to school free of charge. There, if I get sick, I will be cured free of charge.

Clearly, from the point of view of the immigrant, coming from hell to western Europe or Canada or the United States is a highly rational decision.

But why is the First World letting them in, the millions of them? Is the decision of First World governments to do so also rational? What benefits do they reckon accrue to them, to their countries through this demographic tsunami?

Here’s someone with an explanation –

Sean Byrne wrote in February 2018 on the RTÉ (Ireland’s National Television and Radio) website:

Over the past three years, Europe has experienced the worst refugee and migration crisis since World War II.  While the flow of refugees from Syria has diminished as some eastern European countries have closed their borders and the EU has given €6 billion to Turkey to persuade it to keep Syrian refugees within its borders, the flow of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa across the Mediterranean continues unabated.

The number of refugees entering Europe peaked in 2015 at just over one million. Half were Syrian, 20 percent from Afghanistan and seven percent from Iraq, with most of the remaining 33 per cent coming from Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2015, 3,771 people drowned while crossing the Mediterraneancrammed into unseaworthy and overcrowded boats by traffickers. Most of the migrants from sub-Saharan Africa are trying to reach Europe through Libya. The lack of an effective government in Libya has enabled people traffickers to operate almost unhindered out of Libyan ports and there are reports that some migrants are being sold as slaves in Libya. …

The hopeless poverty of sub-Saharan Africa, where populations are growing faster than output, causes many people from the region to risk their lives to reach Europe. …

The writer believes that the massive immigration into Europe is a Good Thing:

As Europe’s population declines and ages, it must accept significant immigration or face economic and social decline.

We should all appreciate that. Economic and social decline! That (does he mean? or hasn’t the question crossed his mind?)  would be far worse than losing our countries to an alien population. Yet some of us are – he thinks – hard-heartedly and stupidly against it.

Even when the immigration was “limited” we were already fussing about it:

Yet the limited immigration that has taken place over the past 30 years has already led to the rise of anti-immigration political movements and some of these, including Germany’s Alternativ fur Deutschland are achieving electoral success. The new Austrian government includes the vehemently anti-immigration Freedom Party, while Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary are all refusing to take their share of the refugees that the EU has agreed to accept from Syria. …

But what of the …?

He knew what we were about to protest and answers us:

Because of the inexorable decline of birth rates, Europe will need large numbers of migrants over the next 50 years. Some of these migrants will want the economic benefits of living in Europe while maintaining their own cultures, including such practices as forced marriages, honour killings, female genital mutilation and the persecution of gay people. Many immigrants to Europe will reject the rights and freedoms painfully achieved by western democracies over the past 200 years. Resolving this conflict of cultures will be the greatest challenge facing Europe over the next 50 years.

It’s a challenge. That’s all. A little courage, some planning, lots of tolerance and humility are all we need to … what?

Byrne’s defense is no defense at all.

Is there another? Can someone else tell us why we must adapt ourselves cheerfully to a huge change in our culture and tolerate (among other appalling practices of the Third World) forced marriages, honor killings, female genital mutilation and the murder of homosexuals?

Yes. Here’s one.

Matthew Boose writes at American Greatness:

The New York Times recently published an op-ed advancing a rather peculiar argument. Author Suketu Mehta builds on the familiar, hackneyed debate over reparations for slavery to make an even bolder, but more politically contemporary proposal: as penance for colonialism, the West should open its borders to the Third World.

Mehta suggests immigration quotas for Western countries that correspond with their respective historical sins. Mehta categorizes the nations of the world into “creditors” and “debtors,” according to their legacy as oppressors or oppressed within roughly the past 500 years.

By this token, “Britain should have quotas for Indians and Nigerians; France for Malians and Tunisians; Belgium for very large numbers of Congolese”. The West should accept 12 million African laborers, one for every African enslaved by the colonialists of the past.

While audacious, this argument expresses what many on the Left believe, but are often careful to avoid stating frankly: that mass migration should be seen as a form of just punishment for the West’s history.

We interrupt to state firmly that the era of Western colonialism on the whole brought more good than harm to the “underdeveloped” world. That is certainly true of the British Empire (though in the case of the American Revolution right was on the side of the rebels). The British took the rule of law, impartial justice, a free press, and higher standards of living to their colonies. On the other hand, we grant, German colonial rule in South West Africa (now Namibia) was oppressive and murderous. And Belgian rule of the Congo in the time of evil King Leopold was a horror story, told memorably by Joseph Conrad in his story The Heart of Darkness. Later the Belgians did better. Now the Congo has reverted to what it was in Conrad’s story. The plight of the African peoples in general is, in all but a few cases, worse now than under colonial rule.

As for the slave trade, it is important to remember that the victims were first enslaved by Africans and Arabs before Christians bought them.

In general, immigration activists try to disguise their malice as sympathy for “refugees”, many of whom are in fact economic migrants seeking a better life. Of course, one need not be so cynical as to imagine that their concern for the well-being of would-be immigrants is entirely fake. But once in a while, the mask will slip, and it becomes apparent that they are motivated at least as much by resentment towards the destination countries as they are by compassion for migrants.

From the “walls are immoral, but we don’t really want open borders” denialism of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to those openly calling for immigration as a form of reparations, there is a growing consensus on the Left that all restrictions on migration are motivated by xenophobia, borders are immoral because they are exclusionary, and Western countries are morally obligated to accept an unlimited number of migrants because of past wrongs.

How would these immigration quotas be drawn up? As with slavery reparations, the price is levied indiscriminately and with great prejudice. People who had nothing to do with the negative effects of colonialism are saddled with collective, generational guilt for the sins of distant, forgotten ancestors.

Mehta mentions more recent ravages as well, such as the Iraq War. National sovereignty doesn’t absolve America’s leaders from the responsibility of making smart, and ethical, foreign policy decisions. The United States should not invade the world and then expect the world to stay behind in the blast crater. But why should American workers pay for Iraq, when it is America’s irresponsible leaders who deserve the blame?

An exact accounting of who the “debtors” are, and what they owe, is beside the point. How would one go about determining who deserves to pay for King Leopold II’s brutal exploitation of the Congo? The enterprise is no more workable than figuring out which Americans living today should pay for slavery. Never mind the specifics; all Westerners are assumed guilty for the wrongs of all Western history.

The classes that comprise America’s elite are pushing this narrative. Journalists, academics, educators, entertainers, and activists are all popularizing academic, anti-American histories that invert the story of America’s founding and legitimize unlimited migration as a form of just deserts.

This new radicalism marks a shift from traditional American heritage, history, and identity. No one can deny that immigrants have had a profound impact on American history and society. But until recently, immigration has been understood as adding to, not defining, American identity; as something that should occur within legal and reasonable boundaries, not endlessly and without consideration for the economic welfare and social fabric of the existing nation.

Put simply, immigration always has been regarded as a privilege. Immigrants would come to America through a legal process. They would be vetted and accepted as American citizens, with certain expectations. They would assimilate to American society and pledge loyalty to their new home. They would contribute more than they would take. The would learn English, and be good neighbors and citizens.

In sum, immigration worked best when it had benefits for America and the migrants it accepted alike. There was no malice or malevolence toward the United States or its existing people involved.

This is a path that countless migrants have followed and continue to follow. But for numberless thousands of migrants coming more with the mindset of invaders than immigrants, a set of powerful interests exists to justify their illegal entry as an entitlement. …

Lawful process has been replaced with lawlessness, gratitude and respect with brazen entitlement.

For the Left today, immigration is a universal human right that can brook no restrictions, whether by national sovereignty or mere economic realism. …

To justify this universal right of entry, the Left employs a foundational myth. In this myth, America, and the West broadly, is the villain and debtor to the suffering masses around the globe. Citizenship is not a privilege but a right owed by Westerners to every “citizen of the world”. 

In this founding myth, the settlers of America were illegitimate brutes who despoiled the verdant plains and stole the birthright of today’s rightful heirs to the continent. American history begins not with 1492, but with the beginning of the struggle for social justice and the rise of modern progressivism in the 20th century, particularly the mid-century. The American “history” that has been written is illegitimate and needs to be written anew, by the erstwhile, rightful occupants of the land. In fact, the real Americans need not have any historical ties to the American continent at all, other than having been on the receiving end of America’s might.

This academic narrative typically writes off the Founders as irredeemable racists, discrediting their nobility, wisdom, and efforts to build a lasting constitutional republic. Once relegated to humanities departments in America’s universities, this “de-colonialist” ideology has seeped into the wider public consciousness through various left-wing channels. Today’s students learn more in K-12 education about what is wrong with America and its past than what made it great.

At its core, this anti-founding myth denies that America has a core identity at all. There is nothing greater about American life than the sum of the countless job seekers searching for a better life from abroad. America has no history, since that history is illegitimate; it has no culture that rises above what can be bought on the market, including the various commodified “cuisines” brought from afar and sized down to American palates; it has no border, since borders are restrictive. America is simply a giant  casino in which all and sundry may seek their fortune, with special preference given to those shut out by the prejudices of the past.

In this narrative, migration, being a right rather than a privilege, comes with no obligation for the migrant.

What nation would there be to render any obligation to, anyway, when America is merely a “nation of immigrants”? …

In an excerpt of his book, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, Mehta argues the West is being “destroyed, not by migrants, but by the fear of migrants” and describes fears of mass migration as “irrational”. Millions of Westerners somehow have been duped into working against their own interests by populist strong men playing off atavistic hatred.

But if immigration is a form of punishment, payment of the “debt” for the West’s wrongs, is this not an admission that those “irrational fears” are simply clear perceptions of the costs of mass migration?

When they’re not forwarding shallow, disingenuous arguments for mass immigration as a boost to the GDP, today’s most ardent proponents of open borders—however much they might deny it—agree in their most honest moments that mass immigration, rather than being a net boon, brings burdens that Americans may be loath to accommodate—but must bear, as payback. How, then, are the fears of immigration restrictionists irrational?

In their haste, the open borders proponents are giving the game away. Does their confidence stem from a belief that they have already won? That through their combined institutional powers, the media, activist judges, the administrative state, academia, an education system thoroughly co-opted by anti-American ideology, and corporate interests seeking cheap labor, dissenters are powerless to resist their agenda?

Can anything stop the vast migration from the impoverished and wretched south into the prosperous north? Will walls do it? Will laws do it?

Perhaps only the economic ruin of the north will put a stop to it. So will the migration itself cause economic ruin? Or keep the welfare states going, as the Merkels and Macrons and Trudeaus and Newsoms who hold the gates open insist that it will?

The Yellow Jacket protests continue in France, and have spread to Holland, Belgium, Sweden(!), and Britain. 

We hope the uprising will seriously disturb all EU member states, and that its purpose is to overthrow their present governments and permanently destroy the EU itself. We hope it is a case of the peoples of Western Europe finally ridding themselves of the traitors they foolishly elected to govern them, who have used their power to ruin their own countries and the continent as a whole by letting in millions of hostile unassimilable Muslims from the Third World. 

Bruce Bawer, writing at Gatestone, says that is what he thinks and hopes it may be:      

I wondered whether this dramatic sign of popular discontent marked the start of the WesternEuropean public’s pushback against the elites’ disastrous multicultural and globalist project. …

The first thing one notices about the variety of motives cited in the media is that they are not unrelated. Anti-EU sentiment? Opposition to the huge immigrant tide? A major reason for anti-EU sentiment in WesternEurope is resentment at the power of Brussels to force member states to take certain numbers of so-called refugees. Similarly, protesters who are angry over high taxes know very well that a great deal of their money is being used to support immigrants who become welfare clients the moment they enter the country. …

AcrossWestern Europe, ordinary citizens feel ignored and condescended to by their political, business, academic, and media elites. Against the will of most of these citizens, their leaders are gradually surrendering their nations’ sovereignty to the EU, which Macron has frankly admitted wanting to transform into a United States of Europe.

Also against these citizens’ will, their nations have been flooded with Muslim immigrants who embody a major cultural challenge, have caused massive social unrest, and represent a devastating economic burden.

Although it is increasingly obvious that taxpayer-funded Islamization is leading Western Europe down the wrong path, the EU, which stands foursquare behind this disastrous development, refuses to reverse course. Naturally, the powerless man and woman in the street are scared, resentful, and, yes, outraged. Perhaps the question should not be why Western Europeans are rioting but why they did not start rioting a long time ago. 

The media in general, being against nationalism and for Islamization, are of course using their usual smear-labels to discredit the movement. The protestors, they say, are xenophobes, bigots, Nazis. They claim that Nazi banners have appeared among the Yellow Jackets. If they have, we suspect that globalist fans of Islam and the EU planted them there. It’s a common trick of the Left to do  such a thing. We remember when “Nazis” with racist banners were planted among Tea Party protestors in America to discredit the movement.   

So is this the beginning of a war of the Yellow Jackets for Western nationalism against the Black Masks for Islam and globalism? 

What discourages the idea is a sign that the yellow jacket is becoming the symbol of civil uprising as such. In Italy, Muslim immigrants themselves and their globalist allies donned the same yellow jackets to protest the policies of the nationalist government recently elected to oppose Islamization!  

An encouraging sign that the Yellow Jacket uprising is a movement to save  Europe is that it is shaking the arrogant rulers, the globalists in power. It has broken apart the coalition government of Belgium. And President Macron of France has had to abandon a policy of taxing citizens to the bone in order to pay for planetary coolants to be manufactured out of moonbeams.    

Ben Pile writes at Spiked – the website of Brendan O’Neill, a net-surfer’s island of political acuity – about a group that calls itself “Extinction Rebellion” (acronym, XR).

The extinction it is against is the one that man-made global warming is bringing (they passionately believe) to the human race and possibly all living things on earth.

Nothing says ‘take me seriously, I am here to save the planet’ quite like a fully grown man, with a full beard, dressed up as a Girl Guide.

(See the picture at the end of the post)

And –

And nothing better forges a sense of solidarity with ordinary people than obstructing London’s bridges and roads, causing traffic gridlock. Protests such as this took place in London over the past two weekends as part of a new movement called Extinction Rebellion (XR), which claims the human race is heading for extinction and calls for carbon emissions to be cut to net zero by 2025.

For decades, direct action of this kind has been environmental activists’ preferred mode of expression. Movements with a weight of numbers behind them only need to demonstrate their size to illustrate how much they resonate with the wider public. Environmental protests, having no such public support, instead use direct action or spectacle to draw attention to themselves. As well as blocking London’s roads, XR activists also glued their hands to government buildings and to the gates of Buckingham Palace. Such stunts get a great deal of attention, but they rarely arouse much public sympathy. …

Green MEP Molly Scott Cato claims that direct action is necessary because a conspiracy of ‘wealthy individuals and multinational corporations, backed by complicit politicians, has subverted the political process and blocked action’. But this conspiracy theory gets things completely the wrong way round. Climate change is almost exclusively a preoccupation of the wealthy. The global poor cannot afford to do without cheap fossil fuels like coal, while the working class in the West struggles to absorb the high cost of green taxes. Billionaires and corporations, on the other hand, fall over themselves to demonstrate their green credentials. And politicians from all parties, far from resisting environmentalist demands, compete to be the champions of environmentalism.

The UK’s Climate Change Act, passed in 2008 by the Labour government, was the first of its kind in the world. It bound the country to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 80 per cent. The current Conservative government is now considering plans that are even more extensive: reducing the UK’s CO2 emissions to zero by 2050. This will include the abolition of petrol and diesel engines, among other things. The only actual fetter on politicians’ green ambitions, so far, has been political reality. XR and its supporters demand regressive, authoritarian and controlling legislation to limit consumption and production. But in general, voters do not want to be poorer and less free.

For a glimpse of what the political reality has in store for green ambitions, take a peek at the protests on the other side of the channel. While last weekend’s Extinction Rebellion protests reportedly attracted 2,000 greens in London, the gilet jaunes movement, sparked by rising fuel taxes, has brought hundreds of thousands of people on to streets and motorways across the whole of France. Despite the inconvenience caused by the blockades and go-slows, the protests enjoy the support of around 70 per cent of the French public, reflecting the high level of opposition to President Macron’s green taxes.

France’s gilets jaunes (yellow vests) took to the streets last weekend for the second weekend in a row, with over 100,000 taking part in marches, blockades and go-slows. The previous weekend saw nearly 300,000 protesters all across the country, threatening to bring France to a standstill. The yellow vests take their name from the hi-vis jackets that all French drivers are required to own by law, which protesters have fashioned into their symbol of resistance. The movement is spontaneous, leaderless and not connected to any existing political party, union or organisation. Its ad-hoc demonstrations are organised on social media. What began as a protest against an environmentalist hike in fuel taxes has come to encapsulate a more general anger with the status quo. Many are particularly angry about the cost of living. [From Spiked]

Moreover, there is no other ‘rebellion’ in history that can match XR’s desperate, fawning obsequiousness. Protesting outside Buckingham Palace last Saturday, activist Gail Bradbrook read aloud a letter to the monarch: ‘With great humility, we now come to your majesty to implore you to act on our behalf: to fulfil your sacred duty to protect the realm.’ What kind of ‘rebellion’ appears ‘with great humility’? What kind of ‘rebellion’ begs the monarch to limit the material freedom of her subjects?

Sticking with the France comparison, this is akin to the starving peasants of the French Revolution demanding of the king and queen not only no cake, but also less bread.

The protesters themselves never tire of making historical comparisons. They flatter themselves with allusions to the Suffragettes, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But King had ‘a dream’ in which places ‘sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice’. XR and other environmentalists, on the other hand, can only offer a nightmare vision: a catastrophic climate collapse to which the only remedy is ecological austerity.

See our critical portrait of Gandhi here.

History is full of weird, religious zealots with apocalyptic prognostications. While the climate debate is often presented as being about ‘the science’, environmentalists like XR’s Molly Scott Cato emphasize not science, rationalism and debate, but spiritual feelings. ‘As a Quaker, I don’t believe that spiritual wisdom resides in books or rituals but in the still, small    voice that tells you when something must change’, she writes. The environmentalists’ belief in an impending apocalypse is a kind of religious conviction.

The Quakers’ still small voice of conscience doesn’t trouble them too much in North Korea, where they run collective farms worked by slave labor. [Note the second last paragraph of the article linked to, bearing in mind that in North Korean all farms are collective and use forced labor.]

Force is the method all these saviors of the earth favor.

Another XR campaigner and co-religionist of Scott Cato, Rupert Read, writes in the Conversation that, ‘As a Quaker, I cherish the opening words of the famous Shaker hymn: ‘Tis the gift to be simple’. Chillingly, he adds his own twist: ‘It isn’t enough to live a life of voluntary simplicity.’ Climate activism, ultimately, is about the authoritarian regulation of other people’s lives.

Doom-mongers have existed throughout history. But the question is, why have the likes of Extinction Rebellion become so prominent, causing such a splash in the media? It is a symptom of our times. The movement has emerged in an atmosphere where politicians struggle to offer a compelling vision of the future and are instead preoccupied with staving off a looming catastrophe. The self-styled rebels of XR, rather than standing against this pessimistic zeitgeist, epitomize it.

Such climate activists are in every country in the West, working to regulate all our lives, wherever we may be. They would have us live in enforced poverty.

The human race just might survive, they preach, if it limits its activities to the minimum necessary to gain bare subsistence.

It is an atavistic creed, yearning to return to primitive ways in which the human race could probably survive but individuals would  have very short lives.

They are extreme puritans, and their rule would be totalitarian. Criticism would not be tolerated. Some environmentalists already call for prison sentences and some think capital punishment would be just for dissenters.

Now is the time to put on figurative yellow jackets and do some serious rebelling against them.

 

     rebels against carbon dioxide

As we and other conservatives have often said, both in sorrow and in anger, Europe is killing itself.

Since the beginning of this century, writers who watch population numbers – notably Mark Steyn – have been stating plainly that the indigenous European populations are dying out. At the same time – partly because of this shrinkage and the resulting “need” for workers enough to maintain their socialist welfare states – European political leaders have been importing multitudes of Asians and Africans.

Obviously a demographic change does not save Europe, it hastens its destruction. Alien  – and inferior, yes, far inferior – cultures replace its own. Yet Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and most other European leaders, keep bringing the aliens in. They will not not consider stopping it. Some long for Europe to cease being a “white” continent.

At last a few are becoming aware that it is a tragedy they are inflicting on their own nations. They may even admit they don’t like it. But only a very few will try to do anything to stop it.

Interestingly, one of the European nations whose government does not yet acknowledge that catastrophe is fast approaching, is Britain. Britain! That used to be the Land of Common Sense.  The land of realists. Now the land of self-deluders?

Voices are announcing from the high towers of the continent (soon to be totally replaced by actual muezzins calling the faithful of Islam to prayer) that the end is nigh. But they  are not cries of repentance or despair. Not the cries of the reluctantly doomed.

It seems they just want it to be over. This civilization thing.

Giulio Meotti writes at Gatestone:

The days of European strength are over. Because of low birth rates, Europe is dramatically shrinking. …

Even President Macron of France, who continues to call for more immigration from the Third World, knows that it hurts Europe, hastens the end of Europe. And, what is more, he deplores the fact that it does. Hear him, hear the cry of dying Europe as it goes on deliberately killing itself.

In 2017, Macron called Africa’s problems “civilizational” and lamented that they “have seven or eight children per woman”. In a second speech at the Gates Foundation last week, Macron said: “Present me the woman who decided, being perfectly educated, to have seven, eight or nine children.” The question Macron implicitly raised is: How can Europe manage its own educated people with their low birth rates while confronting massive African and Middle Eastern fertility and immigration? It seems that Europe is in a demographic struggle with the rest of the world, and can only lose.

It seems that Europe has also lost all confidence in its hard-won Enlightenment values, such as personal freedoms, reason and science replacing superstition, and the separation of church and state.

These are critical, if Europe truly wishes to survive. The distinguished historian Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote:

Judged by the great historical determinants of civilizational power — fuel, energy, education, demography, political stability, and military power — Europe is waning. It is spending a mere 1.4% of its collective GDP on defense … And with a fertility rate of less than 1.6%, Europe is slowly shrinking and aging — hence the short-sighted immigration policy of Angela Merkel who apparently sees immigration also as a solution to the demography crisis and a shortcut to low-cost labor.

However, as Walter Laqueur wrote, “even if Europe’s decline is irreversible, there is no reason that it should become a collapse”.

How does one avoid that collapse?

At a recent European meeting, Italy’s interior minister, Matteo Salvini, who heads the anti-immigration League party, said:

I’ve heard colleagues say that we need immigration because the population of Europe is getting older, but I have a completely different viewpoint … I believe that I’m in government in order to see that our young people have the number of children that they used to a few years ago and not to transplant the best of Africa’s youth to Europe. Maybe in Luxembourg they need to do this, but in Italy we need to help people have more children, rather than bring in modern-day slaves (from Africa) to replace the children we’re not having.

Then, directly addressing an interruption from Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, Salvini added:

I calmly answer your point of view which is different from mine … If in Luxembourg you need a new immigration, I prefer to keep Italy for the Italians and start to make children again.

Salvini evidently sees what to expect from Italy’s future. Under unchanged conditions, Italy’s population could collapse, reaching just over 16 million inhabitants compared to 59 million today. …

Europe’s establishment is … divided between the so-called “Europeists,” who believe that new migrants are necessary to stop the EU’s demographic collapse, and the “Euroskeptics” who want to overcome it on their own. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, for instance, has called on Europeans to stop the “demographic decline” by investing more in traditional families.

Meanwhile, Italian Catholic Archbishop Gian Carlo Perego has said:

The challenge for Italy is to reconcile a country that is dying with young people who come from elsewhere, in order to begin a new history. If we close our door to migrants, we will disappear.

Point is, as Italians they will disappear anyway.

Salvini proposed another idea …

A country which does not create children is destined to die … We have created a ministry of the family to work on fertility, nurseries, on a fiscal system which takes large families into account. At the end of this mandate, the government will be measured on the number of newborns more than on its public debt.

At stake, Salvini said, is Italy’s “tradition, our story, our identity” – the left is using the fertility crisis as an “excuse” to “import immigrants”.

Another Catholic bishop, Andrew Nkea Fuanya of Mamfe, Cameroon, recently said about low birth rates in Europe:

It’s a very big thing. And I will dare to say that, especially with the backdrop of the Islamic invasion, if you look through history, where the Church slept, got diverted away from the Gospel, Islam took the advantage and came in. This is what we are seeing in Europe, that the Church is sleeping, and Islam is creeping in … Europe is being Islamized, and it will affect Africa.

But Christianity cannot argue Islam down. One irrational creed cannot prove itself truer than another.

Nor was it Christianity that made Europe great, however often and insistently “Judeo-Christian values” are given the credit.

Pre-Christian Greece and Rome began Europe’s greatness, western Christianity suppressed it, the Enlightenment revived it and brought our civilization to its glory. 

Europe’s decline and transformation can also be seen in France. According to new statistics released by the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, Mohammed and several other traditional Muslim names now top the list of most popular baby names in the French department of Seine-Saint-Denis (1.5 million residents). It is noteworthy that two journalists with the mainstream newspaper Le Monde, Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme, have just published a book entitled Inch’allah : l’islamisation à visage découvert (If Allah Wills: The Exposed Face of Islamization), an investigation of the “Islamization” of the Seine-Saint-Denis area.

Meanwhile, an investigation published in July by the weekly L’Express showed that in France, “between 2000 and 2016, the number of children with at least one foreign parent increased from 15 to 24 percent.”

Germany too notices the population change:

Die Welt reported that, according to the Federal Statistical Office, in Western Germany, 42% of children under the age of six now come from a migrant background. …

Walter Laqueur wrote:

…uncontrolled immigration was not the only reason for the decline of Europe. But taken together with the continent’s other misfortunes, it led to a profound crisis; a miracle might be needed to extract Europe from these predicaments.

Both Matteo Salvini and [the French writer] Michel Houellebecq have pointed out that the drama of an aging and tired Europe is not a partisan or electoral issue; it is a civilizational one. This issue will also decide the future of the European Union, which the open-borders policy might wipe out.

Time is running out. As Houellebecq said …:

The advance of Islam is just beginning, because demography is on its side and because Europe, which has stopped having children, has entered a process of suicide. And it is not really a slow suicide. Once you have arrived at a birth rate of 1.3 or 1.4, then in reality things go very fast.

(Italy’s rate, 1.35 in 2016. Spain’s, 1.33 in the same year.)

Salvini is one of the few trying to save his nation. It is hard to see how he can succeed. The collapse that Walter Laqueur thought was avoidable, proceeds apace.

Our civilization may only survive in America. The Left came close to destroying it here too, but President Trump was elected in time to save it. At least for a while. If the Left regains power, the fatal self-inflicted European disease, brought on by socialism and worsened by Islam and Third World immigration, will all too probably destroy America too.