Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog,

Disarmed and docile Europeans pose no meaningful threat to their governments’ depredations.

All sorts of reasons have been advanced for declining birthrates. SLL spotlights Europe as an advanced case and offers a hypothesis: its testicles have gone missing.

What does it do to a continent when a country 3,000 miles and an ocean away strikes the decisive blows in two of its cataclysmic wars? What does it do to that continent when that distant power assumes control over much of its defense? At a primal level, the very essence of manhood is the ability to defend one’s self and loved ones. Perhaps ceding responsibility for doing so is not emasculation, but it made Europe the little brother who must rely on big brother to fight his battles.

Naturally, big brother calls the tune. During the Cold War, that meant accepting one’s place under the US defense umbrella and toeing the US line on the Soviet Union. Only French President Charles de Gaulle challenged US domination, and that was more show than substance. With a nuclear arsenal and geographic proximity, the Soviet Union posed an existential threat to Europe, even more than it did to the US. If the Soviet Union had invaded during the de Gaulle era, France would have quickly rejoined a US-led alliance.

European politicians had another reason for accepting US domination. They were erecting the world’s most generous welfare states. Money saved on defense spending was spent on benefits. With little protest Europeans also swallowed high and steeply progressive tax rates in return for state-provided largess.

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 posed an existential threat to the US military-industrial-intelligence complex. NATO could have been disbanded and responsibility for Europe’s defense handed back to Europe. The US could have significantly cut military spending. It took ten years and 9/11, but the complex overcame the threat and preserved the status quo. It ginned up a story that Islamic extremism posed a danger to the West of the same magnitude as the former Soviet Union.

Islam has historically been riven with sectarian strife, notably the Sunni-Shia schism. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were living in caves when the US and United Kingdom invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Not one Islamic nation, and certainly none of the Islamic non-state groups, had any appreciable industrial capacity. Only one Islamic government, Pakistan’s, had nuclear weapons, and its arsenal was tiny compared to the West’s and Israel’s. To rate the Islamic “threat” as anything but minuscule compared to that posed by the Soviet Union was absurd

The only way the West could lose to Islam was if it defeated itself (see “How to Defeat Your Enemies,” SLL). To their credit, the governments of Germany, France, and New Zealand refused to swallow the US’s concocted rationales for the 2003 Iraq invasion—that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was fomenting terrorism—or support it. Globally an estimated 36 million people protested the invasion. The Guinness Book of Records lists a protest by three million in Rome as the largest ever antiwar rally.

We’ll see what happens if the US reneges on the Iran Nuclear Agreement, but to date 2003 remains the highpoint of European opposition to big brother. If they had known the consequences of US incursions into the Middle East and Northern Africa, they would have protested even more vociferously. The US has made a complete hash of it. The war against terror creates more terrorists, and turning the area into a hodgepodge of hell holes has prompted millions to flee, often to Europe.

They find a continent that economically has seen better days. The welfare state guarantees everything but the opportunity to work hard, keep what you earn, and make a better life for yourself. State favored companies use regulation to squelch smaller, less-connected competitors and stop innovative startups before they get started. The European Union is a bureaucratic, centralizing engine run amuck, creating more daunting obstacles to companies and entrepreneurs. There’s the usual corruption that comes with centralized bureaucracies. Monetary authorities are all-in on debt monetization and interest rate suppression policies that discourage honest savings and productive investment but encourage stock, bond, property, and derivatives speculation.

No surprise then that the European economy hasn’t grown much, if it all, the last few decades. Nor that it’s eating America and Asia’s dust in high-tech. It’s not even a surprise that this state of affairs evokes little protest among Europeans. When the government provides cradle-to-grave, you shut up and get with the program. Even if means you live with your parents into you’re thirties or forties, never have a real job or meaningful occupation, never marry or start a family, and nobody can remember one memorable thing you’ve done at your state-provided funeral.

Instead of taking an honest look at why Europeans are not having babies, politicians and other well-credentialed idiots have decreed that immigration is just the trick for declining birth rates and aging populations. They’ve been lucky; big brother America’s interventionist policies have created all sorts of refugees.

Islamic immigration is a focal point for all that ails Europe. Since 2003, there’s been no real opposition to the US’s refugee-creating policies. The refugees have found not just refuge, but state-provided benefits. Europe’s so-called leaders, apparatchiks, and media assure the population that Muslims bear no animus towards Europe. The fable goes that they will readily assimilate and become part of the taxpaying work force, forestalling the impending insolvency of the welfare state.

Only actual facts and a few alternative media outlets challenge this codswallop, for the most part Europeans have bought it. Are they fooled or neutered? The continent responsible for much of Western Civilization probably didn’t get stupid in a generation, which argues for the latter.

The isolated sparks of opposition are met with opprobrium, threats, fines and criminal sentences. Not a month goes by in which a prominent European politician doesn’t call for restrictions on the internet, the one forum that’s not completely cowed (or is it steered?). A few Eastern European nations are the resistance, pariahs. It wouldn’t be the worst thing for them if Angela Merkel-led “proper Europe” cut them off entirely.

One has to wonder if Europe’s preening politicians would be quite so obliviously oppressive (having old ladies beat up to stop them from voting and the like), if Europe’s population would be so docilely delusional, and if its Islamic immigrants would be better behaved if guns were as available as they are in the US. Pseudo-intellectuals smirk that guns are “potent phallic symbols.” True perhaps, but as noted, defending one’s self and loved ones is the first responsibility of the phallically endowed. Guns are a lot more effective than Tasers, knives, baseball bats, or calling the police.

There have been odious incidents of European women being groped, stripped, and sexually assaulted by Islamic criminals in public venues, unchallenged by what passes for European manhood. Just as odious is the pressure brought to bear on those seeking to publicize such incidents. In the US, your “intellectual” credentials aren’t in order unless you hail Europe as a “model.” It’s a model all right, for what happens when governments have no fear of their citizens. Europe’s emasculation is a potent argument for full firearms freedom in the United States.