Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wharton, Capote, Mann, Kafka, Svevo, Hesse, turn over in your graves!
The cosmopolitan Europe of Paris, Vienna and Prague only managed to come together briefly over your tombs! Its thirty-some nations, each with their own language, quarrels and elephantine historical memories, will soon be gone, destroyed neither by Russian tanks nor American missiles, but by their refusal to unite.
If only the ‘construction of Europe’ had been more political and less bureaucratic! If only Europeans, who still remember the worst war in history, could have persuaded each other of the need to create a European identity rather than a European bureau-cracy!
The stunning rapidity with which the European Union is falling apart is matched only by its dangers. Forget Brexit (the UK thinking of leaving), Grexit (Greece recently almost forced to leave), Nexit (the Netherlands threatening a referendum to match the Brit’s), forget the poor mayor of Calais trying to deal with 6,000 tented migrants determined to reach Britain on the other side of the Channel, and village officials on the Greek-Macedonian border desperate to reach Angela Merkel’s open arms.
Forget that most of those who braved the treacherous Mediterranean to get to the Promised Land - Europe’s welfare state - are men in their twenties with nothing to lose. Aside from God knows how many ISIS sleeper cells they may represent, just consider the inevitable anger when even humble countries put up barbed wire fences to keep them from passing through on the way to a German or Scandinavia El Dorado.
If you think I’m a conspiracy-theorist, Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified on yesterday Capitol Hill yesterday that ISIS was preparing more attacks in Europe and on the US. And the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, testified at the same hearing that ISIS was "taking advantage of the torrent of migrants to insert operatives into that flow," adding that they were "pretty skilled at phony passports so they can travel ostensibly as legitimate travelers.”
Even if these young men were apolitical when they left a home country with 50% unemployment - or ISIS gangs - or US drone attacks, how long will it take for them to decide that enough is enough: the first world ransacks their third world, and doesn’t even have the decency to give them another chance at life!
Are the Europeans doing ISIS’ work for it?
Last year I wrote no fewer than six blogs about the inevitable Islamization of Europe, the most detailed being In Europe, the Arithmetic of Otherness and Sovereignty, dated March 3, 2015:
Notwithstanding its conquests and achievements, seventy years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, a Europe of carefully tended landscapes, cathedrals and museums, is scarcely less fragmented than during the nineteen-thirties. While right-wing parties rise alarmingly in the polls, an official left mesmerized by the United States confronts a base that increasingly rebels against World Bank/IMF-imposed austerity and supports Palestine against America’s ally, Israel. While for the United States, Otherness requires regime change, a Europe in which the divide between Christianity and Islam is becoming increasingly violent preaches acceptance of Otherness. And while the United States ‘war on terrorism’ takes place outside its territory (or ‘homeland’), Washington’s fabricated crisis in Ukraine prevents Europeans from dealing with a situation that threatens their own ‘homelands’.
A large part of the responsibility for Europe’s coming apart at the seams can be attributed to the US’s ceaseless search for enemies to destroy, mindless of the consequences for its ‘allies’. But Europe’s leaders must also bear their share of blame for accepting to ‘follow the leader’.
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