Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, wrote in his 2007 volume Europe: Today and Tomorrow:
“There is a self-hatred in the West that can be considered only as something pathological. The West attempts in a praiseworthy manner to open itself completely to the comprehension of external values, but it no longer loves itself; it now only sees what is despicable and destructive in its own history, while it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure there.”
This attitude of self-detestation is both the seed and the fruit of what we have come to call multiculturalism. Benedict does not reject multiculturalism in toto, arguing for its spiritualization, but recognizes that it “is sometimes mostly the abandonment and denial of what is one’s own, a flight from what is one’s own.”
The current pope takes a very different view of the West’s obligation to the Other, having appealed “to the parishes, the religious communities, the monasteries and sanctuaries of all Europe to take in one family of refugees.” According to this saintly luminary, the mistreatment of asylum seekers “makes one cry,” since they are merely “victims of injustice, of this throw-away economy” and war.
Pope Francis’ entreaty to the West flows directly from the 1968 episcopal conference in Medellin, Columbia, which, couched in Marxist categories beloved of Liberation Theologians, spoke of “listening to the cry of the poor and becoming the interpreter of their anguish.” It represented a determined effort, in the ecclesial language it affected, to turn the center into the periphery and the periphery into the center, that is, to raise the Third World to the level of the First and consign the capitalist West to the margins of History.
One way of accomplishing this task is revolution; another is the multicultural flooding of the West with Third Worlders who will radically transform the social, cultural, political and economic structure of Western civilization. (See Leonardo and Clodovis Boff, Introducing Liberation Theology.)
It appears that Pope Francis has got his wish, as Europe has been blessed with wave upon wave of asylum seekers benefitting from both pontifical authority and official complaisance. It has become evident that government officials in many countries and the mainstream media are in lockstep complicity, painting these asylum seekers as refugees deserving of our sympathy, and suppressing information about the epidemic of rape, disease and violence they bring with them. Regrettably, our contemporary Good Samaritans, Liberation Secularists, similarly engaged in exchanging the nodes of center and periphery, have much to answer for. Europe and the West in general are dying of multiculturalism, an affliction that looks as if it may be irreversible.
Hundreds of thousands of Muslims supposedly fleeing the carnage in Syria, over 70 per cent of whom are single males of draft age, are swarming the borders of Europe while some of their number will soon be airlifted into North America. Daniel Greenfield underlines the obvious, “Everyone can see that the majority of Muslim migrants are not sad Syrian toddlers, but angry Muslim men.” Indeed, the EU estimates that only one out of every five migrants claiming asylum is actually from Syria. But one in five is more than enough for Kilian Kleinschmidt, appointed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as Senior Field Coordinator of the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. The Syrians, he laments, “are the most difficult refugees I’ve ever seen.” Physical intimidation, death threats, smuggling, theft and mafia-like control of the camp’s affairs and resources are their stock in trade.
Clearly, it is not only the Syrians who are “difficult.” To adapt the famous line from the Meatloaf hit song, four out of five ain’t bad. The Human Relief Foundation estimates that 95-97 per cent of the migrants crowding Calais, hoping to make their way to the U.K. “to get money,” are “fit,” restive, violence-prone young men who hail from many Muslim nations.
Deputy Chief executive of the Human Relief Foundation (HRF), Kassim Tokan, seems puzzled by the fact that many of these claimants come from “certain countries, which are safe, [where] they can work.” Another report reveals that approximately 90 per cent of the Muslim “refugees” from “certain countries,” packing a train from Budapest to Vienna, were men between the ages of 18-45, who threatened, beat and stole from other passengers — a harbinger of things to come. The mayhem they will visit upon the West — which German Chancellor Angela Merkel ludicrously deems an “opportunity” based on “the principles of dignity, human rights and the right to political asylum” — will be nothing short of cataclysmic.
But the malignant farce goes on. Syrian migrants are now suing the Berlin state government for lagging on benefit payments. Carol Brown provides some of the details of the German catastrophe: school children have been indentured to clean up garbage and human waste in public places; trains are out of service until they can be disinfected; girls have to cover up lest the invaders be offended or lose control of themselves; and mysterious illnesses have begun to circulate. Thomas Lifson has re-posted a video of these Muslim interlopers showing them trashing the free housing they received, a handsel of what Europe may look like in the course of time. The graphic images of the Austrian town of Nickelsdorf, mounded with refuse and smeared with fecal matter, present an even clearer picture of Europe’s future.
And, as usual, the media are traitorously complicit. As Dave Jolly writes in Godfather Politics, “The media completely ignores the huge financial and security impact that the refugees are placing on some of these countries. Many European nations are on the brink of bankruptcy and cannot afford to start paying out millions of Euros to support the refugees. Some of the countries have expressed concern about the security risks, stating that they suspect members of ISIS have been hiding among the refugees in order to spread their terrorism into other countries.”
Nor should America expect to be spared. Refugee resettlement programs are targeting small American communities and unlikely states, which as Carol Brown says, is how “you wind up with pockets of Somalis in places like Wyoming.” The state of Idaho is fast becoming a Muslim haven as it absorbs migrants, not only from Syria, but from Iraq, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia. Tennessee is increasingly prey to Muslim infiltration. The Islamization of Kansas is proceeding as we speak. “Maine’s generous welfare policies,” Greenfield points out, “began collapsing once Somali Muslims swarmed in to take advantage of them.” Brown comments: “may we, here in America, do everything possible to ensure that this is not our future” — though the Obama presidency, the media consortium, the entertainment industry and the American education system are doing everything in their power to make sure it will be. And following the election of pro-Muslim power broker Justin Trudeau in my own country, Canada, too, has opened the sluice valve to its eventual destabilization. It is no accident that ISIS supporters have celebrated Trudeau’s electoral victory.
Even though the oil-rich Islamic nations have refused to admit these asylum seekers, knowing the cost in resources and the prospect of social unrest and internecine conflict such an influx would entail (while, it must be said, plotting to export Islam to the West), liberal politicians have opened the door wide to what is nothing less than an invasion, on the grounds of mercy and compassion. Plainly, more sinister calculations may also be at work — electoral bloc advantages, or potentially treasonable policies of societal collapse, as may be the case under the Obama administration. The argument we sometimes hear that these Muslim hordes will enter a progressively depleted workforce and generate sufficient taxable income to support Europe’s aging pensioners is an obvious canard; most will find themselves on welfare, adding to Europe’s fiscal woes. That we are witnessing a disaster in the making is of no consequence to our leaders or the elite opinion makers and bleeding-heart constituencies in league with them.
As Bret Stephens warns in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled The Death of Christendom, “The death of Europe is in sight.” He then asks rhetorically,
“Could Europe’s liberal political traditions, its religious and cultural heritage, long survive a massive influx of Muslim immigrants, in the order of tens of millions of people? No. Not given Europe’s frequently unhappy experience with much of its Muslim population. Not when you have immigrant groups that resist assimilation and host countries that make only tentative civic demands.”
His analysis of the looming disaster is unimpeachable. Europeans no longer believe in the things from which their civilization sprang:
“Judaism and Christianity; liberalism and the Enlightenment; martial pride and capability; capitalism and wealth. Still less do they believe in fighting or sacrificing or paying or even arguing for these things. Having ignored and undermined their own foundations, they wonder why their house is coming apart.”
The same admonition applies to the West in general. If it is not true to its core inheritance, namely “the marriage of reason and revelation that produced a civilization of technological mastery tempered by human decency,” and deeds its immemorial patrimony to the standard bearers and foot soldiers of an incompatible and destructive civilization, John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” will surely come to resemble Ezekiel’s Valley of Bones.
For what is now taking place affects us on an immense scale of historical detritus. The institutions that guarantee our rights and freedoms are falling into rubble no less than the triple walls of Constantinople were reduced under the siege of Mehmed II. Just as the artillery bombardment of Constantinople was carried out by Western mercenaries in the service of Mehmed, bringing massive cannon to bear against the city (see Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time), so are we — the appeasers, facilitators, and sycophants as well as the tolerant, apathetic and misguided — surrendering the legacy of the ages to an army of barbarians and to our own self-contempt.
This is how we make restitution for what we have come to regard as our “despicable” history. This is our form of “liberation theology” in its secular manifestation, our “abandonment and denial of what is one’s own.” To put it in other terms, Francis has got the better of Benedict and those of us who still remain faithful to our roots have got the worst of Francis.
The multicultural paradox is readily disambiguated with just a little thought. Our social charity is the product of our spiritual penury, and the political calculus of our leaders in its demographic, electoral or empathetic forms is the result of intellectual debauchery. For what we call the refugee crisis is really the crisis of the West. And the refugees, the asylum seekers, the migrants marching in their hundreds of thousands and soon-to-be millions through our open borders are really an army we have recruited in the campaign to destroy ourselves. M-Day, it would appear, is in its final planning stage. And we have become our own fifth column, the multicultural architects of our own destruction.
First published in the American Thinker.
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One Response
Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones, eh?
Ezekiel 37.
“The Spirit of the Lord (RUACH ADONAI) was upon me, and carried me out in the Spirit of theLORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones. And caused me to pass by them round about, and behold, there were very many in the open valley, and they were very dry.
“And he said unto me, “Son of man, can these bones live?
“And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest.”
‘Again he said unto me, “Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD.
‘Thus saith the LORD GOD unto these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the LORD.”
‘So I prophesied as I was was commanded, and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold, a shaking, and the bones came together, bone t o his bone.
‘And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above, but there was no breath in them.
‘Then said He unto me, Prophesy unto the wind [or, the breath], “Thus saith the Lord GOD – Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.
“So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.”
Me, I remember that; and I also remember a certain great passage from the Gospel of John, chapter 5, verses 19-29, that is set for the Feast of All Souls, which was yesterday – “For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth whom He will….Verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live.” And I remember the account of the Raising of Lazarus, which is recorded by John in chapter 11, particularly verses 32-44, which my parish church read during our celebration of the Feast of All Saints. The voice of Lord says “Lazarus, come out!”…and Lazarus, alive again, answered the call.
Death and resurrection, exile and return, falling and rising is the pattern that runs through the history of Israel…and of Israel’s daughter, the Church, and every society inhabited by the faith. The arc is always toward life, not death; the *final* word is always Life and restoration. The *very* last word is the triumphal cry of YHWH from the throne – “Behold, I make all things new”.
Those who feel disheartened or are even in a certain sense grimly enjoying bleak visions of the impending destruction of ‘the West’ would be advised to read Jacques Ellul at his most austere – perhaps “Prayer and Modern Man” or “Hope in an Age of Abandonment”, or else G K Chesterton – I recommend particularly, from Chesterton, “The Everlasting Man”, the chapter entitled “The Five Deaths of the Faith”. The final chapter of Charles Williams’ idiosyncratic church history, “The Descent of the Dove” is also worthy of some reflection, with its deliberate retort against W B Yeats’ much-quoted ‘things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.” Williams, instead, states calmly, “The Centre cannot be touched; all that can possibly be done there has been done, outside Jerusalem, under Tiberias.”