This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

We are ignoring a European crisis that is going to change all our lives irreversibly and for ever. It is the huge, tragic surge of African migrants across the Mediterranean.



Once inside the borderless European Union, these newcomers can and will settle anywhere. There is no law or power that can stop them.



I first became aware of this when I went to Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in North Africa. I had gone to tease Spain for moaning about Gibraltar, while it had its own Gibraltar in Morocco.



But much more serious was the virtual siege of Ceuta (and its nearby twin, Melilla) by migrants, immense numbers of them, crowding up against the 20ft fences which are all that separate this little piece of Spain from Africa.

They climbed. They swam round or paddled past the barricade in makeshift rafts. It was impossible to stop all of them getting through. They walk thousands of miles from all the many famines, massacres and civil wars (often started by us) which beset that tragic continent.



Following the building of an effective fence between Greece and Turkey, migrants from Asia and the Middle East who used to come through Greece are now also coming to Europe by sea alongside countless Africans.



This problem has grown much worse since we madly overthrew Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi (who tried to stop the refugees) and turned that country into a failed state with no control over its own coastline.



Official figures, probably severe underestimates, say 31,000 crossed from Africa to Europe in 2013. Some 42,000 have tried to reach Italy alone this year. Hundreds drown in the attempt.

It reminds me of how the US-Mexican border used to be 20 years ago, when they simply could not cope with the multitudes of economic migrants hurrying across the muddy dribble that is the Rio Grande. For in summer, the Mediterranean, like the Rio Grande, is no real barrier. If they can reach the north coast of Africa, they can reach Italy, Greece or Spain. And then they can get to Calais.



That vast illegal migration from Mexico helped to transform the USA into the bilingual, multicultural nation it has since become. Something similar may be in store for Europe.



Actually I admire the migrants’ bravery and determination. Nobody can blame them for wanting to leave their blasted war zones. Nobody, in turn, could blame the nations of Europe if they said they could not cope with them (for they cannot) and took serious steps to stop them coming.



As it is, the political leaders of the Continent prefer not to face the problem at all, leaving the worst-affected states to do what they can and hoping the problem will go away, while it gets bigger all the time. It would be a good start if we admitted that this is actually happening.

We MUST ask: What was their heroism for?

Since I first blundered on to the edge of war, and saw what bullets do to human flesh and bone, I have given daily thanks that my generation never had to fight. These days, when I watch old films of D-Day, I imagine myself, trembling and gibbering with fear and cold, turning tail and running rather than face the German guns.



I still don’t know how they did it, soft human flesh running head on into hard, cruel metal.



And I also wonder, more and more, how it came about that young men found themselves having to do this horrible thing. And so, while I honour them for it, and understand why they had to do it, I do not honour those politicians whose vanity and stupidity made it necessary.



If we are serious about revering these men, and I am very serious about it, hasn’t the time come to look once again at the 1939 war, and how it came about, and whether it was as good a war as it is cracked up to be?



For if we don’t, how will we avoid the same thing happening again? In my experience, most of my generation still have a glamorised, idealised view of the Second World War that has little to do with what really took place.



Those who actually fought in it generally shut up about the horrid details. The only D-Day veteran I ever knew, asked to describe what it was like to step ashore at Arromanches that morning, would only say: ‘There seemed to be rather a lot of sand flies about.’



An equally eloquent silence is to be found in the war cemetery at Bayeux, where the terse and hopelessly sad inscriptions on the graves of all those 18-year-olds will reduce anyone to helpless tears in less than a minute.



Guns aren't the real mass killers



Here are two reasons to wonder if ‘more gun laws’ is the right response to the increasingly frequent rampage killings that seem to be happening almost everywhere, even though guns are no more common than they used to be.



One: According to the American news network ABC, Santa Barbara mass killer Elliot Rodger had been taking the mind-altering drug Alprazolam, a benzodiazepine. A large number of mass killers have been found – when investigated – to have been using legal or illegal mind-altering drugs. In many cases the authorities have not bothered to find out, so the correlation might be even stronger.



Two: Canada already has tighter gun laws, yet there has just been a rampage shooting in the quiet Canadian city of Moncton. Finland, as strict as Canada, and Germany, which has even tighter gun controls, have also been affected.



Could we for once actually think about this, instead of just reacting?

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President Barack Obama tells us we must stay in the EU to suit the needs of the USA.



And he tells Scotland it must stay in the UK for the same reason. Which part of ‘national sovereignty’ does this President not understand?



I wouldn’t blame Scots for voting ‘Yes’ just to make it clear that foreign politicians should stay out of their business. For the rest of us it’s more complicated.

The USA has been trying to cram us into a federal Europe since the 1940s, for its own benefit, not ours.



But wasn’t it American pressure that forced us to give in to the IRA in 1998, in an agreement that will lead, in the end, to Northern Ireland leaving the UK? Does one hand know what the other’s doing?



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