Popular paralysis amid a political class that’s committed to globalism at any cost has brought the cradle of The Enlightenment to the edge of its cultural grave
By Mark Cromer
There was something sadly predictable as news of the radical Islamist terror bombing in Manchester spread across the networks, from the immediate aftermath of the blast that has claimed 22 lives so far and in the days that have followed—and that is it was all sadly predictable.
The breaking news flashes reporting some kind of an explosion at a British arena during a pop show followed by the surreal verbal contortions of the reporters, the cable news anchors and the news analysts summoned to dissect what had just happened all while doing their mandatory best to obscure, downplay and deflect the reality of who and what was responsible for it.
As the minutes gave way to hours, across the three main cable news networks in the United States viewers were treated once more to the fog of politically correct war. At MSNBC, Chris Hayes was only on the air for scant minutes before he began referencing rightwing, white supremacist attacks in America. The Ghost of Timothy McVeigh made his mandatory appearance. Over at CNN, Erin Burnett sounded as if she was praying that it might somehow have been ‘an industrial accident’ or perhaps pyrotechnics for the concert’s finale gone horribly awry. The Irish Republican Army, which ended its bombing campaign in the United Kingdom two decades ago as its political wing Sinn Féin entered into the negotiations that produced the ‘Good Friday’ accords (despite some dead-ender elements), was also evoked in what seemed a passing hope that perhaps ‘The Troubles’ had returned.
For if it was an act of terror, it was clear that Burnett and others on CNN were channeling the sentiments of top aide Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta, who had bemoaned in emails that the Islamist terror attacks in San Bernardino in December 2015 hadn’t been committed by white rightwing gunmen that had killed Arabic victims instead of the reality that it was another terror attack unleashed by Islamic jihadists on Americans of all stripes.
Even Fox News—now rudderless and running aground after Rupert Murdoch turned the bridge of the powerhouse network over to his legacy-challenged and shore-hugging sons James and Lachlan—seemed initially hesitant to suggest that the Islamic terror groups that have declared and waged relentless war against the West for decades now might be continuing to wage that very war on the streets of the United Kingdom. (At FNC, the initial reluctance also likely had something to do with the Sky News reporting that Fox was airing live throughout its immediate coverage of the attack and the UK-based network’s own politically-infused guidelines.)
The awkward-turned-absurdist hesitancy to even just tentatively state the likely origins of the Manchester blast were now simply old hat to most viewers older than thirty, the reliably shameful byproduct of the political groupthink that has been instrumental in shaping news coverage across most of the establishment media since well-before September 11, 2001, but a filter that has been reinforced and aggressively enforced ever since.
Watching so much of the establishment media tip-toe through the wanton carnage that still smoldered, one might imagine what reporting of ‘The Blitz’ would have looked and sounded like across television, desktop, laptop and ‘mobile devices’ around the wired world today, as nervous knockoffs of Edward R. Murrow stood against the backdrop of a night sky lit bright with spotlights and tracer rounds to report: “Yes Erin, it does appear that London is possibly under some sort of mass aerial attack, though a Biblical-scale meteor shower has not been ruled out. And even if, as very preliminary reports have suggested, that the Luftwaffe has unleashed nearly 1,000 Junkers, Dorniers and Heinkels from occupied France against the British homeland tonight, the smoke and blinding flashes of the flak barrage have made it impossible so far to accurately identify whether the planes—and we must stress if these indeed are planes that are raining death on London tonight—are in fact German. We have no confirmable information to that extent at this moment. While Hitler has vowed to flatten London to bitter ash, we must remind our viewers that madmen and the groups that follow them can make bold claims and celebrate the actions of others that serve their interests even when they have nothing directly to do with them. So as London civilians huddle in the underground as their capital city burns above them, we must not jump to conclusions. And if it turns out that the sky was filled tonight with planes adorned with Nazi swastikas and the Balkenkreuz, investigators must then rule out whether they were authentic, or, whether perhaps this was another group altogether hijacking the iconography of the Germans for their own purposes? Lots of questions on the cratering ground here in London tonight, Erin, I can tell you that. Also, we’ve just learned that the Greater London Society for Peace, Love & Learning German will be holding a memorial candlelight vigil around whatever’s left of this city tomorrow morning. Now back to you, Erin.”
But this is not the fall of 1940 and the enemy—dare they even be called that now—are not launching strategic bombing campaigns over free Europe’s great cities, but rather their agents of death have been flying comfortably in on commercial airliners even as others still cross the Mediterranean neatly camouflaged amid the millions of people pouring out of nation-states wiped from the map by Western imperial hubris and other nations that still exist in concept but remain perpetually mired in sheer misery, unable to offer even the glimpse of a dream of a better future for their burgeoning populations.
And so into the West they continue to pour.
And for all the claims of ‘women and children’ fleeing their war-torn countries, the photographs capturing the vast human exodus arriving on Europe’s shores reveal the truth: they are legions of young, fighting age males.
Journalist Christopher Caldwell’s detailed and fearless account of the history and impacts of mass immigration into Europe; Reflections On The Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West, paints a grim portrait of the position the continent and its traditional liberal cultures currently find themselves confronting. A writer for the Financial Times and The New York Times, Caldwell’s work was published by Random House in July 2010 and lays to methodical waste the long-running, one-dimensional assertion that mass immigration has enriched stagnating European economies and communities, but rather has created ‘ethnic colonies’ within countries—the aptly entitled ‘No-Go Zones.’
“Violence has kept native Europeans out of certain immigrant neighborhoods as effectively as an electric fence,” Caldwell writes. “While still European territory de jure, they are places where Europeans sense they have lost their right of way.” He quotes George Walden, a former Tory minister in the United Kingdom, who observed: “Silently, squeamishly, the natives are disengaging and the lines of ethnic mini-states are forming around us.”
The roiling violence of France’s banlieues has been growing for decades but exploded into the open in the mid-2000s with such force even the most determined French advocates for relentless immigration couldn’t conceal the chaos it had brought any longer. In 2005 alone, riots were reported in France on more than 200 nights that year. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy, then Interior Minister, told the French public that as 2005 came to a close that more than 9,000 police cars had been burned “or otherwise destroyed” by rampaging mobs across the land of liberté, égalité, fraternité. That national orgy of violence reached its zenith in France in late October and early November 2005, when the immigrant-packed banlieues detonated once again after two youths were electrocuted to death as they attempted to hide from police in a power station. The resulting convulsions tore into Paris as more than 8,000 cars were set aflame, businesses gutted and nearly 3,000 people arrested during two weeks of looting, anarchy and arson.
Two years after those riots had seared the French psyche, the cold reality of just what has become of their nation was again on display when a 32-year-old Congolese immigrant—who already had established a deep criminal record in France—was stopped by transit agents in Gare du Nord for not having a transit ticket. That such a convict subsequently went berserk at a metro Paris train station during a police encounter wasn’t a shock, but as Caldwell details, the hundreds of immigrants that immediately set upon the transit agents in the station in what became yet another riot was one more stunning jolt across France.
“The rioters understood their attack as aimed at France and its symbols,” Caldwell writes, noting the desperation of police forces that found their uniforms alone were enough to trigger mob violence in immigrant neighborhoods. As officers attempt to make arrests they are now routinely greeted with shouts from the sidewalks to the windows to the rooftops “Nique la France!” Translated to English, the immigrants in France are shouting: ‘Fuck France!’
Less than a decade later and following the series of Islamic terror attacks that bookended the City of Light in 2015 precious little has changed, save perhaps the accelerating pace of mass immigration into Europe as the turmoil across the Mediterranean continues to boil with no end in sight.
And as witnessed in Manchester this week, also unchanged is the governing elites’ penchant for meeting such bloodletting with hashtags, candles, chalked slogans, flowers, memorials and solemn lectures on the moral imperative of acceptance and surrender cloaked as cultural diversity. The price of their prized cultural reorganization was, is and will continue to be horrifying bloodbaths carried out at the hands of Islamists who have declared war and are prosecuting it patiently and without hesitation, quarter or boundary.
Given the choice—and it is one—between borders and bombings, the robotic suits and skirts that govern from London to Brussels, from Paris to Berlin, from Prague to Rome, have chosen the bombings of their people.
But the epic betrayal by bloodless bureaucrats in those Old World seats of power who have sold their people down the river is relatively old news now, bitter as it still may be. What is far more shocking is the relative popular acquiescence that continues to greet it in the aftermath of every new explosion, mass shooting or hijacked vehicle-turned-steamroller.
While the globalist elites have unburdened themselves with what they see as essentially provincial clichés such as belonging to a people or a culture let alone a nation even as they face an enemy that is wedded to such identity to the point of violent fanaticism, the majority of European people seem unlikely to have shed such identities.
Yet they also appear increasingly frozen in the dull daze of some sort of shellshock, only to emerge just in time for the latest celebrity-led bizarre sing-along about ‘unity’ before retreating once more into the tech-addled haze of their daily lives that connects them to everything but the very real war that has arrived on their streets.
For where is the unadulterated rage by the majority in Britain following the blast in Manchester? Where is the fury on the streets that’s not meant to send Muslim citizens packing en masse but rather the United Kingdom’s governing elites running for their political hides back to Parliament to declare war on those that are waging it against their people and prosecute it accordingly?
In the aftermath of the 2015 terror attacks in Paris, then-President Francois Hollande vowed: “This is war!” But he then promptly took lunch Italian-style and never returned to fight. His successor Emmanuel Macron now seems intent on reasoning with Islamists and reassuring his fellow French citizens it’s all a terrible misunderstanding. Failing that, Macron appears to be looking for more swaths and sweeps of French land to quietly surrender in cultural reality but sans any ‘bad optics’ such as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his cortege of black-robed mullahs strolling through a reoccupied Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the background.
But where are the French people as cities like Calais are overrun with migrants fighting running battles with outnumbered security forces? Even if a new Vichy has taken shape in Élysée Palace, where are the Gaullists prepared to literally fight to free France from the scourge of ‘No-Go Zones’ and the colonies of a violent foreign culture that are now garrisoned throughout their land?
As thousands of migrants and Islamists march through cities and even small towns across Europe menacingly making demands in ever more brazen shows of strength based in a willingness to act, where are the tens or even hundreds of thousands of French parading through the banlieues holding the French tri-colors high and putting the migrants on cold notice that French citizens will not be intimidated, threatened or attacked? Where are 50,000 British men marching with their sleeves rolled up through the sharia-dominated neighborhoods of Birmingham that now teem with Islamists to deliver the appropriate message of ‘You are welcome here to join our society and culture and celebrate the freedoms we all share. You are not welcome here to subvert, attack and kill it.’
Where are they?
Some may argue that Europe became inoculated against terrorism as the horror of World War II was but a generation old before the radical Left and various national liberation movements began their long wave of terror on the continent punctuated by bombings, kidnappings, public executions and hijackings.
But there is a fundamental difference between those acts of terror and the war the West faces today.
The IRA, the Red Brigades, ETA, Baader-Meinhof, the Black September Organization and the rest of the farm team operations that were committing acts of terror in the 1960s and ‘70s weren’t seeking the subjugation and eventual elimination of European states or European culture. As heinous as their acts were, they weren’t driven by the desire of conquest and total subjugation. In contrast, the goals of ISIS, Al-Qaeda & Co. are undeniably clear. They broadcast them daily and when they state their intent to see their black banners fluttering from atop The Vatican, that’s no more fantastical bluster than Hitler’s detailed plans were in the pages of Mein Kampf of just what he had in mind for Europe and its peoples.
To suggest massive and aggressive street demonstrations by European people in response to the ongoing war of terror being waged against them would somehow be tantamount to ‘reprisal attacks’ against Muslim citizens and immigrants on the continent would be a false argument. To the contrary, it would send a clear and compelling message that the days of meeting terror bombings with memorial services and wristbands are over. It would be a demand to their respective governments that the militaries need to be mobilized to war-footing with the appropriate reconfiguration of the European economies to do so, the borders need to be closed for now, the interior threat needs to be confronted fearlessly and the war needs to be taken mercilessly to Raqqa, for starters.
Whether the Europeans will bestir themselves to confront the existential crisis that is not on their doorstep but already well into their house remains to be seen, but anything less at this late hour will be merely another step closer to surrender, submission and total subjugation.
Europe’s leaders desperately hope the people will not draw that conclusion no matter how rapidly the bombings escalate, no matter how many more come to lay dead in the street while their cherished freedoms are blown to smithereens along with them.
In the ISIS capital of Raqqa and Al-Qaeda’s command centers in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they are counting on that they won’t.
The governments of Europe have already surrendered.
If its people cannot now muster and fight, then the West is forever lost.
