Europe is Taking the Slow-Release Poison Pill
As Europe’s migrant crisis enters a new phase, it’s clear that European leaders have neither the will nor desire to preserve their own civilization.
John Daniel Davidson
The Federalist
On Sunday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she would not limit the number of refugees coming into the country. “On the issue of an upper limit, my position is clear,” Merkel said. “I won’t accept one.”
Setting aside the electoral implications of Merkel’s statement, which defied her party’s long-term coalition partner just two months before federal elections, it perfectly captured the refusal of European leaders to face the migrant crisis head-on—a refusal that in turn epitomizes the slow suicide of European civilization.
President Trump’s Warsaw speech earlier this month provoked predictable cries of racism and xenophobia from a mainstream media worried that even the term “western civilization” was a dog whistle for alt-right nationalists. Implicit in such criticism is the dubious notion that western values are not really western, that people of all cultures and religions desire more or less the same thing.
His critics say Trump was playing on white Europeans’ fears that Muslim migrants won’t adopt western values and won’t assimilate into European society, and therefore pose a direct threat to western civilization. But there’s another group that Trump no doubt had in mind, a group that also rejects western civilization and has little interest in defending or preserving it: European elites.
European Elites Refuse to Defend Women
Without splitting hairs over what we mean by “western civilization,” let’s stipulate that, at minimum, it encompasses things like freedom of speech and religion, equal rights for both sexes, and democratic rule of law.
