Europe's Scoffing Its Way to Annihilation

I spoke with two Germans, several weeks before the Paris Islamist attacks, on religion, ideology, and the future of Europe. I predicted to them that Germany will be consumed by Islam due to the hordes now invading. Both Germans were serenely, unperturbedly dismissive. He is a captain of industry, middle-aged, brilliant. The world is his oyster, and he is in great command of industrial and financial trade. Married with children, he lives in London and guffaws at the idea of Islamist takeover on the mainland. She is a neuroscience graduate student, fully persuaded that religion is completely irrelevant and that these ripples of medievalism will surely die out as the Muslims settle down to the prosperity of economy.

Evidence, for both of my German friends, need not interfere with the exaltation complexes that blind them. The question is why. Europe is convinced – utterly – of the superiority of its civilization. Europe today has no questions. It "knows" there's no God. It knows that socialism in a secular liberal democracy is supreme. It knows that atheistic science is the only science allowed to be done. It knows that wanton sex isn't just a right, but an entertainment industry orthogonal to morality. It knows that abortion is a shrug of the shoulders and that the bearing of children in marriage is a most improbable occurrence – but when the Leonids return, it might be considered in an academic paper. The continent "knows" that religion is a thing of the past. And it knows that the march towards dissolution of personal sovereignty, national sovereignty, is an inevitable fact of evolution, evolution being the unquestionable god of all things. And all that evidence-free fundamentalist secular-liberal certainty is becoming Europe's complete undoing. Europe has no knowledge that it is psychologically programmed to be indifferent to God. It has no knowledge that communism's relentless atheism has succeeded in gobbling private capital, privately held souls. Europe is like a blank-eyed child raised in a soviet zoo by video screens and electroshock, with no thoughts in her head except those imprinted by her secular, capital-controlling masters. But how does this leave a person? Europe has no ability to respond to new and unpatterned situations. German society, for example, is known for high-precision solutions, but not as the engine of new ideas. They are world-best engineers, not bleeding-edge entrepreneurs. Germany makes the Airbus A350 in response to the Boeing 787. The A350 may be high-quality, but no one in Europe would have done it first. Stay there, don't move: a nation conditioned to have only regimented lives, controlled by central powers, the state that is to be worshiped, is left unarmed when unscripted situations arise. Yes, praise the Lord for the French police who showed up late and, according to the rules, killed terrorists. But state action cannot replace individual armament and will in time to save. Individualism is now crushed in Europe, China – the men at the top prefer obedience over creativity, state-worship to worship of God. Where is Europe's individual? Where is the fire of Bonhoeffer? Jean-Jacques Rousseau? Where is the cannon of Lord Nelson? Where is even a dwindled ember like Guy Fawkes? And so this is how Europe dies – obediently, collectively. The Muslims enter, wild and uncontrolled, individuality as a suicide bomb, caring not for exalted systems. Burn it; Europeans can't grasp the euro disobeyed. More – Europe can't grasp dying for God, while Islamists lust for it. The "self-evident truth" of Euro-supremacy is the talisman hope held aloft. With absolute certainty, they know that this conceit will eventually overpower the hostility of otherworldly Islam. Sooner or later, they think, the Muslims will figure out that a highly paid job at Bosch with state health care, state college education, state direction for your life, unlimited access to state-approved hookers, state certification and training for your every impetus – that this will somehow be honey so compelling that all these little passions about Islam will leave the head, and drugged up drones will trot off to precision assembly training. Europe's belief is the unsupported presumption of universal atheism. But there's no force in Europe's bucolic Animal Farm. Muslims believe in force – they make babies, they make war, they make demands, and they use whatever violence they have to weaponized all those things. Europe does not make babies, does not make war, does not make demands on Muslims. Instead, Europe purses its brow and wonders how long the realization of European superiority will take to dawn in the mind of the Ummah. Europe de-weaponizes everything; Muslims sneer, shrug, and reload. European superiority is a myth that lives in the minds of only Europeans. We Americans are always aware of the presumptuousness – Yankees get very tired very quickly of being lectured about how superior European socialism is when America has been the entire defense department of Europe for 100 years; we fight, you don't. But this superiority-myth is stubborn. Weirdly, America also seems captured by it – we send money and arms for generations…to prop up Europe's socialism, a sacred cow. Sadly, the USA's codependent weirdness now subsidizes even barbarians. But Europe's divorce from force, its debt bubble now lived in, is coming due. Europeans have held that it is beneath them to engage in war – far better to just wait for self-evident liberalism to diffuse into the minds of all! Victory of superior economics is inevitable! In the meantime, the proper response to the invasion of Ukraine by a totalitarian aggressor is...Neville Chamberlain? After all, Europeans all know that what really matters is money! Whereas an American might add, "Right?," Europeans do not. They gently state the matter of unquestionable truth and then look puzzled when you don't agree. How is disagreement even possible? There are no disagreements, only bureaus. But the world doesn't agree. No one, in fact, outside Europe agrees. And Eastern Europe, while its inhabitants are happy enough to increase their prosperity, doesn't buy it either. They remember that homes undefended by force fall to tyrants. And the Muslims, who hold very contradictory ideas and very poorly constructed societies, nevertheless relish the first-order law of the jungle: he who can force his will on the other guy wins. Europe is unaware that it is losing because victory is an axiom, not a verb. Europe is trying to "place the French attacks in context." It is not trying, with alarm, to confront, root out, and destroy the terroristic invasion of an enemy power with war. Except, perhaps, Le Pen. But Islam is invading by force, not by the bond market. Islam finds it a matter of weakness and contempt that the Europeans respond to jihad with a pursed brow and welfare checks, as though being conquered were so improbable it can't even be discussed. Perhaps in a conference proceeding? So when your superior civilization won't fight, won't reproduce itself, and won't recognize that it is under attack – because the attacker is so inferior – the "superior" civilization has condemned itself to annihilation. Subsidized minarets! And when your superior civilization has no god higher than the civilization itself, it cannot criticize its own sins – the highest truth is just whatever the state does. Turn the church into a museum! Europe thinks state action is god's action, and god's action is infallible. With atheism entrenched, Europe has no external moral authority against which to measure itself and thereby against which to correct its errors. I remember asking a young French girl what the highest authority was in her life, the greatest power. She didn't know, but she guessed, "The Republic?" God never entered her mind. Babylon, Rome, many others fell because they scoffed at the pathetic inferiority of their attackers. They congratulated themselves that "we are the people, and wisdom will die with us." But believed infallibility produces only negligence. Oh, Europe, will you call yourselves gods in the presence of the men who slay you?