A Review of Fistfights with Muslims in Europe: One Man’s Journey through Modernity, by Julian Langness

Fistfights with Muslims in Europe is the kind of book that is essential reading for young people curious or alarmed by developments in Europe and Scandinavia. I can certainly relate to Mr. Langness’s experience. As a young man I was stationed at a military base in Germany and discovered firsthand how far the situation had deteriorated (and this was before Angela Merkel was chancellor).

There is sometimes a well-meaning tendency among older men to caution younger ones against getting in fights (even if one didn’t start them), and to avoid conflict at all costs. It is not only usually hopeless, however, to caution young men against experiments with aggression (such as contact sports), but it’s also hypocritical. As self-defense expert and martial artist Marc “Animal” MacYoung notes, the “the people who are telling [young men] ‘not to fight’ are the ones who have already dealt with their primate drives. That means they’re secure with their social status, have established territories, and live with long-term mates. Good for them, but it doesn’t help you, does it?” (MacYoung, xvi)

Fistfights starts with Julian Langness traveling to Norway, the home of his Viking forebears:

All I knew was that my ancestors had come from the area around Halden, in present-day southeast Norway. But this nugget of information was enough to send me on a quest across the Atlantic back to Scandinavia, to discover what I could of my history and people” (Langness 11). Although Mr. Langess was raised as a “global citizen” (11), he recognized the desire for “tribe and heritage is one of the most innate drives that we as humans possess…. It was natural that as a young man I would seek out additional answers to questions of identity.

He arranges to stay with the friend of a friend, a young, earnest Norwegian girl named Karoline who works as a social worker and lets him stay at her apartment. The author arrives in urban Norway underwhelmed by the Stalinist blocks of apartments he sees. He is discomfited by the streets thronged with Muslim women cloaked in hijabs and offended by the foreign-language graffiti scarring the buildings in and around the place where he is staying. He finds the scattering of woods around the housing complexes to be beautiful, however.

There’s trouble early, as one day he finds himself with Karoline waiting on a bus, when he notices a teenager with an oversized set of headphones “and a strange shirt. It had big neon lettering on it, but as it was not in English I did not know what it said. The young man’s eyes were light brown or hazel, and his hair was a chalky black color” (15). The youth looks to be Albanian or Bosnian, and he is listening to loud rap music in a foreign language (not that it would be all that intelligible in English). Mr. Langness then turns at this point to Karoline and asks her if it’s normal to listen to music at such volume. Being a good and docile multiculturalist, his social worker friend assures him it is. Ironically, it is an older Indian man waiting on the bus who interjects that the behavior of the youth in question is very rude, indeed.

Julian politely but forcefully gets the young man’s attention and asks him to turn down the music, which he does with a shrug. Karoline assures Julian that such a modest request for respect from a Muslim is a breach of European etiquette, but the minor incident is quickly forgotten.

Later the author finds himself at a party with a bunch of other Norwegian youths, drinking and smoking and listening to music in a rustic barn. The Norwegians question him about American mores, specifically gun laws and the assortment of weapons available in America. Most of the info that the young Norwegians have gleaned has come from a dubious source, Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (my girlfriend, who is German, informs me that the film is actually part of the syllabus in many German high-schools).

Talk of America’s gun-craziness is interrupted, however, when the author and some of the other Norwegians notice “a slight commotion at the entrance of the club. I could not really see what was happening, but noticed several young men with short dark hair arguing with the bouncer” (26). When Julian turns to Svend, one of the young partiers, to ask him about the commotion, Svend tells him they are “Middle Easterners” who are not allowed in the club because they bring “criminality.”

“It is unfortunate, but the owners have no choice…They create great problems. Drugs, knives, crime. They are warned but it still continues.” (26)

Things come to a head roughly 20 minutes later, when one of the “Middle Easterners” attempts to flirt with several of the Norwegian girls, who politely refuse his advances. Mr. Langness finds himself entangled in a fight with the harasser, a short scuffle that “lasted maybe eight seconds…and once on the ground the Muslim spun away” (27).

The author is warned to leave the party before the cops come and he flees, adrenaline racing through his veins.

It must be said at this point that Mr. Langness is lucky, and he behaved a bit foolishly (he admits as much). I have personally seen what I thought was a fistfight on a Bahnhofgleis (railway station platform) in Germany wherein an American soldier attempting to defend himself swung with his right hand to keep his Turkish opponent engaged, while sneaking his frame-lock Gerber knife out of his pocket and open with his left palm. The American soldier then “shelled up” and covered his head with a crossed arm guard and allowed the Turk to punch against his outer forearms, and against the edge of the blade the soldier had secreted flush against his ulna. The harder the Turk punched, the more profusely his hand bled, and his own adrenaline was pumping too strong for him to notice. The American soldier boarded a train, while the Turk fled the platform minus a finger and lighter a pint of blood.

Mr. Langness returns from Norway with an understandably dimmer view of Muslims in Europe, and a bit confused about the general acquiescence of the Europeans to the disrespect they are shown by their guests. While abroad he met the odd Norwegian with some common sense.

The main example he describes is male, and quite naturally a bit older. There’s a scene where Mr. Langness wanders away from the pack of young friends and acquaintances he’s made. He comes to a café where he sees a pile of newspapers — a Times and a Guardian, but most of the dailies are in Norwegian. He can’t read a lick of it, but luckily the aforementioned old man comes to his assistance, reading over his shoulder. “It says, ‘community shocked by teenage girls’ rapes’. Running his finger under the lines he continued slowly…‘The girls were reportedly raped by five youths.’ I noticed he put emphasis on the word youths as he read…” (20)

The euphemistic dodge of calling criminals whose complexion doesn’t fit the official narrative “youths” is familiar to any knowledgeable race-realist, although, in my experience, most English-language European dailies tend to prefer the equally dishonest “Asian” when talking about Muslim immigrant crime.

Mr. Langness returns from Norway to America and guts it out for a while at college, where he listens to flabby, self-loathing White beta male professors talk about the evils of European civilization. These men present Western history as a mere litany of genocide and conquest. The author spends his free time reading about the crimes happening in Europe, consuming such stories with more interest than when reading about events in America.

He discovers the grooming gangs of England. Much like the homosexual writer Bruce Bawer (While Europe Slept) or the feminist Julie Bindel, he recognizes that Western ideals of democracy and freedom of speech and religion, as well as Enlightenment principles, are incompatible with Islam, which makes the leftist alliance with Muslims not a case of strange bedfellows, but rather one of madness and suicide.

Mr. Langness un-enrolls from classes. Heeding the siren call of imperiled Europe, he travels again, this time to Holland. He holds out hope that Holland, unlike Norway, will still conform to the ideal of the land that he holds in his mind’s eye. Perhaps it will be a country of windmills and wooden shoes, “a nation of enlightenment and creativity” (52).

Arriving in Amsterdam, he finds immigrants staggering through the streets on heroin, and the natives in thrall to a consumer culture of sexual exploitation (with prostitutes hawking their bodies in neon-splashed windows), marijuana shops, and, most disheartening of all, young men rotting their minds in videogame shops.

Mr. Langness is familiar with the work of masculinist Jack Donovan, and notes that the natural drives of men toward tribal affiliation and meaning have in many cases been misdirected into what Mr. Donovan tragicomically calls “bonobo masturbation” culture:

Growing up in the time period I was born into, I had seen countless young men waste away their youth playing video games. In many ways the games seemed worse even than drugs. They would play for hours and hours at a time, sometimes in groups and sometimes alone. They reveled in the virtual worlds of danger and bravery and glory (52).

Mr. Langness notes that where young men feel adrift in a rudderless, feminized/narcotized postmodern existence, some elect to misidentify with Black culture by listening to hip-hop, or by joining in worldwide jihad (John Walker Lindh did both).

Thoroughly disheartened at this point, the author wanders away from the tourist district and through the city on an unaccompanied tour. He does not seek out conflict, but neither does he shrink from it. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, he comes across two young Muslim men who demand to know where he is going: “One had slightly scraggly hair and a goatee. His teeth were crooked and he wore a gold chain around his neck. The other was several inches taller. He was wearing an ADIDAS shirt and sweatpants and had short hair” (50).

They demand his money belt, insult him as a “fucking American” (51) and then the shorter of the twosome begins pelting him with rocks. Mr. Langess engages with the larger of the two men, swinging and missing. The Muslim counters and barely misses Mr. Langness, who then responds with a blow that glances his unnamed opponent’s face.

The sting from a rock thrown by the scrawnier of the two causes the young American to turn to the second opponent, whom he shoves away. The combatants engage in what Professor Jonathan Gottschall calls “the monkey dance,” the taunting and shouting that usually leads to a fight, but in this case signals de-escalation. The author walks away from the men, inviting them to throw more rocks if they wish, while they shout epithets but don’t follow him farther.

The action then segues to Germany, the European country with whose culture I am most familiar. This chapter naturally touches closest to home for me and would do so for others who not only have roots in Deutschland, but family and friends living there and currently suffering under the multicultural regime of the “Davoisie” who consider Germany to be the crowning achievement of the Eurozone (notwithstanding the reality on the ground).

The next fight Mr. Langness finds himself in isn’t that much different in character than the previous minor skirmishes he describes, but it still leads to an epiphany of sorts. Perhaps this is because this fight is one-on-one, rather than two-on-one, and thus has an element of fairness and can then be perceived as a truer test of masculinity:

I had turned the corner of an alleyway and physically bumped into a man coming in the other direction. I reacted badly and verbally laid into him. He shot exclamations right back at me, and before I knew it we had stumbled into one of Gottschall’s monkey dances, with the intensity steadily escalating. The man hurled epithets across the alley. Words echoed off the cold brick walls, as his deep voice reverberated (72).

Mr. Langness gets another natural infusion of adrenaline and catches a cuffing shot on his ear (this hurts, as any boxer with cauliflower ears can attest). Both men jockey for position on each other, miss with their swings, then collide and somehow end up tangled together on the ground. The author never states whether he’s right- or left-handed, but a clash of heads or tripping over one-another’s lead feet is as likely an outcome as any other in a fight between two men with different non-dominant hands.

“I became conscious of thoughts moving through my head. It was like a pinpoint dot of calm in the eye of a storm, and I wondered to myself what was going through the man’s mind. Did he feel that he was fighting for Islam, for his race, as an oppressed minority of Europe?” (73)

He ponders this for a bit longer, as his opponent picks himself up, mutters a few more curse words, and then walks away.

The author speaks at this point not only of his “body…on fire with adrenaline” (73) but also the “weird calm [that] seemed to be settling on me.”

For men who have fought in the ring or in actual combat (and some have done both), this serenity is not surprising. It is such a common aspect of the martial experience that there is even a book about this paradoxical feature of violence as a perhaps necessary and definitely unavoidable aspect of being a man and proving one’s manhood. The metaphysical worth of combat has been noted by everyone from Julius Evola to Ernst Junger, and has now been reiterated for a younger generation by Julian Langness.

Whatever one thinks of Mr. Langness’s actions, it must be said that his book is good. It is short, well-written, and unpretentious. It’s perfect reading for those young men (and women) who are barraged constantly by a propaganda that says their instincts (and their eyes) are faulty. The book should serve as confirmation to these youths who must remain silent in school that the hoary words of cossetted academics and opportunistic bureaucrats should not be valued above what one feels in their blood and bones. (See also Mr. Langness’s Red Ice interview.)

Fistfights with Muslims in Europe is not a primer on how to start trouble with immigrants on the streets of Europe, although I predict that if it is reviewed at all by anyone on the left, it will be deliberately misconstrued as advocating violence. That’s ironic because Mr. Langness even notes that the kind of experiences he had in Europe would be difficult to have now even if one went looking for trouble. The continent has changed so much since he was there, even though it was only a few years ago. Muslims are no longer so much mixed in among the host population as they were previously. They now live a parallel and deliberately ghettoized existence in “no-go zones” where they willfully refuse assimilation (except for the welfare benefits aspect of European culture). They even rely on ancient codes of “honor” (including killings, disfiguration, and mutilation of females for “crimes” like “immodesty”) under the jurisdiction of sharia courts, sometimes with the complicity and even endorsement of European authorities. The expansion of the surveillance state also means the chances of being caught fighting on CCTV are also greater, and the political climate makes it possible that any act of self-defense against a Muslim aggressor may be perceived as aggression by the law.

Another irony of accusing Mr. Langness or Fistfights of promoting violence is that the suppression of healthy instincts, both regarding one’s tribe and the need to find a healthy outlet for aggression, is arguably part of what turns many young boys into monsters. It is hard to read the passages in the book about this “bonobo” video-game and pornography culture and not think of the Columbine killers, or over-medicated, directionless young men like Adam Lanza, or (and perhaps especially) Dylan Storm Roof, who as Jared Taylor acknowledged, would not even be possible in the kinds of societies race realists and those frankly just realistic about masculinity would build, if our enemies simply allowed us to do so.