Posted on 10/19/2010 2:48:28 AM PDT by markomalley
Is Europe’s adventure in international living about to end?
At Potsdam, Germany, this weekend, Chancellor Angela Merkel told the young conservatives of her Christian Democratic Union that Germany’s attempt to create a multicultural society where people “live side by side and enjoy each other” has “failed, utterly failed.”
Backing up her rueful admission are surveys showing 30 percent of Germans believe the country is overrun by foreigners. An equal number believe the foreigners come to feed off German welfare.
Merkel had in mind the Turks who came as gastarbeiters, guest workers, in the 1960s. Some 2.5 million now live in Germany.
Arabs and East Europeans have come more recently. One survey puts the Muslim population at 5 million.
“Multikulti is dead,” says Horst Seehofer of Merkel’s sister party, the Christian Social Union of Bavaria. He wants no more immigration from “alien cultures.” Turks and other Muslims are not learning the language, he contends, not assimilating, not becoming Germans.
Awareness of deep differences with Turkish neighbors became acute for Germans when, grieving in solidarity with America after 9/11, they learned that Turkish sectors of Berlin were celebrating Islam’s victory with barrages of bottle rockets. Like all of Europe, Germany grows nervous.
This summer, Thilo Sarrazin, who sat on the Bundesbank board, published “Germany Abolishes Itself,” which sold 300,000 copies in seven weeks. Sarrazin argued that Germany’s Muslim population is intellectually inferior and unable or unwilling to learn the language or culture, and mass immigration is destroying the nation.
No rightist, but a stalwart of the socialist party, Sarrazin was forced out at the Bundesbank. Half his socialist party stood by him.
Across Europe, there is a resurgence of ethnonationalism that is feeding the ranks of populist and anti-immigrant parties that are gaining respectability and reaching for power.
Austrian nationalists triumphed in 2008 when the Freedom Party of Joerg Haider and the Alliance for the Future of Austria together took 29 percent of the vote. The Swiss People’s Party of Christoph Blocher, largest in Bern, was behind the successful referendum to change the constitution to outlaw minarets and prohibit the wearing of burqas.
Hungary’s Jobbik Party, which to the Financial Times “sits squarely in Europe’s most repulsive arch-nationalist tradition and which blames Jews and Roma for the hardships of other Hungarians,” pulled 17 percent of the vote this year and entered parliament with 47 seats, up from zero seats in 2006.
The Sweden Democrats just captured 6 percent of the vote and entered parliament for the first time with 20 seats, joining right-wing folk parties in Norway and Denmark.
Geert Wilders, a rising figure in Dutch politics, was charged with hate speech for equating Islam and Nazism. In June, his Freedom Party swept past the ruling Christian Democrats, who lost half of their strength in parliament. “More security, less crime, less immigration, less Islam—that is what the Netherlands has chosen,” said Wilders.
In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy—one eye on Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, the other on the 2012 elections—rejecting cries of “Nazism” and “Vichyism,” is dismantling Gypsy camps and deporting Gypsies to Romania. Milan is now following the French lead.
What is happening in Europe partakes of a global trend. Multiracial, multi-ethnic, multicultural nations are disintegrating.
Russians battle ethnic Muslim separatists in the North Caucasus. Seventy percent of Americans support an Arizona law to identify and expel illegal aliens. Beijing swamps the homelands of Tibetans and Uighurs with Han Chinese. India fights secession in Kashmir, Nagaland and the Naxalite provinces.
“Wars between nations have given way to wars within nations, “ said Barack Obama in his Nobel Prize address.
Ethno-nationalism tore Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union and Josip Tito’s Yugoslavia into 22 separate nations, and is now tugging at the seams of all multi-ethnic states. Globalism is in retreat before tribalism.
But the awakening of Europe’s establishment to the shallow roots of multiculturalism will likely prove frustrating and futile.
With her fertility rate below replacement levels for 40 years, projected to remain so for the next 40 years, Germany will lose 12 million of her 82 million people by 2050. Her median age will rise eight years to 53, and 40 percent of all Germans will be over 60.
Germany’s problem is insoluble. She is running out of Germans. Yet if her welfare state is to survive and her industries are to remain competitive, Germany will need millions of new workers.
Where are they to come from, if not the Third World? For not one European nation, save Iceland and Albania, has had a birth rate for decades that is not below zero population growth.
Baby boomer Europe decided in the 1960s and 1970s it wanted La Dolce Vita, not the hassle of children. It had that sweet life. Now the bill comes due. And the bill is the end of their tribes and countries as we have known them.
Old Europe is dying, and the populist and nationalist parties, in the poet’s phrase, are simply raging “against the dying of the light.”
Merkel is correct - multikulti is dead. It was and is a non-starter. The immigrants to all western countries are not interested in assimilating to the existing cultures, but aim to absorb the host countries’ cultures into their own. In most cases, it is Islam. The U. S. is slightly behind Europe in becoming Islam compliant because of the huge influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico.
PJB is assuming it ever left
“Awareness of deep differences with Turkish neighbors became acute for Germans when, grieving in solidarity with America after 9/11, they learned that Turkish sectors of Berlin were celebrating Islam’s victory with barrages of bottle rockets. Like all of Europe, Germany grows nervous.”
Very important message here. The world is full of people who either hate us for cultural reasons, or who want what we have, and will do whatever it takes to get it.
Civil war is not new, Barack.
“”Yet if her welfare state is to survive and her industries are to remain competitive, Germany will need millions of new workers.””
It makes me crazy that this is always the selling point for opening the flood gates to illegals.
Germany’s unemployement rate is 7.6%, but that figure is artificially low because the German government has a program called Kurzarbeit. If an employer needs to cut hours or wages because he can’t maintain his employees the government will compensate up to 67% of the employees wages to keep them at their former wages and keep them from getting layed off.
If Germany got rid of foreigners that were taking German jobs and living off German welfare, their welfare costs would go down drastically. Their would be enough jobs for German citizens that Kurzarbeit would be unneeded.
As in the US some companies will go out of business, but these companies will be companies that were making money off cheap foreign and/or illegal workers and would never have survived on a fair playing field anyway.
Merkel is 100% correct. Multicultural never works.
What Europe needs is the next Charles Martel.
> Most European countries are much more bigoted and insular than the US.
It’s not that Europeans are any more bigoted than anyone else. For centuries, each European country has been, more or less, ethnically pure. Being surrounded by people like yourself gives you a natural feeling of security. Now that the various European countries have been infiltrated by people who don’t want to mix, blend in or become part of the European culture, but instead want the Europeans to accept the newcomer’s culture, the only path is strife or purging Europe of the invaders.
Ditto !!!
It's not an either-or: we'll see both, in order. First comes strife, then civil breakdown, then war and purging of the weak by the strong (whomever that may be at the time).
As a species, we're not really as highly evolved as we like to think we are. Humans are still very tribal; it's our nature.
It's utterly ludicrous to assume that every other culture can or even wants to "assimilate" and adopt Western lifestyles and cultural values if we just take them in and give them enough free stuff. Looking at this objectively, I can honestly say that there is ZERO chance that I would move to Iran and adopt a fundamental Islamic lifestyle, so why on earth should I assume that they'll come here and adopt ours?
“He wants no more immigration from “alien cultures.” Turks and other Muslims are not learning the language, he contends, not assimilating, not becoming Germans.”
Too funny. The sheep invite wolves to live among them and are then surprised when they refuse to act like sheep. Who could have seen that coming?
Mein Furher, I can walk!
> Mein Furher, I can walk!
Ah, yes, but remember he said that just before the bombs started going off.
We’ll meet again,
Don’t know where,
Dont’ know when ...
Russia has already started a campaign to increase the Russian population. After WWII, the population of what is the Russian Federation today was about 200 million. Today, it’s only 149 million, and that includes the aggressively growing Mohammedan population, which is currently at about 10% within the RF.
If the battle happens at all, I believe it will be fiercest in France.
Europe can easily survive a smaller population of acculturated Europeans. It can Not survive allowing Islam to exist in Europe.
Those who doubt man’s devotion to in-group v. out-group fighting need only Google St. Barts Day, France, 1500’s.
Don’t overlook the Third Reich, either.
Islam Delenda Est - the rallying cry of Europe, America, and the rest of the non-Muslim world.
At least they are fighting. We have not reached that level of awareness yet.
The salvation of Western Civilization may have to come from the eastern European states, who suffered under arbitrary trans-national tyranny and know the difference between self-defeating BS and national interest.
Well, let’s hope that Germany has more (and better) stones than England.
Why does it seem that almost every destructive trend in Western culture started in the 1960s?
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