The Strange Death of Europe

Douglas Murray
The Strange Death of Europe (2017)

Os principais factos que Douglas Murray aborda em The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, escritos sobre o acontecimento, têm agora dez ou mais anos, mas nem por isso perderam importância, bem pelo contrário. É um livro de factos, números, estatísticas, não de opiniões ou percepções, apesar dos tabus existentes na recolha de dados baseados na etnicidade. É um livro que incomoda, porque os factos costumam ser teimosos, e desmonta as falácias e as mentiras dos «estudos» com que os governos europeus repetidamente pretenderam — e ainda pretendem — justificar a imigração em massa.
Começa pelo caso britânico, com as primeiras vozes contrárias nos anos 50 e 60 quando a realidade dos números mostrava uma trajectória que inevitavelmente viria a desembocar na situação actual. Todos os alertas foram ignorados quando não silenciados e os mensageiros perseguidos. Instaurou-se um paradigma político e social que floresceu nos 80s e 90s: o «multiculturalismo», que acabou numa política de fronteiras abertas a partir de 1997 e teve como consequência o desequilíbrio demográfico constatado no censo de 2011. As mais desastrosas políticas de imigração tornaram-se impossíveis de questionar pois quem defendia medidas de restrição foi apelidado de «racista», mesmo quando se referia aos «brancos» do leste europeu.
O mesmo foi replicado, com pequenas variações, nos outros países da Europa Ocidental, nomeadamente RFA/Alemanha, Suécia, Holanda e Bélgica e França, a partir do pós-guerra, devido à falta de mão de obra local ou produto da descolonização ultramarina. Uma política que pretendia resolver um problema a curto prazo criou a mais prolongada repercussão, quando o número de entradas previstas foi sempre excedido pela realidade em várias ordens de magnitude, verificando-se ainda uma subestimação dos números oficiais destinada a ocultar o problema.
E, por fim recorda-nos a cadeia de acontecimentos da fatídica década de 2010: o empenho em prol do «mundo sem fronteiras», o efeito chamada, Lampedusa, a operação Frontex, as ilhas gregas, o sul do Mediterrâneo, os navios negreiros das ONGs, Merkel e o boom de 2015, Suécia «superpotência humanitária», Dinamarca, a pressão sentimentalista, a euforia demencial de Refugees Welcome, a endofobia das elites europeias, o terrorismo islâmico, as violações e agressões sexuais, as catastróficas alterações demográficas, a Grande Substituição. É a história da não-integração, ou da impossibilidade de assimilação, o triunfo de culturas alienígenas fortes (leia-se, o Islão) sobre uma cultura nativa fraca e relativista, obcecada pela «culpa» histórica e pela auto-flagelação. Diz-se que os deuses cegam aqueles a quem querem perder. É realmente esta cegueira que se descreve neste livro: o capítulo mais recente da queda da Europa, mas não o último, porque o pior está ainda por acontecer.

The reason people wish to come to Europe is not only because of the perception of wealth and work. It is also because Europe has made itself a desirable destination for additional reasons. Not least among them is the knowledge that Europe is likely to allow arrivals to remain in the continent once there. High among the reasons why people flock to Europe are the knowledge that its welfare states will look aer migrants who arrive, and the knowledge that however long it takes or however poorly migrants may be looked aer they will still enjoy a better standard of living and a better roster of rights than anywhere else, let alone in their home countries. There is also the belief – flattering to Europeans as well as true – that Europe is a more tolerant, peaceful and welcoming place than most parts of the world. If there were many such continents in the world then Europeans might be able to enjoy their status as one generous society among many. If the perception grows that Europe is in fact the only place where it is both easy to get in, easy to remain and safe to stay, then the continent may find the resulting attention less flattering in the long term than it does in the short term. In any case it is not inevitable that the world’s migrants should come to Europe. They come because Europe has made itself – for good reasons and some bad – attractive to the world’s migrants.
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In 2010 Germany had a total of 48,589 people apply for asylum. Just five years later Merkel allowed (if leaked internal estimates from the government were correct) up to 1.5 million people into Germany in the space of one year alone.
If multiculturalism was not working with around 50,000 people claiming asylum in Germany each year, how was it expected to work with thirty times that number coming in each year? If not enough was being done in 2010, how was it the case that five years later the German government’s integration network was so much – indeed thirty times – better? And if Germany had been fooling itself in the 1960s about the return of the guest-workers, how much more was it kidding itself that those applying for asylum in 2015 would return to their homes? If multiculturalism had not been working well in 2010 it was working even less well by 2015. The same goes for Britain. If multiculturalism in Britain had failed when Prime Minister David Cameron said it had, in 2011, why was it any less failed in 2015 when the British government oversaw a new record high of net migration into the country? Was the relationship between France and its immigrant populations better by 2015 than it had been a few years before? Or Sweden’s or Denmark’s? All across Europe the migration surge of 2015 piled further numbers of people into a model that all the existing political leaders had already admitted to be a failure. Nothing noticeable had occurred in the years between to have made the model any more successful than it had been in the past.
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At such times, the gap between what the public can see and what the politicians can conceivably say, let alone do about it, became dangerously large. An Ipsos poll published in July 2016 surveyed public attitudes towards immigration. It revealed just how few people think that immigration has had a good impact on their societies. To the question, ‘Would you say that immigration has generally had a positive or negative impact on your country’, extraordinarily low percentages of people in each country thought that immigration had a positive effect on their country. Britain had a comparatively positive attitude, with 36 per cent of people saying they thought immigration had a very or fairly positive impact on their country. Meanwhile only 24 per cent of Swedes felt the same way and just 18 per cent of Germans. In Italy, France and Belgium only 10–11 per cent of the population thought that immigration had made even a fairly positive impact on their countries.