Are the big three European powers - and a couple of the smaller ones - all collapsing at once?
In the last few days, the titles of YouTube videos about Europe have tended toward the exceedingly agitated: “They’re Destroying France” (October 6); “France Has Collapsed” (Rubin Report, October 8); “We’re Watching France’s End” (October 9); “France Is on Fire” (Triggernometry, October 9); “The Siege of London” (Bill O’Reilly, October 8); “Germany’s Crisis: Why Living Here Is Impossible Now” (October 3).What a fascinating moment it is in Western European history. Not a happy moment, not a promising moment, but certainly fascinating. Not so very long ago, Germany, France, and Britain were world powers; now all three of them are basket cases, undergoing parallel crises, at the mercy of immigrants from the worst places on the planet. And the mainstream media, in these countries as well as in the U.S., are doing their best to avoid covering these crises, leaving it to YouTubers and other online news reporters and commentators to fill in the gap.
The basic story of the past few decades is simple enough: Western Europe’s political leaders – motivated by a combination of multicultural ideology, contempt for their own countries’ ordinary citizens, and a heady mix of stupidity and cowardice – have pursued policies that have made their countries less Western, less democratic, and less safe. They’ve seemed to care far more about Muslim immigrants, legal or not, whom they’ve lavished with welfare benefits ad infinitum than about hard-working natives who’ve been at once overtaxed and underserved.
Tony Blair was frank about his desire to change the face of Britain. Angela Merkel later confessed that she opened Germany’s floodgates in 2015 in order to drown her political competition in the votes of newly arrived foreigners. For years, while prime ministers of both major parties have come and gone, British voters have made clear their wish to keep Britain British; yet both parties have deliberately kept the illegals pouring in, much as the Biden Administration did, as part of a mischievous program of radical social metamorphosis. While the people have clamored for jobs and housing, for law and order, and for an end to open borders, their rulers have prayed at the altars of climate ideology and transgender ideology, have punished speech in a way no one could have imagined a generation ago, and have treated Islam as a boon and not a bane.
For me, the quintessential symbol of the impotence of the British state is the longtime Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg. Mind you, he’s far from being Britain’s worst politician. Indeed he drives me up a wall because he’s patently intelligent, knowledgeable, eloquent, and, I think, honest and well-meaning. In a recent online debate he wiped the floor with Tucker Carlson. But he’s a maddening figure precisely because he never seems to lose his cool, never acts as if things are as bad as they really are, never displays an iota of passion for the welfare of the British people. He’s chronically unflappable, a “cool, cool, considerate man” (to quote the song from 1776) who perfectly embodies the phlegmatic manner of the classic Victorian public servant, making his way to work every day to keep the world’s greatest empire afloat, confident that in the fullness of time he will pass it along, as powerful as ever, to his sons. What is he, nuts?
Britain’s neighbors, of course, have their own living symbols of political inertia – Sarkozy and Hollande in France, Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Germany. The trouble in all three of these countries – and I’m singling them only because they’re the big boys on the block – has been clear for some time, as has the growing impatience of their natives with the political elites. Support for the Alternative for Germany, for France’s National Front, and for Restore Britain has risen steadily, and more and more people have been daring to speak of returning problematic immigrants to the places they came from.
The example of Donald Trump in the U.S. has obviously played a major role in all this. In a recent speech, Robert Lowe, head of Restore Britain, vowed to “drill, baby, drill,” to “make Javier Milei look like a socialist puppet,” and to “make Britain great again.” His entire text was a battle cry: “We will reverse the Islamification of our country.” “Immigration into Britain from the Third World will end entirely.” “There will be no more Pakistani immigration into Britain.” “We will restore the connection between being a British citizen and being British in any meaningful sense.” He even described the boat people crossing the English channel as “scumbags,” but he pronounced it with such English elegance that it hardly sounded vulgar.
Lowe’s audience gave him a standing ovation. I’d cheer him, too, if I could be sure that his promises are capable of being realized. Alas, he’s up against a public sector packed with Labourites; a national police that has not been trained in the noble tradition of Robert Peel but has rather been taught to arrest truth-tellers and safeguard Islamic agitators; cities with Muslim mayors and administrators; and a governing system dominated by far-left quangos (“quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations”) that, while not answerable to the electorate, have full control over an immense number of the country’s leading institutions. It’s a Deep State that makes the D.C. swamp look like Lake Tahoe.
Meanwhile, in Paris and other cities across France, massive street protests by teenage students who started off by calling for improvements in education have developed quickly into day after day of violent pro-left and pro-Palestinian rioting. Scores of teachers have been physically attacked, dozens of schools set on fire, thousands of rioters arrested, and countless Palestinian, Algerian, and Moroccan flags hoisted proudly by eminently deportable rogues who’ve repeatedly shouted to the skies about their love for Allah, their hatred for France, and their readiness to kill every infidel in sight.
Cynics might shrug that in melee-prone France this kind of discord is called merdi. Or is it merde? Last week the British commentator Winston Marshall lamented that there are already “two Frances.” Other observers have suggested that this mayhem all but guarantees that the next elections will be won by either Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella – whichever turns out to be the National Rally candidate. About time: Le Pen has been on deck for decades, waiting to straighten things out, while one member after another of France’s hopeless political class has blithely presided over the conversion of a civilized nation into a dominion of savages.
Last week, one of the French street protesters, a privileged, photogenic, but rather psychopathic-looking Parisian high-school kid named Elwan Benoit – clad, naturally, in a Palestinian scarf – shot to instant fame by spouting a litany of ragged left-wing clichés into a journalist’s microphone for a solid three minutes; he was later filmed kissing socialist politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the current face of the French left.
Mélenchon, incidentally, is known for cheering – and is cheered for cheering – what he calls the “créolisation” of France. What he’s talking about is the “grand rémplacement” of Frenchmen by Muslims, largely from the Maghreb. You’ll get shouted down, of course, if you warn sophisticated Frenchmen about a great replacement – the very concept, they’ll tell you, is racist – but if you celebrate creolization, which is precisely the same thing, they’ll raise their glasses to you.
It’s not just in France that leading figures on the left have shifted quietly from denying the reality of Islamic replacement to accepting and even applauding it – although under another name. Speaking recently at a panel discussion, Timothy Stanley of the Telegraph – purportedly a conservative paper, mind you – expressed delight that the Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, is British-Nigerian. “it’s happened,” he pronounced, “and it ain’t going back!” Does he have any qualms about Britain’s demographic direction? Not at all: it makes him “proud,” he said, to know that Badenoch, “a generational transitional figure,” is the face of a “change in ethnicity” in Britain and its government.
But back to Benoit, the pale face of the black French suburbs. The online comments about him were interesting. Leftists applauded him as a wonderful new political star. Others saw him as a “textbook case” of an “utterly bourgeois” lad who’s “perfectly learned to regurgitate communist dialectics”; as “the perfect prototype of the champagne socialist” whose parents are “well-placed in the deep state” and who “plays at being the moralizing lecturer”; and as a “spoiled little brat” awash in “certainty and moral superiority.”
Yes, that about sums it up. If France weren’t being quickly “creolized,” this jejune jeune homme would probably have a splendid political career ahead of him. Or maybe not: on the evening of October 7, Benoit appeared on a TV debate program and didn’t exactly cover himself in glory, leading some to wonder whether he’d already polished off his fifteen minutes of fame. Nonetheless, all of this hoopla over various budding Robespierres does raise an interesting question: when the Muslims do take control, what will they do with erstwhile allies like him?
Meanwhile, in Germany, the political establishment is in a panic over Alternative for Germany (AfD), which looks as if it’ll soon be in a position to form state governments, if not a federal government. One of the Germans who are troubled is Feli, a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young German YouTuber whom I’ve watched from time to time. For several years she posted cheerful, lightweight videos about her life as an expat in Cincinnati. She loves Cincinnati, loves Ohio, loves America. But a year ago she returned to her hometown of Munich with her American husband, and although she’s rarely touched on political matters, in early October she released a video intended to instruct her American viewers about AfD. --->READ MORE HERE
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