Immigration, Extremism, and Existentialism

Life in the tiny town of Sumte, Germany, is about to become very different. The 105 residents of the remote and little-noticed Lower Saxony village will soon be joined by 500 of the millions of migrants who are heading to Europe from the Middle East, with another 250 scheduled to arrive soon after, so it is reasonable to expect that some significant changes are inevitable. The rest of the western world won’t be out-numbered seven-to-one within its own borders quite as soon, but it would still do well to consider the fate of Sumte.

It’s tough enough for a town of 105 people to suddenly accommodate another 750 or so in the best of circumstances, especially when it has no shops or schools or police stations and a limited amount of sewers and roads and other infrastructure, and such an influx of newcomers who do not speak German and practice a consequentially different religion and derive from countries with a culturally enforced hostility toward western values is by no means the best of circumstances. The German government, which one might well have thought had been created to protect the German way of life for its citizens, has reportedly told the people of Sumte that the only responses to the resettlement plans are “yes and yes,” and the rest of the western world suddenly seems faced with the same grim options. The people don’t much like it, in Sumte or pretty much anywhere else in the western world, but their supposedly democratic governments don’t seem to care. Throughout most of Europe’s officialdom, and among at least half of America’s political parties, and even among the American press that brought us the sad story of Sumte, the bigger worry seems to be that extremist nationalist parties might benefit from the inevitable discontent.

We’re at least somewhat sympathetic to the concern regarding Germany, where extremist nationalist parties have proved so very bellicose over the past century, although even there we’re inclined to feel sorry for the Sumteans, but we wonder why Sweden and Great Britain and Denmark and other countries that have less troublesome histories should be similarly guilt-ridden. The sudden surge of migrants asking for the generous welfare benefits of Scandinavia, long the envy of America’s liberals and the role model for the surging insurgent Democratic presidential campaign of self-described and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, suddenly has those far-right crazies popping up even there. Even in the United States those Republicans have gone so extremist as to oppose mass immigration, with the same appalled reaction from the respectable press and the more respectable members of both major parties, and there is the same glaring gap between the opinion of the populace and that of its elected officials. Almost nowhere in the western world are the governments acting to defend the western civilization that its people have grown accustomed to, whether the populace prefers it because of racism and xenophobia and chauvinism or the same objectively valid reasons that have caused millions of people from the Middle East to migrate to the west, which also seems worrisome.

If the respectable press and the respectable parties are able to declare that any opposition to a preemptive surrender to a Third World invasion is outside the realm of respectability, we expect that the disreputable parties will indeed benefit. The New York Times’ account of Sumte’s travails includes some clearly reviled quotes from one neo-Nazi town councilman, as well as some regretful comments by an unreformed East German communist town councilman that are quoted with great respect, and although we’d like to think that at least a few of the other 103 people in town are somewhere in the more sensible middle we expect they’ll be tarred as right-wing extremists if they’d prefer to not be suddenly outnumbered more than seven-to-one by people who don’t speak German and practice a consequentially different religion and derive from countries with a culturally enforced hostility toward western values. Here in America we can still hope the Republicans will  insist on immigration policies that perpetuate the existing culture, and will retain whatever respectability comes with its status as one of the two major parties, but in much of it Europe we can see how only the worst sorts of elements will address the concerns of otherwise respectable people.

For the moment America’s immigration problems are less threatening, as most of the country’s unprecedented number of new arrivals don’t speak English but at least practice a religion that is less consequentially different than the American norm, or they don’t practice any religion at all, which is becoming the American norm, and they’re not so hostile to most western values, even if they derive from countries with a culturally enforced hostility to capitalism, but the issue is still thorny even here, and the Middle Eastern influx is becoming even thornier. Already the issue has provided a platform for the likes of Donald Trump, and anyone hoping to shame him out of the race should hope that a more respectable candidate will emerge to represent the overwhelming public opinion in favor of retaining something more or less like the cultural status quo.

The same respectable secular opinion that believes the culture of any cannibalistic Amazonian jungle tribe with bones in noses must be preserved in amber seem to also think that Sumte, Germany, or the entire country of Sweden or all of western civilization should be sacrificed on an altar of multi-culturalism to the most supremacist strain of Islam.  They’re worried that extremist parties might benefit from the extremism of the small town yokels in Sumte, Germany, and Wichita, Kansas, and we share their concern, but we’d also prefer to not only avoid the Nazis or the admittedly less dangerous charms of Donald Trump but also leave Sumte and the rest of western civilization intact.

— Bud Norman

Barbarians at the Gate, Then and Now

The decline and fall of the Roman Empire happened a long time ago, but it still seems to show up in the news often. What with the obvious decline and seemingly imminent fall of America and the rest of western civilization so far underway, the analogies are too hard to resist.

Everyone has his favorite theory about the causes of Rome’s demise, of course, with each person’s preference always neatly coinciding with his views on the current scene. The modern-day isolationists blame imperial overreach for that long ago decline and fall, while those who favor a more robust foreign policy point to the lack of attention paid to seemingly unimportant outposts in the empire. The cultural conservatives like to cite the legendary moral decadence of those final days, and the more liberal sorts have a notion that it was because of income inequality or some chemical in the pots they were cooking with that only went undetected due to the lack of a fully-funded Roman Consumer Protection Agency. A very smart fellow over at the American Spectator has written a most intriguing article about Europe’s recent immigration crisis, with obvious implications for our own problems with the matter, and he also posits an analogy to the fall of Rome.

His interpretation of classical history and its lessons for today is more persuasive than most, largely because he cites Edward Gibbons’ “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” the little-read but widely accepted as authoritative book on the subject. The passages he quotes, describing the mass migration of Goths into the Roman Empire at the end of the 4th Century, also have an eerily familiar ring.

“The Barbarians still wore an angry and hostile aspect; but the experience of past times might encourage the hope that they would acquire the habits of industry and obedience; that their manners would be polished by time, education, and the influence of Christianity; and their posterity would insensibly blend with the great body of the Roman people,” Gibbons wrote. He added that, “Notwithstanding these specious arguments, and these sanguine expectations, it was apparent to every discerning eye, that the Goths would long remain the enemies, and might soon become the conquerors of the Roman Empire. Their rude and insolent behavior expressed their contempt of the citizens and the provincials, whom they insulted with impunity.”

The European press has been reluctant to admit it, preferring to focus on the heartbreaking photos of dead Syrian children washing ashore on the beaches of a Europe that is somehow responsible for the mess that Middle Easterners have made of the Middle East, and of course the same old specious arguments and sanguine expectations about industry and obedience and good manners, but the current wave of refugees closely resemble those conquering Goths. The more democratic “social media” on the continent have been providing videotape of the refugees who are swamping the continent as they attack police, scornfully toss away the food and water that are generously provided them, and make demands for immediate transit to the jurisdictions with the most lavishly funded welfare states, and they also note how an inordinate number of these refugees from the Syrian conflict seem to be young and male and able-bodied and and unmarried and not from Syria, and how their rude and insolent behavior expresses their contempt of the citizens and provincials of modern day Europe.

Any American with a discerning eye has by now noticed such rudeness and insolence and contempt of the citizenry among a troublesome portion of this country’s gate-crashers, and especially among such advocacy groups as La Raza, with its nakedly racialist and suddenly plausible ambition for a reconquista of the southwest quadrant of this formerly anglophone country, but here, as in modern Europe and ancient Rome, the prevailing impulse is for specious arguments and sanguine expectations. Even such an able historian as Gibbons probably overlooked the economic arguments that were made in ancient Rome, about Goths doing the work that Romans wouldn’t do and all that, and there’s reason to believe that Germany’s plummeting fertility rates are driving Germany’s suddenly welcoming attitude toward hundreds of thousands of non-German-speaking and illiterate-in-their-own-language refugees from lands where the most stern sort of Islam is practiced, but now as in retrospect such specious arguments and sanguine expectations cannot explain the current madness.

We’ve always been inclined toward the theories about Rome falling due to a lack of attention paid to the far-away and politically troublesome chores of a Pax Romana and gradually slide into moral degeneracy, which fits neatly with our views on foreign policy and to a lesser extent our views on the social issues, and of course we understand that the latter is largely responsible for the former, but at the present moment we’re liking this idea about a lack of border enforcement being the cause of it all. Allowing the allegorical Barbarians into the gate, and then providing them with subsidies and various legal protections, proved a bad strategy back in the day and seems to prove just as futile this time around.

This time around the specious arguments and sanguine expectations are offered in all sincerity, and we suspect that even such a discerning eye as Edward Gibbons’ would concede that the ancient Romans had similarly good intentions, but they are no more convincing. Rarely do we disagree with anything that in appears in City Journal, the publication of the oh-so-intellectual yet right-wing Manhattan Institute, but we were even unswayed by a very well-written argument that at least the most authentic of these “refugees” deserve the compassion of America and the rest of western civilization. The author’s argument not only earns respect by its appeal to the values of western civilization, but also from the fact that his father once feed the horrors of the holocaust in Nazi Germany and survived only by joining a beleaguered French Resistance in the snowy Pyrenees after being turned away by the western democracies, and we do not take it lightly. Still, we reject his argument that his father was no different from the men who so openly express contempt for the nations they hope to inhabit and live of its productivity, and we’d think it a most tragic result of history if Europe were atone for the Holocaust by ceding the continent to people who proudly pine to finish the job.

Here and in Europe, though, the next few epochs of history could go in any direction. Throughout what used to be called “western civilization” there are rules of etiquette that insist on the specious arguments and sanguine expectations about industry and obedience and all the rest of it, but the social media and Donald Trump and all those nativist parties popping up in European countries suggests that will meet some resistance.

— Bud Norman

Europe Falls Out of Love

At this point we must reserve judgment about the allegations of American spying on our European allies, as the information that has thus far surfaced in the international press is quite incomplete. If it turns out that the National Security Agency has been snooping around only in the communications of Frenchmen and Germans who are Islamist nutcases planning acts of terror against the United States we will not be offended, nor care much if the French and Germans are offended, but if the spying turns out to be of a broader and more capricious nature and the allegation that European Union diplomatic offices were bugged is proved we will be forced to concede the Europeans have grounds to be irked.

No matter what the next news cycle might bring, however, there is already a guilty sense of satisfaction in seeing Europe suddenly disillusioned with President Barack Obama. French President Francois Hollande is so incensed with his American counterpart that he’s threatening to block a trans-Atlantic free trade pact, the German government has directed its prosecutors to commence a criminal investigation into the matter, and across the continent newspaper and television commentators are resorting to such foul language as “Bush” and “Cheney.” European patience had already been tested by Obama’s failure to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, his expanded campaign of drone strikes into Pakistan and other Middle Eastern countries, and an American economy that hasn’t exactly kick-started a global boom, but the latest controversy seems to have at last turned European opinion against Obama.

One can only imagine the Europeans’ disappointment, given the high hopes that they had for Obama during the ’08 presidential campaign. During his triumphant tour of the continent that year he was greeted by massive crowds of adoring fans, the press was even more enraptured of his persona than its star-struck American counterpart, and both popular and elite opinion favored him with something scarily close to unanimity. Obama made much of the fact that he “looked different” than previous American presidents, and his dark skin provided Europeans with the same giddy sense of being absolved of racism that so many Americans found in supporting him, but more importantly the Europeans could look at his soft-power foreign policy promises, his spread-the-wealth domestic programs, and his post-nationalist philosophy of the world and see someone who looked very much like themselves. All of the European fears of American power, and all of the resentments that derived from the embarrassing fact that American power had thrice saved Europe from itself during the 20th Century, were alleviated by Obama’s smooth baritone voice and citizen-of-the-world oratory before those adoring crowds.

It was all simplistic nonsense that would inevitably be exposed by the harsh realities of the complicated world, but Europe’s enthusiasm was nonetheless one of the often-mentioned selling points for Obama’s candidacy back home. Self-styled sophisticates in the media and at your local barroom cited Obama’s sky-high approval ratings in Europe as proof of his messianic qualities. After eight years of international ignominy under the oh-so-gauche Bush, Obama’s supporters promised, America would once again be able to sit with the cool kids in the international high school cafeteria. Why supposedly smart Americans should be so concerned with what a bunch European rubes think is a question best left to future historians and psychoanalysts, but it will be interesting to see how the up-date-leftist in America responds to this recent change of international opinion.

— Bud Norman

Doing the Continental

Everyone who has ventured on a European trip has some embarrassing story to tell about it, but President Barack Obama’s recent continental tour could top them all. The president’s recent trip to Ireland and Germany featured enough gaffes, big and small, to fill two or three sequels to “National Lampoon’s European Vacation.”

One of Obama’s smaller gaffes was repeatedly mistaking United Kingdom Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne for rhythm and blues singer Jeffrey Osborne. The confusion prompted much hilarity among the British press, which seems to believe that the old school rhythm and bluesman would do a better job of managing England’s red-ink-soaked finances than the Oxford-educated bureaucrat, but George Osborne politely laughed it off. Obama’s mistake was also laughed off by the American press, which would likely have been more appalled had a Republican president made the same error, and eventually it will be offered as proof of the president’s up-to-date tastes in music. Had he been more of a heavy metal enthusiast Obama might have called the Chancellor “Ozzy,” arguably a more insulting error, but at least he would have been getting the nationality right.

A more significant and deliberate error occurred when Obama lectured an Irish audience that Catholic schools are “divisive.” The remark offended many Catholics throughout Ireland and the United Kingdom as well as in the United States, and was widely viewed as further proof of Obama’s animus toward religion. Although we are quite Protestant by temperament as well as theological conviction, we also found the claim offensive as well as bizarre. The Catholic church has been in the education business for many centuries and has become quite good at it, judging by the Catholic-educated people we know, and we’ve not noticed any divisive effects. Unless Obama was speaking for the benefit of pubic school teachers’ union members back home, or is still miffed by the church’s obstinate rejection of his views on contraception, or somehow prefers the Islamic madrassas of his own youth, we can not imagine why he should insult Catholic schools while in a majority-Catholic country.

A couple thousand die-hard fans still showed up to cheer Obama while he was in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but like a fading rock star whose biggest hits are in the past he found that at every stop the crowds were conspicuously smaller than on past tours. When he returned to Berlin, where a Woodstock-sized throng of adorers were enrapt by his oratory back in the heady days of ’08, Obama found himself speaking behind a bullet-proof glass wall to a modest 4,500 or so polite listeners. He pulled out all the tried-and-true crowd-pleasers from his repertoire, reaching all the way back to the ‘80s for some nuclear disarmament rhetoric, but the speech was universally panned by a suddenly disgruntled European press and back home the media cheerleader Chris Matthews was reduced to blaming the poor reaction on the sun glaring too harshly on the presidential teleprompter.

All of which is embarrassing, but largely inconsequential. The more significant problem was that the European political leadership seemed just as unimpressed, and as a result Obama failed to achieve much of anything but another round of golf. Germany’s Angela Merkel publicly scolded the president about his National Security Agency’s intelligence-gathering techniques, an issue of personal interest to a woman who grew up in East Germany under Stasi’s constant surveillance, and we expect that in private she also had a few things to say about his economic policies. Russia Vladimir Putin offered no concessions regarding the Syrian civil war, icily explaining to the press that “Our views do not coincide,” and his public encounters with the president demonstrated that Russo-American relations have not been reset to any positive effect.

The trip was bad enough that Obama should be glad to get back to the United States, where the stock market is crashing, scandals are mounting, the Obamacare train is wrecking, but a restful week of vacation in Martha’s Vineyard awaits. All the fading rock stars vacation there, and they could have a good time swapping stories about their European tours.

— Bud Norman

That Sinking Feeling

The analogy is so obvious, so easy, so likely to soon become hackneyed, that it should be below the high standards of this publication. Still, we can’t resist likening the European Union to the cruise ship that sank last Friday off the coast of Tuscany.

Early press reports indicate that the Costa Concordia crashed against rocks and went under because of the captain’s hubris and incompetence, that the ensuing rescue efforts were a disastrous chaos of every man for himself, and that much finger-pointing and excuse-making will follow. The similarities to the EU are simply too obvious to explicate.

The metaphorical ship of state in Greece will be the first of the EU members to sink entirely into a sea of red ink, according to the Fitch rating agency. Edward Parker, who must keep very busy as managing director of Fitch’s Sovereign and Supranational Group in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told Reuters that “It is going to happen. Greece is insolvent so it will default.” Such blunt assessments usually provoke vague denials by politicians, but in this case the Greek Prime Minister told the New York Times that if his country’s bondholders didn’t agree to take losses they would be forced to do so, and either option matches Fitch’s definition of a default. Fitch tempered its dire forecast with an assurance the default would be “orderly,” unlike the Costa Concordia’s demise, but given that Greece has already seen widespread and murderous rioting over austerity measures even that might be optimistic.

Greece’s sinking economy might well drag down Portugal, which has already seen its bonds downgraded to junk status by all three of the main ratings agencies. Investors have lately been stampeding out of the Portuguese bond market with all the ferocity of a Costa Concordia crew member knocking over little old ladies on the way to a lifeboat, and the Financial Times reports that the country “moves into default territory.”

Many of the bondholders that Greece and Portugal will be abandoning without a metaphorical life preserver are banks spread throughout the rest of Europe, many of them already under severe stress that threatens their national economies. The credit ratings of nine other European countries, including such big ones as France and Italy, have already been downgraded, and if they’re counting on help from the EU’s bail-out fund, that’s been downgraded as well. Germany has retained its top-notch credit rating, despite signs that it is slipping into a recession, but Germans are increasingly resistant to rescuing their fellow EU passengers.

Europe’s sinking feeling, along with slower growth in such developing countries as Brazil and India, has prompted the World Bank to warn of a global economic downturn. None of this is likely to affect America’s indebted and down-graded economy, judging by the questions being asked at the rare White House press conference or the all-too-common Republican presidential debates, but just in case the United States does turn out to be part of the world we urge a return to the chivalrous days of women and children first.

— Bud Norman