Last weekend my daughter, who lives in Vienna, sent us a photograph of herself, her husband, and our four-month-old grandson enjoying themselves in the Kristmasmarkt in Karlsplatz.

Today a similar holiday marketplace in Berlin was attacked by a jihadist, who rammed a truck into the happy crowd. As I write the death-toll stands at twelve, with forty-eight injured.

The attacker has been arrested. Multiple news outlets have reported that he is a Pakistani “refugee”. ISIS has claimed responsibility.

Forgive me for asking, but: why in God’s name is Germany admitting “refugees” from Pakistan? Is Pakistan at war, or under siege? Is the country suffering famine, or pestilence?

It is not.

Europe is very, very, ill, a victim of a weak but highly opportunistic pathogen, and if it cannot soon mount a robust immune response it will die. Even if it can manage such a response, at this late hour it will be a close-run thing — and we have already passed the point, I think, where it can recover without some very serious “unpleasantness”. But the choice is now very plain: awaken or die.

Most likely it will die, I think. (Already there are calls to close down the traditional Christmas-markets for the sake of security. This is what late-stage cultural immunodeficiency looks like.)

When a nation forgets her skill in war, when her religion becomes a mockery, when the whole nation becomes a nation of money-grabbers, then the wild tribes, the barbarians drive in. – John Howard

I wonder: when the last native Europeans have dwindled to a final few, and they are forced to watch one another put to the sword, will they worry, most of all, about an anti-Muslim “backlash”? Will they wonder, in that moment, how things might have been if they had stood for themselves — and then say, just as they are annihilated, “But that’s not who we are”?

“Not ‘who you are’?” says Gnon, with majestic indifference. “Right, perhaps not. Very well, then. Goodbye.”

* * *



Update, December 20th: According to this report, the Pakistani “refugee” arrested yesterday has been released. The truck had been hijacked by someone who shot and killed the driver. That attacker is still at large.

Saarland’s Minister of the Interior, Klaus Buillon, is quoted as saying that Germany is in a “state of war’. Duh.