Charlemagne And Islam, The Crusades, And The Alamo - Keeping People Out Is What We Do

Mohammed is now the most popular boy's birth name in both the UK and France - no surprise as waves of Muslim immigrants, welcomed under the banner of diversity and inclusivity, have changed the very fabric of European civilization. 

 

France and its laicity, an all-encompassing policy conferring French citizenship on all who immigrate and based on the assumption that any foreigner who becomes French by law will become one by culture as well.  It was Europe's most integrationist policy, one which refused to ignore radical racial, ethnic, and religious differences and felt that because of the historic nature of French cultural wisdom and appeal, all newcomers would soon become indistinguishable from the native born. 

Nothing could have been more naive. Muslim immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa poured into an open-bordered country, remained deliberately isolated, adherent to Third World customs and Islamic law, and were increasingly insolent and aggressive about France's attempts to secularize them.  Allah's law superseded French law, and no amount of persuasion, intimidation, or force would budge them from their principles. 

 

The French were caught between Scylla and Charybdis - on the one hand they believed in laicity and the full and unquestioned assimilation of newcomers; and on the other hand they saw a threat to their millennia-long Christian, European legacy.

France was always la fille ainee de l'Eglise - the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church for having saved Europe from the Muslim Saracens at the Battle of Roncesvalles - but watched as its hallowed traditions of art, literature, philosophy, and culture were being eroded by a defiant and utterly opposed Muslim horde.  

The irony was not lost as French SWAT teams fought African migrants in the Northern suburbs, trying to teach them a lesson lost in the centuries since Charlemagne. 

Now it is too late.  The birth rate among Muslims in France (the largest such population in Europe) is growing exponentially while that of native born French is declining.  Whole arrondissements of Paris more resemble Africa than Europe.  From the hundreds of mosques in the country clerics damn the French and their Islamophobic policies.  

Muslims categorically refuse to abandon the veil, Sharia, and the medieval traditions of Islam, and the French, still believing in accommodating integration resist arrest and deportation of radical imams. 

The political Right is resurgent, and the party of Marine LePen and Marion Marechal are outspoken and unrepentant in their harsh criticism of Islam.  Islam is not a religion, says Marechal, but a radical political force out to establish a ruling caliphate throughout Europe and erase all traces of  Christian, European culture.  

All Muslim immigration must stop and a purge of mosques, madrassas, and Islamic political cells in France must take place.  The most radical, divisive, and aggressive clerics, French citizens or not, must be deported.  France should take every measure to recalibrate and to restore the dominance and preeminence of Christian Europe. 

 

Italy under the leadership of Giorgia Meloni has taken the same unequivocal stance.  Islamic fundamentalism has no place in Italy.  It runs counter to Italian, European, and Christian mores, laws, and traditions, and anyone preaching otherwise must be deported.  Political leaders in Hungary, Poland, Germany, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands have been no less demanding. 

Closing the American southern border is of less consequence. Most aliens making their way across the Rio Grande are Christian, albeit of a different ethnicity and cultural background.  Their presence is more a threat to native-born American employment, a drain on public resources, and a challenge to the white, Protestant ethos.

Xenophobic nationalism is what it is, cry progressives on both sides of the Atlantic. Who said that France must ad infinitum be white and Christian?  Who said that America should not one day soon be rainbow, mixed race, and mixed ethnicity?  And would not that diversity be an advantage?

Of course not, say conservatives.  It's one thing to have highly educated, intelligent Indians, Chinese, and Southeast Asians immigrate and fill key technical positions in emerging AI technologies; another thing altogether to be swamped by lettuce pickers who simply delay the automation of agriculture, add to the public dole and increase the ethnic and cultural divisions within an already divided society. 

If migrants were to assimilate into European culture - retain enough of their home cultures to keep important cultural links to the past but reject any and all contradictory philosophy, religious demands, and ethnic claims - they would be welcome.  Yet no European country wants enclaves of foreignness within its boundaries. 

So, nationalism? Yes indeed, and there is nothing unique or wrong about it.  Ever since the first Paleolithic human settlements, territory has been claimed and defended.  'This is mine' has been the rallying cry of human societies forever, and expansionism the natural sequel.

There was no way that the new America was going to stay east of the Mississippi and let the land beyond stand as Indian territory; and no way that Europe was going to let the Muslim hordes of Mohammed retain control over the Holy Land - Europe's territory, the birthplace of Jesus Christ and the place of his resurrection. 

China wants Tibet, Taiwan and the Turkic speaking regions of its west to come under full Han control.  Russia has been overtly territorial and nationalistic in its takeover of Crimea and eventual absorption of the rest of Ukraine.  Iran wants total hegemony over the Middle East. 

If there was ever a fabulist fantasy in recent years, it was the One World movement - the Utopian idea of a harmonious, interdependent, collaborative world of peace and cooperation.  To even suggest this was not only to ignore the lessons of history - territorial and aggressive since the beginning of time - and to dismiss the permanence of a self-interested, defensive, territorial, aggressive, and defiant human nature. 

The international Left has sold its febrile, untenable, fictional dream for decades - diversity, equity, inclusivity, and identity.  There is an a priori advantage to diversity they say, a divine right, and absolute truth although they have proven nothing of the sort.  Why should a white European culture responsible for a world civilization of high learning, art, philosophy, science, jurisprudence, and architecture be dismissed in favor of a polyglot peasantry? Prove it. 

There is nothing wrong with the world the way it is - a competitive, harsh, aggressive, territorial place - for it has always been so.  Darwin's theories don’t only apply to finches and barn swallows but to people and cultures.  Competition is at the heart of humanity and the engine of progress.  The more able, capable, strong, intelligent, and visionary will always dominate those who are not.  Rebellions, civil strife, wars, and perennial violence are the rough edges of social evolution -  a playing out of innate self-interest. 

 

Territorialism, xenophobic nationalism is an expression of such evolutionary destiny.  Human beings have always wanted their own patch, defended it to the death, and expanded it when opportunity presented itself. It is natural, expected, and predictable. The attempts of progressives to deny this ineluctable human and social nature, and to attempt to neutralize enterprise, acquisition, and expansion simply delay the inevitable. 

The whining and offense taken by the Left at territorialism, nationalism, and xenophobia is understandable - idealism has no bounds.  Yet such idealism has turned Europe into exactly the divided, sectarian, isolationist ethnic and religious cabals that it so wished to avoid.  Now it must extricate itself; but such extrication will not be easy, for if there ever was a socio-cultural force that dug its heels in so deeply as Islam and from that purchase demanded more and more turf and influence, it is hard to find. 

The world is now turning radically conservative, having had enough of the fanciful, one world, accommodating nostrums of the Left and is fighting back.  Leaders do not hesitate to call out Islam for what it is - an aggressive, highly motivated, unintimidated political force - to defend the glories of empire and Western civilization, and to reject infantile ideas of 'inclusivity'. 

In America, politicians no longer hesitate to defend the idea of a central Christian ethos at the core of American society - one of traditional religion, sexuality, and social configuration.  Immigration, the heart and soul of the American Republic since its inception, will continue, but only on certain well defined  terms.

The era of open borders, halcyon 'diversity', and racial and ethnic identity is over.