July 10, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:08:28
3738 The Strange Death of Europe | Douglas Murray and Stefan Molyneux
"The Strange Death of Europe is a highly personal account of a continent and culture caught in the act of suicide. Declining birth rates, mass immigration, and cultivated self-distrust and self-hatred have come together to make Europeans unable to argue for themselves and incapable of resisting their own comprehensive alteration as a society and an eventual end.""This is not just an analysis of demographic and political realities, it is also an eyewitness account of a continent in self-destruct mode. It includes accounts based on travels across the entire continent, from the places where migrants land to the places they end up, from the people who pretend they want them to the places which cannot accept them."Douglas Murray is Associate Editor of the Spectator and the Associate Director of the Henry Jackson Society. His is the author of many books including “Bloody Sunday: Truths, Lies and the Saville Inquiry” and “The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam.”Website: http://www.henryjacksonsociety.orgTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/DouglasKMurrayThe Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islamhttp://www.fdrurl.com/strange-death-of-europeBloody Sunday: Truths, Lies and the Saville Inquiryhttp://www.fdrurl.com/bloody-sundayNeoConservatism: Why We Need Ithttp://www.fdrurl.com/neoconservatismYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
In an essential interview I have, and I'm very pleased to have Douglas Murray with us.
He's the associate editor of The Spectator and the associate director of the Henry Jackson Society.
He is the author of many books, including Bloody Sunday, Truth, Lies, and the Savile Inquiry, and, which we're going to focus a little bit on today, The Strange Death of Europe, Immigration, Identity, Islam.
You can check out the Henry Jackson Society website at, of course, henryjacksonsociety.org and follow Doug's great Twitter at twitter.com forward slash Douglas K. Murray.
That's M-U-R-R-A-Y. Douglas, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Great pleasure to be with you.
It's a great book.
It's almost an elegy.
It's mournful.
It's passionate.
It's powerful.
It's illuminating.
And I really appreciate the fact that you, I guess, let the elephant of despair sit slowly on your chest while writing it.
And one of the things that I got from the beginning was...
How much this is not a plan, like the sort of immigration and migrants into Europe and so on, that everyone is kind of playing catch-up on decisions that were made, maybe with the best of intentions or with the least of information decades ago, and everyone's just trying to manage something that is swelled beyond all original intention and that there really isn't much of a plan going on in Europe at the moment.
That's right.
I mean, I am...
I've written a number of books in my life.
I've written a lot about history and writing a history of the present, as it were, which this book seems to be.
I try to apply the same principles I would anywhere else.
You know, quite often people tell you, you know, about conspiracies in the past, conspiracies in the present, plans in the past, plans in the present.
My general feeling with things is that most of history is cock up and it's the same with the present.
You know...
There's no great master plan, no brilliant group of people sit around a table and sort out everything.
Brilliant people get surprised by events, react badly to them, and make things worse.
It's a far more plausible story, and the story of immigration and Europe in the post-war period right up to the present is really, in my view, I say early in the book, just a history of People making mistakes and then finding justifications for things that would have happened anyway.
Yeah, and that I think is fascinating.
And the same thing has happened in America after the Ted Kennedy's 1965 Immigration Act, which fundamentally changed the culture and origin of immigration into the United States.
There was, of course, it was presented as, well, you know, it's a small tweak and it's going to be nice.
And of course, in Europe, there was the post-war labor shortage, of course, as partly as a result of the massive number of deaths in the Second World War.
But the relationship between the justifications now and the original story is so tenuous as to cease to me almost to exist at all and therefore it looks like people are just using ex post facto justifications to avoid any decisive action in the here and now.
Yes, I think that's right.
I give a set early on in the book of the explanations that started to emerge once mass migration started into Europe in the post-war period.
And they're all the same justifications we heard for the migrant movement of recent years.
You know, we need it for economic reasons.
Then, even if we don't need it for economic reasons, we need it for social reasons.
We don't need it for social reasons.
We need it for diversity and interest reasons and on and on.
And the last of which is always, well, it doesn't matter because it would have happened anyway and you can't stop it.
You know, globalized world means, of course, there are no borders and no restrictions, that argument.
And I say them early on because one of the things that really just struck me during the height of the migrant crisis, as we now call it in 2015 in Europe, is that every single one of the bogus arguments I'd heard throughout my adult life for why migration had already been happening at such a scale Just came out even more.
You know, there were people at train stations in Germany saying, you know, I won't do the accident.
You know, it seems like a very sensible thing to me that we need to bring in, you know, a million people from sub-Saharan Africa because we are aging in Germany, you know.
As if, I would say, migrants themselves don't also age.
And it was just sort of something that comes as an enormous surprise to a lot of policymakers.
But no, I mean, I think it's I think it is all just, as you say, I mean, it's explanations for something that have been allowed to happen anyway.
Well, and I find it astonishing that on the one hand, you have social planners, central planners, social engineers in the government who claim a near omnipotent power to affect future events.
You know, we're going to control the temperature of the planet in 100 years.
You know, we're going to take trillions of pounds from one group and give it to another group, and we're not going to have any perverse incentives.
We're not going to have any problems.
We're going to be able to socially engineer just about anything that you can imagine.
We're going to have foreign aid and dump trillions of pounds into the third world, and it's never going to corrupt anyone.
And we're going to sell arms all over the world, and it's never going to end up in the wrong hands.
They have this absolutely astounding megalomaniacal, narcissistic, grandiose, whatever it is, perception of their ability to alter future events, manipulate cultures and weaponry around the world.
But when it comes to enforcing existing laws in the country, well, then they just throw up their hands and say, well, we can't possibly achieve any of that.
Yeah, I mean, early in the book, I explain the case with Britain in the late 1990s onwards when the Blair government, the Labour government of the period, really just swelled immigration into the UK in unfathomable numbers.
And this was, again, I mean, this is before the migrant crisis of recent years.
And, you know, I've given the book some examples of the people in charge at that time in the Labour government who basically decided that it wasn't worth enforcing the law anymore.
that the same thing happened as has happened in North America, that a set of pro-mass migration groups, for their own reasons, blur the line between legal and illegal immigration, legal and illegal immigrants, make sure there's no punishment for illegal immigration, make sure that if you in any make sure there's no punishment for illegal immigration, make sure that if you in any way criticize or demonize illegal immigration, you are anti all immigrants and so on, until basically, you know, what they've done has made the law unimportant, which for societies like ours that are founded on the rule
important, which for societies like ours that are founded on the rule of law is a profound attack on the basis of our societies, as well as something which from its consequences helps to very seriously atomize our societies.
Well, and diversity is one debate, but certainly diversity should not involve balkanization of the legal system.
It should not involve a fragmentation of the legal system wherein different rules apply to different people because one, of course, alongside sort of culture and history and geography and so on, one of the defining characteristics of a nation is the universal application of laws in a geographical region.
And if a white person wishes to move from California to I think that's going to cause resentment, not as a result of racism, but as a result of anybody who you feel is stepping in ahead of you in the line, is not subject to the laws of the nation, and thus poses an existential threat to the unity of laws that, to some degree at least, does define a nation-state.
Yeah, and also, of course, put on that, I agree with everything you just said, but I put on that, of course, the issue of the welfare state, whereby the central pact that, you know, you pay in and sometimes take out, and you kind of take out because you did pay in, or you pay in but you don't mind somebody you know is taking out because they're just on hard times or whatever.
Those sort of central pacts of the welfare state break down entirely when very large numbers of people who've never paid in But we'll take out a great amount, despite all the lies that are concocted to argue otherwise.
All of these things also just chip away at foundational trust, among other things, in a social welfare democracy.
Now, another aspect of migration in Europe, and we're not just talking about the migrant crisis, this has been going on since the post-war period, as you point out, is the extraordinarily wide divergence between the ruling elites, the political classes, the academics, the mainstream media, media and the average person on the street.
One of the sort of polls that you mentioned in your book, April 1968, Paul by Gallup found that 75% of the British public believed that controls on immigration were not strict enough.
That later rose to 83%.
And we see this over and over again, particularly with regards to sort of third world or Muslim immigration that people say, whoa, let's see if this experiment is going to work before we start piling more and more on I wonder if you can help people to understand just how big this divergence is and where it may have come from.
It's been growing for years.
In Britain, I mean, the migration debate in Britain was...
dominated for many decades by the shadow of a politician who many people have heard of, Enoch Powell, a member of the shadow cabinet of the Conservative Party, who made a speech in 1968 that was known as, although he never used the words, as the rivers of blood speech, in which he foresaw great trouble down the road.
Some of what Powell predicted has come true, some of it has not, some of what he said was right, some was wrong, but It's very striking that although the political class as a whole in 1968 came down on Enoch Powell, he was expelled from the shadow cabinet for this speech.
Not only were most of the figures he mentioned, I mean, vastly understating what ended up being the reality in Britain, but what's so striking is that even then in 1968, the very significant majority of the public were in support of him,
thought that the Conservative leader was quite wrong to have sacked him from the shadow cabinet, and the left-wing Conservative politician of the time says that he thought that if, you know, Powell had have had control of the Conservative Party and run as Prime Minister, he would have got a landslide majority that year.
This was quite normal.
I give throughout the book examples of polls in France and And polls right up to the present across the continent.
They keep showing this picture.
And by the way, an interesting nugget on this is that the European peoples are constantly demonized for their alleged racism, nativism, and every other imaginable wickedness.
And the striking thing is actually that Despite their views being not just ignored, but lambasted and derided and so clearly not listened to by basically an entirety of the mainstream, the political class, despite that, you know, the European publics didn't have pogroms.
They didn't, you know, take to the streets and riot.
They just have consistently, and I think don't get enough acknowledgement for this, just accepted that on this matter, nobody listens to them.
And but it hasn't meant that, you know, we, the European peoples, have become, you know, wicked in response.
We just I think most people is one of the tones I try to hit in the book.
I think we're just rather sad that the political class is so uninterested in the views of the public.
And it strikes me that there's a parallel between the sort of insistence of the upper classes that the poor classes, classes, the working classes and so on, need to get swept up in wars that they don't necessarily agree with and don't necessarily understand, alongside with this great experiment in multiculturalism and diversity, which could be more cynically characterized as vote buying for leftist politicians.
But that's like, well, sorry, you don't like it.
Sorry, it's too bad.
You have to be drafted into a war and you have to be drafted into this multicultural experiment.
It seems that there's a kind of continuity of elitist arrogance where the elite, their jobs aren't being threatened by migrants.
They're not being pushed out of their neighbourhoods.
By immigration.
So there is a kind of blissful unawareness of the impact on the average Britain or the lower class Britons, which seems to me strikingly similar to some of the indifference in past colonial activities and wartime activities where it's just like, sorry, you have to do it because we have the power.
Well, I think that one of the things that really came across very clearly to me when I was researching and writing this book was that there is, of course, among politicians, a certain type of politician in all of our countries, Who basically has a vision of the sort of societies that Europe is becoming.
And that is the sort of politician who says, you know, I'm a citizen of the world.
I'm cool with a sort of multicultural city.
And I'm cool with a very diverse world city.
And therefore, why not have a world country?
continent.
There's a sort of politician that has that view.
There's also the type, and I mean, if one referred to it as the elites, not a term I tend to like, but if you use that term for this, it's also definitely a type of person for whom all of this, you know, is really rather pleasant.
They get cheap cleaners, cheap nannies, good sort of cheap service staff.
They enjoy those benefits.
They enjoy the...
Some of the cultural benefits, but they also have the money to live precisely where they want to live.
And that tends not to be in the places and in the sort of bifurcated communities that the rest of the country doesn't have a choice about.
I give an example, by the way, in the book from Sweden.
There's a hilarious study.
I mean, you've got to take your laughs where you can in this subject.
There's a hilarious, by my standards, study of a couple of years ago in Sweden of people's attitudes towards so-called multicultural and diverse areas.
And one of the most amazing things about it is that the people who move to the least diverse areas are the ones most in favour of people living in diverse areas.
It's like you don't want it for yourself, but you think it's improving for other people.
Or you don't want it for yourself, but at dinner parties you'll say how much you are in favour of it.
I mean, it's These are sort of juggling games that Europeans have got used to.
Well, we're all, you know, there's something in human nature where we love to display our status and if people can't see your roles, they can assume from your pro-diversity mantras that you're not living in some of the more challenging areas in London or in other places in Europe.
It seems to me a kind of virtue signaling or status signaling to be so pro-diversity.
By the way, the interesting thing about the diversity thing is that, as I say about a lot of things in this book, the problem is that these things take advantage of a good instinct.
I mean, who of us doesn't want to know as much as we can about the world and its people?
You know, the whole range of cultures and so on.
I mean, I think it's a quite different thing to then say, and as a result of my, you know, our intellectual curiosity, the whole world should come and live with us.
But, you know, it starts from a perfectly reasonable instinct.
You know, it's interesting to have a diversity of a kind.
Now, the question is, of course, when does it become uninteresting?
When does it stop repaying the interest you're taking on it?
And when does the diversity become undiverse?
You know, the first hundred people from Pakistan bring a certain amount of cultural interest.
Do the next thousand and the next million and the next four million and the next ten million?
When is the point when you've kind of got enough of what you need to know and learn and experience?
And these are very unpleasant, in a way, discussions to have, but They are the one that we're living through, in a way.
And our unwillingness to even address it is a big part of the problem, only made worse by the fact that this isn't a science.
It's not like you could work out on a chart the point at which you become uninterested in something or think you've had enough of it.
But this is what we're all living through, and so we ought to be able to talk about it.
Well, and I think that your earlier point, Douglas, about the welfare state is something well worth for people to dwell on.
Because a lot of times people say, well, America was a nation of immigrants.
And I've even heard that England is a nation of immigrants, which I find.
I grew up in England and I just find the idea very – you really, really have to stretch history beyond the breaking point to make that kind of case.
Fortunately, of course, there are loads of people who are willing to stretch history beyond breaking point.
And, yeah, they always say about...
I mean, yes, there's a plausible, you know, explanation of America as a nation of immigrants.
There's a totally implausible claim about Britain where, I mean, you know, the Norman Conquest was the biggest event in the last millennium in Britain, and it changed the population by about 5%.
That was an invasion of Britain.
And really, I mean, in the last couple of millennium, really what you're talking about in terms of immigration in Britain is...
Some people from Ireland moving over to the mainland of Britain and vice versa.
And, you know, 50,000 French Protestants came in the 17th century.
And that's pretty much, you know, that's pretty much the only movement we're talking about of any meaning.
So it just isn't the case, albeit there are masses of people who want to argue the line.
It just isn't the case.
You know, we had huge movements from sub-Saharan Africa throughout the 15th century to the UK. You know, I mean, it just didn't happen.
And in America, of course, and this was specifically by design for the immigration policy, the vast majority of immigrants were from Western Europe.
A lot of them were Protestants.
They were white, of course, similar backgrounds, similar histories.
But most importantly, without the honeypot of the welfare state, it was fairly safe to assume that people who moved to America in, say, the 18th and 19th centuries moved to America because they valued the American system in some manner.
It gave them freedom.
It gave them land.
It gave them opportunity.
and so they moved there because they weren't bribed to be there.
It's the difference between dating and hiring a prostitute.
If you hire a prostitute, is she there for you or is she there for the money?
And I know that's a harsh way to characterize immigrants.
It really is an analogy.
But if people are coming to England because they value the British frame of mind, the British way of life, British liberties, British philosophy, and so on, I say the more the merrier.
If, however, there's this giant payout called the welfare state, are people coming there because they value British values or because they can make 10 times?
I know that in Europe they can make 10 times on the welfare state what they could make in their home countries.
So are they there for the values or are they there for the money?
If they're there for the money, this seems to me a significant powder keg because statistically the money can't continue.
Yes.
Yeah, this is an absolutely key one.
By the way, there's a strange thing that goes on in Europe.
I think it does where you are as well, where about half the people say, you know, we don't talk about immigration.
And another half say, what are you talking about?
We're always talking about immigration.
I've often wondered why there's this talking past each other.
But one of the Feelings I have is that it's because we just don't have the conversation we should be having about immigration.
Unfortunately, that's exactly the conversation that you and I are now having.
But just to get to that absolutely key foundational point on it, you see, as you say, if somebody wants to come to Europe because they really want to be European...
I don't really have any problem with that.
I admire that.
I like it.
And I do know of some people like that.
I know of people who so love Britain, of all sorts of races and backgrounds, that they want to be in Britain and they want to be as British as they think everyone else is, and so on.
And then, of course, you have this other thing, which is, I mean, there are often polls done of immigrant groups, which tend to ask the wrong questions, things like, you know, how happy are you to be in Britain?
Well, I mean, surprise, surprise, most people are very happy.
You know, they're very happy to be living in a country where there's a welfare state and where they have, you know, a whole set of freedoms and so on, which allow them to live basically the lives that they want to live.
But all the time, of course, we, the publics, have noticed something.
And again, this is something which isn't science.
I give all sorts of stats in my book, but one of the things I've tried to do is to explain the thing that we all just sort of noticed and never really talked about, such as this.
If it was the case that when people from Pakistan and Bangladesh came and moved into the northern mill towns of Britain, firstly to do labour and then after the jobs had dried up, if they were indeed, as we always pretend, as British as everyone else, then it just wouldn't be the case that you'd have these towns where basically everyone is dressed for the foothills of Pakistan, And some women are dressed for the Arabian Desert circa, you know, 7th century.
And this wouldn't be the case.
They would be, I mean, you know, for better or worse, I wouldn't force it, but I just, you know, you would notice that they would be sort of dressing like everyone else and they'd be going down to the pub.
And they'd be failing to turn up to church most weeks, but would go for family weddings and funerals and so on.
And it just obviously isn't the case.
I mean, you just need to travel around any of these towns and you just notice it's a different culture living in the towns.
And some people love that.
Obviously, for the people who come, it's very good.
And some people are just saddened by it.
Saddened because we think, well, you never asked us about this.
And we see...
Just a very, very fundamental change to a society that we loved.
Well, and of course, if you wish to experience Middle Eastern culture, there's an entire Middle East you can go and visit.
But if you wish to experience quintessentially British culture, it seems like it's a bit of a shrinking geography these days because, of course, if people want to live in Arabic or Muslim countries or if they want to go and live in Pakistan, they can.
But as you point out at the beginning of the book, Europeans have no other place to call home.
Yes, I mean, this is the central, as it were, pain in all of this, is that Europe, in this weird thing of deciding that Europe is the home for anyone in the world who wants to move in and call it home, ends up taking away the only home the European peoples have.
I say at one point in the book, you know, we talk forever about the rights and the duties we might owe people coming into Europe.
And I've traveled all around, you know, the places, the reception points, the places where people come in.
I've spoken to the people literally just off the boats, seen them come in.
And, you know, the thing is about this is that we talk about the boats of the people coming in.
But I say toward the end of the book, what if this is our boat?
And what if the discussion we've been having, which presumes that this boat of Europe is a vast cruise liner that can just keep on taking on people on board that it finds in the oceans around it...
If instead of that being the case, we're actually ourselves a rather smaller and more volatile vessel, more vulnerable vessel, and that we actually keep taking people on board, and at some point the whole thing capsizes.
And capsizes, as I say, the only thing we have to call a vessel which is our home.
It's a chilling thought where this kind of stuff can lead.
And the other thing, I think, regarding the welfare state is integration, I guess, was the original idea.
I mean, if everyone had been told at the beginning, well, we're going to bring people in from the third world, we're going to pay them to set up their own communities, and then they're going to try and set up parallel legal systems, and then they're going to do this, and your tax bill is going to go up enormously, and it's going to be hard for you to find housing, and your housing is going to be very expensive, and there's going to be lots of problems for your kids in schools and violence and criminal.
If this was all told, of course, nobody would vote for it.
But of course, it never is told that way.
And even the people who frame it may not have the information or the foresight to see where it's going to go.
But in the presence of the welfare state, it seems that the incentive to integrate becomes diminished to the point of virtually being non-existent.
Like if I go to Japan with $1,000 in my pocket and intend to stay for a couple of years, I'm going to have to adapt to the local customs.
If I don't learn anything about the local customs or learn anything about the local language, it's going to be very hard for me to make a go of it in that society.
And this is another thing, of course, in the 19th century when people came to America, they had to learn English, they had to We're good to go.
Yeah, and I mean, by the way, the example you give of housing prices and things is an amazing thing.
In Britain, we need to build about 300,000 new homes a year, something we really keep failing to do.
And I mean, you've basically got to build a city nearly the size of Liverpool every 18 months or every year or so.
And we keep failing to do it.
And it's the reason why actually young people in Britain find it incredibly hard to get on the property ladder.
It's incredibly expensive to buy property in the U.K., And almost nobody ever mentions that 300,000 is pretty much exactly the net immigration figures into Britain in an average year.
I mean, you know, who'd have guessed that people moving into Britain would need somewhere to live?
But the climate is so balmy, right?
And they're just tent on the beaches.
It's also this, by the way, just going back to that point you made about the...
Nobody expecting the integration or, you know, demanding it.
It's so much worse than that, isn't it?
Because as I say at one point in the book, go back to five years before Angela Merkel opened the borders of Europe to the world, officially.
Go back five years before that to a speech that Angela Merkel made in Potsdam in 2010.
Famous speech at the time in which he declared that multiculturalism had failed, utterly failed was her term.
I go into this in some depth in the book.
It's a thing that fascinated me at the time.
It made headlines around the world when she said it.
One of the things, by the way, apart from the fact that isn't it bonkers that you would say that a thing had failed and then five years later massively ramp up the thing that had caused the failure in the first place.
But just to go back to that initial point, the interesting thing about that 2010 Merkel speech is that in it she said something else which was extraordinary.
She said We had expected the guest workers to go home.
In the 1950s, when Germany invited Turkish and other guest workers in to help rebuild the country, and it wasn't just that one speech, we know this from all sorts of other sources, German authorities and others didn't expect the migrants to stay.
The expectation was that they would do the job and then return home.
Of course, you know, Who would blame anyone?
You invite them into your country.
If you're a young man with a job, you've also got a wife, you bring in your wife.
And if you're with your wife, you're very likely to do things that might lead to children.
And then once you have children, they're going to need to go to school.
All of this is totally predictable.
But nobody did predict it.
So then when everyone has the integration argument...
We forget that we never expected to get to the stage where you were talking about integration.
And then once we did, we didn't know whether we wanted integration or not.
I mean, there's a whole set of things that happened.
It was a long period in Europe over recent decades where actually we didn't particularly encourage people to integrate.
Quite the opposite.
Well, that's the whole point of diversity.
Diversity or integration.
You can only pick one in the long run.
Yeah, and we sort of...
We went back and forth a bit, and currently we say we're about integration.
But really, there's no evidence we are.
I mean, look, let's face it.
Angela Merkel now says that people who come to live in Germany should learn to speak German.
I mean, wow.
After all of these decades, I mean, that's the demand.
And by the way, what happens, Ms.
Merkel, what happens if they say, no, they're not particularly inclined to speak German?
What are you going to do then?
Nothing.
Great.
Let's talk a little bit about the...
Spiritual vacuum created by the decline of Christianity, which you have a very long and powerful piece in the book about.
And, of course, Christianity with its concept of original sin and the need to redeem yourself for the sins, well, I guess intergeneration all the way back to Adam and Eve, sins of history.
It's almost like, to paraphrase what you're saying in the book, and, you know, correct me, of course, if I go astray, but it's almost like when original sin was taken out of the consciousness, the need for guilt and self-flagellation and self-punishment seems to have been replaced by a revisionist historical narrative that have painted Europeans as the basic devils of the world.
Yeah, there is something, and this is a sort of truth I'm trying to get to, yes.
It's Just because you lose your religion doesn't mean you lose the impulses of religion or indeed the memories of it.
And I do think there's a sort of secularized version of Christianity which exists for the better in all sorts of ways and with some very unpleasant connotations along the way.
The concept of original sin as it's now been translated into European politics is particularly filled with iniquity for one reason in particular, which is this.
The religious notion of sin in the Christian understanding can, of course, come to redemption.
And the non-religious post-Christian idea of sin has no redemption apart from self-destruction.
The idea that we in Europe, and indeed, I say in the book, this is the same thing that America, Canada, Australia, and indeed Israel, I would argue, all the countries that are sort of seen to be, rightly or wrongly, sort of cousins or offspring of the European culture.
All of these countries also are alleged to suffer from an original sin which we put on no other societies.
I mean, you never hear someone saying that there is an original sin in Turkey and that as a result the world must move into Turkey and abolish basically Turkish culture.
It's only the Western countries that have it.
And as I say, if you have a sin like this, I think this is very much the debate that America is going through still to do with race and reparations and all this sort of stuff.
There's this endless question of how you could absolve yourself.
Of the sin of racism, colonialism, and so on.
And again, I mean, you know, what educated, sensible person wouldn't recognize the wrongs that their ancestors had done?
But to end up in a situation where it's as if they are always before you, these sins, at the same time that the rest of the world...
I mean, you never hear anyone saying, you know, we must go and find reparations for the people who Genghis Khan and his crew, you know, moved out of their homes.
But yet we, weirdly in the West, are these people whose guilt is ever before us.
And the only answers you ever come to...
Basically, therefore, we must destroy ourselves.
These are sins without redemption.
And the only redemption being the fire of self-destruction.
It's why we have the culture of self-abnegation, as the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton once termed it, that means that we have to war on ourselves.
It is an extraordinary perspective when you zoom out in that kind of way.
And it is something that does seem to be endemic to the West.
I mean, certainly there are religious reasons, there are cultural reasons, there are, I think, some leftist, guilt-provoking reasons.
But I also think that there are economic reasons insofar as – I mean, if there is any group, I would argue, any group that should be least criticized for the institution of slavery, it would be white Western European Christians for two basic reasons.
Number one, they indulged in the practice of slavery for only a few hundred years, basically, and – Ended the institution in their own countries as soon as humanly possible.
And so they – I mean if you compare it to the Muslim slave trade, which is reported to have killed over 100 million Africans in the most brutal fashions, including the removal of the testicles and so on.
That is a brutal situation.
So the white Western European Christians engaged in slavery for the least amount of time and expended untold blood and treasure to end the practice worldwide.
And I think what that does is you stand up and you say, wow, we really hate and fear and feel terrible about slavery, so we're going to work really hard to end it.
And I think what that does to other cultures around the world is say, ah, those guys feel really, really bad about this.
Let's install the racism button.
Let's install the colonialism button.
Let's keep pounding it and pounding it and pounding it.
Because every time we do, they cough up free resources for us.
It's like we've become this vending machine, and then we wonder why we keep getting pounded with these insults.
It's because we pay to make them go away, and therefore, supply creates its own demand.
Yes, I mean, that's why I repeatedly use the description of us in my book as being masochists.
I mean, we are actually paying people to beat us up.
It's an extraordinary thing.
And sometimes in the most visible ways, the number of terrorists we now have across the continent of Europe who, after they detonate, or after they persuade other people to detonate in our cities, Turn out to have been receiving welfare payments right up until the moment.
You know, there was a guy in Britain, I'm sure you've heard him over there, called Anjem Chowdhury, who now mercifully is in prison.
He was a long-time Adversary of mine crossed swords on many occasions.
Anjum Chowdhury was a really vile hate preacher who recruited people to terrorist causes.
He used to take £25,000 a year in welfare payments in Britain.
And when one of our soldiers, drummer Lee Rigby, was decapitated on the streets of London in 2013 by two people who were close to the Chowdhury network, Chowdhury and co were all over the airwaves making excuses for these killers and refusing to condemn them.
But very few people pointed out, I tried to at the time, that the starkest thing about this was that Anjem Chowdhury was better paid by the British state than Drummer Lee Rigby was.
That is insane.
We may not be the first society in human history To be paying both sides in a conflict.
But we're probably the first societies in human history to pay our enemies better than we pay our own troops.
And this is what I mean by this sort of conscription.
You conscript the bodies of people in war and you're now conscripting the money of people in the pursuit of this utopian fantasy.
And it is really appalling.
The British people not only are not consulted on an irregular basis, and I would argue, as you point out in the book, I think, Douglas, that the politicians in the UK and across Europe regularly stand tall, spine stiffened and snarl particular invective into the wind about controlling immigration.
And that's enough.
And we need to have borders and then betray regularly the public who vote them in, I think, on the grounds of wanting some limits to all of this kind of stuff.
Not only are they not asked as to whether they fundamentally want to be replaced, because as the birth rate of immigrants grows up, the birth rate of the domestic population goes down, which means it's not an addition to society.
England is not England plus immigration.
England is minus English people plus immigrants over the long run, and nobody's asked.
And, of course, they're forced to pay for this through the redistribution as well for a state.
Yeah.
Yeah, I say it, but there was a great myth for a long time that...
That immigrants brought more in in economic terms than they took out.
And a study I cite in my book from a few years ago, actually from a university in London, was used to argue this precise point.
It did the usual thing, you know, you pretend that your average immigrant is a Luxembourgian hedge funder, you know, or a A sort of French start-up.
You know, they always pull off this trick.
But you have to really do a lot of fiddling to persuade people that, as I said earlier, that people who've not paid in suddenly, miraculously, in a few years, pay in throughout what everyone else has put in in their lives.
But actually, that found that over a 15-year period, migrants into the UK had taken out something like 130 billion more in welfare than they had put in And again, I mean, who wouldn't know that that was the case?
How could you, if you moved in with a family to Britain, how could you be putting in enough within a couple of months to cover what everyone else and their families have put in for generations?
And of course, if you're that economically valuable and that economically motivated, then why on earth would your home country be so economically devastated?
I mean, there are, of course, some people who come from conflicts and so on, although, as far as I understand it, being the victim of a war-torn country is not enough for you to get refugee status because war is just one of the inevitable products of social conflict.
Some might even say diversity plus proximity.
But there is, to me, a kind of racism involved even in this whole idea that these countries can't sort themselves out, that white people need to rescue all of these people from their – why can't these countries sort themselves out?
I mean, the basic principles of a free and democratic society were invented or discovered or promulgated centuries ago and were even sometimes imposed by various European empires and colonial systems over the last few hundred years.
You know, separation of church and state, economic freedom, limited democracy, small government, respect for property rights, lower corruption.
All of these things are not patented by the West.
Any country, any culture can impose them or develop them as they see fit.
And the idea, well, they just can't do it over there.
So we have to bring them here.
Otherwise, they have no chance of freedom.
Why can't they do it over there?
Are you saying that they can't run their own countries?
I mean, isn't that kind of racist in and of itself?
One of the things I found most fascinating on my travels to this book was finding out for myself what I had already sort of guessed, which was that this migrant crisis of 2015 in particular was not actually primarily a Syrian crisis.
This was something you could tell from a lot of the coverage that already took place, but I wanted to see it firsthand.
One of the fascinating things I say is that because if you present it to the public as being, The people who want to come to Europe, who are coming on boats, are all fleeing certain death in Syria and are basically, and this has been done, by the way, by the organized churches, by religious leaders of all faiths in Europe and by almost the entirety of the political class.
If you say, basically, these migrants are like Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, then you tell us and remind us of Something every country in the West in particular thinks, which is if we'd have known what we knew after, and even if we'd known what we knew at the time, who wouldn't have taken in more refugees from Nazi Germany?
Of course, there's one problem about this, which is that, I mean, actually nobody that I can think of in Syria, I mean, there are some groups like Yazidis who have been subjected to genocide in recent years.
But basically, I can't think of any particular group That you could say are actually directly analogous with a Jew fleeing Nazi Germany, i.e.
a regime dedicated to the total annihilation of their people.
And so anyway, but we have this equivalence.
And it plays on our minds, and again, the people who push for the mass migration, which is all sorts of parts of civil society as well as across politics, deliberately then elide the difference between, not only between a Jew fleeing Nazi Germany and a Syrian wanting to escape the civil war in their home country, but between the Syrian wanting to escape the civil war in their own country and everybody else in the world who wants to move to Europe.
So, in the Italian points of entry, The Syrians don't really come anymore.
It's almost all sub-Saharan Africans, and in particular, young sub-Saharan African males.
There are also some North Africans in with them.
If you go to the Greek points of entry, yes, there are some Syrians.
But they are also people fleeing from Afghanistan.
Of course, by the way, people then say, oh, well, this is all to do with the West's wars.
No.
Also, large numbers of people from Pakistan.
My country, Britain, has very good relations with Pakistan.
But yet we have many, many people fleeing Pakistan.
We also have people fleeing Bangladesh.
We have people fleeing Myanmar.
Really, it's a very, very wide number of people coming.
Now, you see, then you get Western politicians who say things like...
Well, if we could just solve the Syrian civil war, then we could solve the migrant crisis.
Absolute rubbish.
That's why I wanted to see this all firsthand.
And I said to policymakers across the continent who I've spoken to on this, How can you believe this lie?
Even if you thought it was within our gift to solve the Syrian civil war and bring peace to that land, as I wish it was, but it just doesn't seem to be.
Even if it was in our gift and we could do it tomorrow, you know, what's the plan for making Eritrea a booming free society in the coming months?
You know, what's your plan for Bangladesh, where you've got such good diplomatic relations and so on, but people still flee because it's a A very, very unfree country and a very persecuting country for people of all sorts of minorities.
You know, what's your plan for these people?
And, of course, the answer is they don't have a plan for any of it.
The only plan is let's take in the third world into Europe.
And the result, I think, is that you make Europe more like the third world, and that's about it.
Well, I guess their only plan is to avoid the smoking crater they see of Enoch Powell's career and the schoolmaster that you point out.
So I think their only plan is to avoid destroying their careers by being called a racist.
It's really a defensive plan that has nothing to do with the long-term good of the society.
Because, of course, if the people who are leaving, let's say, Pakistan, if the people who are leaving Pakistan and coming to England are very pro-freedom, very pro-free markets, very pro-limited government, very pro-separation of church and state – What does that mean to the future of Pakistan?
If all of the people who are dedicated to freedom and limited government leave Pakistan, it means that Pakistan is going to get worse and worse and worse, which means more and more people are going to come.
How is taking the best of the third world and moving it to the first world do anything other than condemning the third world to continued decline and continued migration?
And the other thing, too, I mean, the Nazi argument, you know, it's an old principle of Internet debating that whoever brings up the Nazis first loses.
But it would be a little bit easier to make the case that the – and this is a generalization, of course, but I think you'll back me up on the statistics, Douglas – but it would be a little bit easier to make the case that the migrants were like Jews if a lot of the migrants who came into the First World didn't have such anti-Semitic views.
That seems to me a little bit of a square circle that's impossible to sand down.
Yes, it's an amazing thing, this.
By the way, there's a fantastic little episode on this.
In the UK, the chief rabbi of the UK, a man called Ephraim Mervis, and a delegation of other prominent British rabbis went to the Greek islands.
I think they went to Lesbos a couple of years ago at the height of the crisis.
And helped bring, you know, people ashore sort of thing and hand out packages and do a bit of aid and have a photo taken and so on.
And again, I don't deny there's, you know, good intentions behind this and a lot of Jewish people, like a lot of other people, make the equivalents and so on.
There's a fascinating thing that happened.
The rabbis, including the chief rabbi, in all the photos I noticed, were wearing baseball bats, baseball bats, baseball caps.
And I noticed this in the photos, and I thought, that's very strange.
I mean, it might be a new form of Rabbi Sheik, but I'd never seen them wearing them before in Britain and so on.
And it was hot, but anyhow.
And I looked into this a bit, and it turned out that the security advice that the rabbis were given was that they should cover their skull caps in case the people who they were welcoming ashore, as it were, recognized they were Jews and attacked them.
Now, I think this doesn't mean you don't help any migrants.
It doesn't mean you don't help asylum seekers.
But why not say, at the very least, look...
This is a set of competing virtues, as it were.
I say this at one point in the book.
We're so used to this crappy, student-y style of debate that only knows about debate as being, I'm Churchill, you're Hitler, and so on.
I'm going to win.
I'm good, you're bad.
It's basically, by the way, the only reason they use the Hitler analogy is that nobody knows anything anymore.
Ask a student at American College, or indeed many British universities, but I'm afraid American colleges seem to be worse these days, ask them to name any other bad guy in history, and I think they'd be stumped.
You know, it's Hitler or broke.
But anyway, if you recognise that current events like history are more complicated than always just being a matter of Hitler versus Churchill, you'd recognise that sometimes there are competing virtues.
Now, the virtue of helping some migrants and some people actually fleeing war should also compete with a thing of, for instance, if it's so likely that a lot of people People coming, not a majority, maybe a majority, who knows, are going to be, for instance, anti-Semites, then at least bring that into the discussion.
But it's a literal cover-up of a very big question we ought to have been asking.
By the end of 2015, early 2016, a spate of anti-Semitic attacks in Germany and elsewhere.
It started to become part of the German debate.
What if we, Germany, a country that has historically not been immune to anti-Semitism, are actually importing people into our country who will bring anti-Semitism back?
A German cabinet minister admits, yeah, no, we don't want more people in Germany who might have anti-Semitic views.
As we say, if you don't part of it, no shit, Sherlock.
Why don't we have this debate ever?
On the one hand, there are people who like to pretend that absolutely everybody who arrives in...
Europe, from the developing world, is a suicide bomber waiting to prime.
And obviously that's not the case.
But nor is it the case that they're all saints.
Nor is it the case that they don't bring attitudes with them.
And I suppose one of the central conundrums of all of this, which I just wish people had thought about, but at least we can think about now, is what are the ideas that people bring?
What are the things that we say we can't put up with?
And what do we do when we say we can't put up with something?
And what do we do when we say we can't put up with something?
Well, and of course, one of the more challenging aspects, I've had a number of experts in the intelligence field come on my show and tell me that, tragically, at the moment, the average IQ in sub-Saharan Africa is about 70.
Well, and of course, one of the more challenging aspects, I've had a number of experts in the intelligence field come on my show and tell me that tragically at the moment, the average IQ in sub-Saharan Africa is about 70.
And nobody knows how to magically change that number or how to integrate that level of disparity into a society with an average IQ of about 100.
I mean, these are challenges that need to be talked about, but need to be discussed.
And it is, to me, very frustrating that bringing basic facts and information to a debate is just screamed down and is so emotional.
And as you point out in the book, the picture of the boy who drowned on the shores of Turkey was somehow laid at the feet of Europe, which is a huge challenge.
And why is this tragic and an awful death not laid at the feet of Turkey or not laid at the feet of his father who fled a safe country or left a safe country voluntarily?
And why is it necessarily that that boy's image is the only thing that's remembered and not the images of the 1400 girls in Rotherham who were doused in gasoline, who were passed around as rape chattel, these young white girls by these gangs?
Why is it that we only see one side?
Of the equation of tragedy.
And why is it finally, if we want to help people, as you point out in the book, you can get much more bang for your pound by helping people stay in the Middle East close to where they could return rather than bring them over.
I've seen numbers as 12 to 13 times more efficient to help people in the Middle East rather than bring them to Europe.
Yeah, I think even more.
It's only like 100 times more costly to house a migrant in Sweden than it is to house them in a neighboring country to Syria, for instance.
And of course...
I think, by the way, gradually people are starting to recognize this, that it's much more desirable that if you are, for instance, fleeing the Syrian civil war, much more desirable that you should be roughly in the area, you know, be in Jordan or Turkey or Lebanon, than that you should be helicoptered into Norway, which makes no sense, despite the fact some people still argue for it.
But just very quickly, on the question of why some terrible things get remembered and others don't, and why we don't want to talk about certain things, I think a lot of this is to do with the great fear of the follow-on question, which is, what are you going to do about it?
And this is, in a way, the really hardest part of this.
I... I say at one point in the book, you know, I've always, you know, throughout my career, politicians in public and in private, you can see the terror they have in discussing any of this.
You can see, as you said, the knowledge that there's going to be career death if they venture into it.
But then beneath that, there's something else, which is that thing of, What are we going to do about this?
I mean, we can't do anything about it now.
It's too late and so on.
And I think that tone is audible to us, to the public, that really they don't know what to do.
And so they're just going to keep spinning the lie for a bit longer.
I've seen these lies unpack a little bit over the years, but it does happen very, very slowly.
And the example you just gave of Rotherham, I mean, it took years.
We were far more worried in Britain about the possibility that the far right of the British National Party and so on would use the Rotherham scandals for their political benefit than we were for 1400 girls in one town alone being gang raped by groups of Muslim men.
We were more worried about the far right BMP So even now, I spoke to a journalist recently who'd interviewed some of the girls who were victims of that rape scandal, and he mentioned to me that he thought that they would be, as it were, talked out.
You know, they'd given so many interviews over the years, you know, there's nothing for them.
No, not at all.
Not at all.
No one had really come to speak to them.
I mean, there was one or two journalists in the UK who really went into that in depth, but pretty much everyone just sort of kept away, and it wasn't just that it was such a gruesome subject, it was that it had a whole set of other questions that came behind it.
What are the views these men brought with them?
What were the views of their community?
And then the next one, what are we going to do about it?
There's a fatalism beneath this which causes the lack of questions.
To me, this question of what needs to be done about it is far too great a burden to place on any particular intellect.
It's sort of like saying, well, if slavery has ended in America, what are we going to do with all the slaves?
It's like, well, the question is...
What is the facts?
What are the morals of the situation as a whole?
If we start getting information out, we're going to get a lot of very smart men and women who are going to start talking about this issue.
And through some miraculous form of social consensus, productive outcomes will be determined.
But if we say to one person who's bringing facts that we find uncomfortable, oh, yeah, what's your soup to nuts A to Z solution to all of this?
And then if they fail in any conceivable way, and of course they will, then we say, aha, therefore you better not talk about the facts.
It's like that's a trap.
That's a trap that's just designed to put a giant wall between the citizenry and the facts.
Bring the facts out.
Let the intellectual work begin.
Let the free play and the free market of ideas work over these facts and try and figure out solutions.
But denying the facts is for sure going to mean that there's no solution.
And if there is no solution that is ever proposed and the accumulation continues and the resentment continues and polarization continues, Well, we've seen that before in history.
It does not have a very good outcome.
No.
I mean, I say in the book, at the end of my book, I give a chapter on what we could do even now to at least start to address some of this across Europe.
And then I give a chapter on what I think will happen.
But one of the reasons I did that was because I do, as you say, think that we need to try to think of ways to address this.
And I suppose there's one reason in particular, which is that those of us who care about ideas and about politics...
Often make a fundamental mistake that we think that we can reason people into agreement.
And one of my favorite quotes is from Jonathan Swift, who said once, you cannot reason somebody out of a position that they were not reasoned into.
And most people haven't been reasoned into these issues and the politicians haven't been reasoned into them.
They've had to work at a lot of lies over the years and work them up to come up with excuses for what they've done and explanations for an otherwise pretty inexplicable act of self-destruction.
So the best I think that can be done in a way, and this is a bit gloomy, but the facts are gloomy.
The best that can be done in a way with most is to think about this, because at some point also the facts change.
You know, the example I've often given is, you know, it was pretty hard in the 1990s for the few people in America who did it to warn about the threat of Islamic terrorism in America.
Most people said, you know, even policy people, wow, it's never going to really hurt people here.
It wasn't until 9-11 happened that people realized, oh yeah, and then recognized that people had been thinking about it had some virtue in them.
And I think it's the same with most of this.
Really, what changes people is events.
And when the events change, you've just got to hope that you've got some people around who've thought about things in enough depth that the response is decent.
After every terrorist attack now in Britain, in Europe, it's a sort of, you know, weekly occurrence.
Now, you know, a car bomb goes off on the Champs-Élysées and, you know, it's sort of page five, you know, a few hundred words.
And most of these events, they do shift things, apart from at the political level, where you continue to have these asinine...
Sort of present tense technocratic discussions.
But underneath all of this, that stuff actually is, I think, moving public opinion.
The public, you know, I've often said nobody, for instance, says, I used to be worried about Islamic extremism, but I'm not anymore.
In Europe, it's only people who sidle up to you and say, I never thought it was true, all this stuff.
And now it turns out there's a problem.
And, of course, because that's because of events.
It's because of three guys running around London Borough Market and across London Bridge, stabbing people and slitting their throats and shouting, this is for Allah.
You know, it's about a 22-year-old child of Libyan migrants standing at the exit of an Ariana Grande concert and detonating a nail bomb that slaughters 22 young people.
Of course, this is going to change people's opinions.
But I just wish that we'd been allowed to think about this and talk about it more widely, because then we wouldn't be in all of this mess.
We hope that this is not the 30s when it comes to these kinds of issues.
So just to close off, if you don't mind, we have a little bit more time, if that's all right.
The call and answer situation where people bring up why immigration is inevitably valuable and useful, that no one should ever have any questions or issues with it.
Because, of course, as you point out, in the post-war period, there was a dearth of young people as the result of the war, particularly young men.
But, of course, that had happened many times before.
The wars have been continual.
There were religious wars.
There were the Napoleonic wars.
There was the Franco-Prussian war.
There was the First World War.
And after the First World War, there was the decimation of the population through the Spanish flu, which killed, what, twice as many people as the First World War?
I mean, not to mention the Black Death, not to mention the fall of Rome.
The depopulation is a regular occurrence in human society.
It's happening right now in Japan.
And you know what Japan is going to do?
They're going to automate everything.
And so you're not going to need as many people to produce as much wealth.
I think we're good to go.
I don't see how that works.
If the people coming in are costing you more than they're paying in, I don't see how that's...
It's like, wow, I'm bleeding out of one arm.
I better open up the other arm to fix it.
I don't really see how that works.
Yeah, it doesn't.
I mean, as I say, the first thing is, of course, if you believe in the importing of people from around the world, There's nothing you want when you're old and medically informed than to go back to
a third world country because that's where you're going to get the best doctors.
Yeah.
And so there's that.
There's also the...
There's a whole set...
The greying population thing is so strange.
I mean, it presumes that all societies need to constantly grow in size.
By the way, this is...
That's an odd one, isn't it?
Because I mentioned at one point in the book, I remember in the 1990s or so, the left in Europe were all for population reduction.
There were these movements like the sort of basically one-child policies.
Europeans, we should all have one child per couple.
Zero population growth.
I remember it from when I was a kid too.
Only it seemed aimed at white Christians.
I'm not sure exactly why, but it was not exactly being proselytized much throughout the Third World, sadly.
Yes, it was fascinating because it was basically, look, we've all agreed that we're using up the planet's resources, and so if there were fewer people, we'd be using up fewer resources.
All the green parties went for it.
But then the Green parties discovered and the parties left discovered they had to tell people with darker coloured skin than them that they should have fewer children.
They just dropped the whole thing.
So it was a total crock and a great demonstration that, you know, the sort of failure on this stupidity comes from every imaginable direction.
But there's a whole set of other things with the growing population I just find fascinating.
You know, take one.
If it's a case...
That you do need the world to move to Germany, for instance, and you need to increase your labour force and you need young people.
One of the things I have never had answered is this.
If Germany in 2015 genuinely needed to import young labour, in fact, like Sweden, for instance, it doesn't need labour.
In fact, it doesn't need...
The only thing it needs less than a labour force He's a labor force that doesn't speak Swedish.
But then that's what they've now got, a non-labor force that doesn't speak Swedish.
Anyhow.
But if you were Germany in 2015 and you honestly needed to import people, you had all these jobs you really needed to do, why not give it?
Why not invite?
The 25 to 50% of young Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Greek citizens who do not have work.
You know, youth unemployment in these countries goes up to 50% in recent years.
So why not ask the Italians?
Invite them to come to Germany, temporary period, all members of the EU, come in and do the jobs.
Sorry to interrupt, but alternatively, if you really felt that helping a persecuted minority and refugees was a big thing, you could go to South Africa, where hundreds of thousands of whites are currently stuck in squatter camps, unable or not allowed to work.
Or you could go to the Boer farmers, who are being murdered at unprecedented rates, and you could invite them in, and it could be argued that they would have some more compatibility.
But really all it is about, isn't it, is again, is just finding lies for things that you just mucked up already.
And, you know, I say at one point, it's an unpleasant thing to think about, but I say at one point, really, if you do believe that the only way you in your old age will be able to live in the comfort to which you've become accustomed, then I suppose really what you should do is to consider whether...
You would like to get a better and better standard of living in a country that is less and less recognizable to you.
Or whether you would forfeit a little bit of that, possibly, I don't think necessarily, in order to retire and die in a culture which you know and understand.
And across Europe, there are people now who will die in cultures that are totally alien to the one that they were born into.
And there are some people who will rejoice in that fact, who will take pleasure in the eradication of a culture, and there are other people who will simply mourn that fact, and other people who realize there's nothing very much they can do about it.
But I think that, as I say, and I give a few pointers in the book, It is salvageable, that.
But it would need us at this very late stage to realize that that's what's at stake.
It's about living and dying in the culture that you inherited or living and dying in a totally alien land.
And that's a choice.
And I think that it's...
It's obvious how we should choose it, but unfortunately, mired in inertia and a sort of societal depression about all this, I see at this stage very little likelihood of very many people taking the sensible decision there.
And my goal, other than the enjoyment of these conversations, my goal in having these conversations is that Europeans have a history of being very nice and conciliatory until they're not.
And it is very much my goal to have public conversations about challenging topics so that we can avoid any kind of blowback.
The idea that the European culture, European civilization is going to sink into oblivion with no pushback, to me is incomprehensible.
I mean, British people, I mean, I grew up in England, British people are extraordinarily nice, bend over backwards, give you the shirt off their back.
Until they're not.
And then they're really, really not.
And this sort of, you know, be as nice as humanly possible.
It doesn't take a lot to go from turn the other cheek to an eye for an eye.
People have forgotten about some of the more aggressive aspects of Europeans.
And I hope that these conversations can avert any kind of blowback.
But the idea is going to be a peaceful transition if it should come to pass.
That, to me, is incomprehensible and something devoutly to be avoided, if at all humanly possible.
And the only way to avoid it is with facts and conversations, I think.
Yeah, I just couldn't agree more.
I just had one other thing.
I mean, we, after every terrorist attack recently in Britain, we've kept having that irritating meme passed around again and again, the sort of, keep calm and carry on.
We're all Brits.
You know, they're not going to destroy us.
You know, we lived through the Blitz and so on.
It's sort of Sort of slightly faux bonhomie thing, but I've taken to reminding people recently of the fact that Britain didn't survive the Blitz simply by keeping calm and carrying on.
Keep calm and carry on was advice to Londoners after night after night of bombing.
But at the same time that they were told to keep calm and carry on, we were also flattening German cities.
So it's a very strange thing when absolutely everything in your society is sort of geared to this This passivity, this passive view that basically all we can be is mourners at our own funerals.
And as I say in my book, I entirely agree with your sentiment.
I think that that could all change.
And if it's going to change, one would hope that it would change decently.
But I think that the indecent, as it were, answer grows the longer people try to Thank you.
Thank you.
I mean, as you know, this can be a wearying topic.
You have that wonderful German phrase, which escapes me now, weary of history.
And of course, this is – it can be difficult stuff to understand.
It is a bit of a red pill just looking at demographic winter, looking at birth rates, looking at projections, looking at immigration rates, looking at religions and cultures and compatibilities.
