The ongoing "deculturation of Europe" can only result in the destruction of Western civilzation

Ray Oliver Dreher Jr, aka Rod Dreher, is an American conservative writer and editor living in Hungary. He is a critic of large-scale immigration to the US of A and Europe, and a staunch defender of  the concept of Western civilization.

Mr Dreher has been condemned by the usual suspects for his on Jean Raspail's 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints. To be fair, he strongly criticized the novel's use of derogatory language to describe non-Westerners and called the book bad, both aesthetically and morally. But he also referred to the "valuable" and "prophetic" lessons that can be drawn from the work, including from Raspail's argument, which Dreher presents as potentially correct, that "the only way to defend Western civilization from these invaders [non-Western immigrants] is to be willing to shed their blood."

He refers again to M Raspail's book in his diary entry published October 12th, headed Role Of Church Elites In Europe's Suicide. The subhead: "Christians Cannot Afford To Trust Ecclesial Leaders To Defend The Faith". A big thank-you to BCF for directing us to the Substack post, from which we take this excerpt:

...we all heard a speech by Thibault de Montbrial...[who] has a new book coming out in France next week, about what he regards as his country's "emergency" situation.... He warned that western Europeans should prepare themselves for mass violence at the level the continent...hasn’t seen since the end of World War II. That is to say (though he didn’t use this term), civil wars.... 

He explained that Islamists have managed to infiltrate both public and private institutions all over Europe, and are using it to their advantage. How did all this happen? 

De Montbrial, a practicing Catholic, said that the core of the problem is cultural — namely, that France (and Europe) has lost all sense of who and what it is. It has forgotten its past, and any sense of connection to it, and has lost its identity. (This is what Renaud Camus calls “The Great Deculturation”).

How do you expect young people to resist people (Muslims) who are hostile to Western civilization, and who have a strong culture, if you have produced a generation, or generations, of people who have no culture? 

[De Montbrial] said that in France, Muslim activists are even succeeding in winning over the hearts and minds of no small number of native-born French, by telling them, basically: "Look around you at what a nihilistic, pornified disaster modern Europe has become. Is that really what you want? Convert, join the ummah, and gain a story. Become part of the glorious march through history of the sons and daughters of the Prophet." It works, he said....

This, he went on, is why though France and other European countries have to use legal, political, and law enforcement means to fight this stuff, the core of the struggle is cultural. If Europe doesn’t recover its sense of history and culture, and in a meaningful way, such that its people are willing to fight to defend it, all will be lost.

A subsequent speaker made the point more explicit: at the heart of culture is cult, or religion. Either Europe re-Christianizes, or it Islamizes. There is no stable third option.

Worth reading: Suicide of the West, by James Burnham. The John Day Company, New York, 1964. An essay on the meaning and destiny of liberalism, even more relevant 60 years later than it was when published. You don't believe me? Look around you!

Mark Steyn on the Middle East and our "societal suicide"

Shortly after I wrote to explain why there's no way for us Westerners to win a war in which we don't have any skin -- the Muslim civil war now raging in the Middle East -- I stumbled on some thoughts along the same line from Mark Steyn in National Review, almost seven years ago (30/12/08). Following the supposed defeat of the Taliban, Mr. Steyn wrote:

With the Taliban gone and the world's slowest "rush to war" with Iraq just getting underway, I made the mistake of going to Europe to visit the famous banlieues of Paris and other Continental Muslim neighborhoods.... I started to get the queasy feeling the bewildered investigator does when he's standing in the strange indentation at the edge of town and, just as he works out it's a giant left-foot print, he glances up to see Godzilla's right foot totaling his Honda Civic.

I began to see that it's not really about angry young men in caves in the Hindu Kush; it's not even about angry young men in the fast growing Muslim populations of the west -- although that's certainly part of the seven-eighths of the iceberg bobbing just below the surface of 9/11. But the bulk of that iceberg is the profound and perhaps fatal weakness of the civilization that built the modern world. [My emphasis. Walt]

We're witnessing the early stages of what the United Nations Population Division calls a "global upheaval" that's "without parallel in human history". Demographically and psychologically, Europeans have chosen to commit societal suicide, and their principal heir and beneficiary will be Islam. [Again. Walt] ...

Islam is not monolithic.... It's perfectly understandable for Osama bin Laden to play bad cop to the western Muslim lobby groups' good cop, granted that they share the same aim: the wish to annex the crusader lands to the House of Islam.

These comments are part of a chapter called "The Limits" in The [Un]documented Mark Steyn (Regnery 2014), which I recommend highly. But Mr. Steyn is not the first student of history to identify the suicide of the West. That, in fact, is the title of a classic by James Burnham -- full title Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (John Day Co. 1964). I have it on my "working bookshelf" and urge you to get a copy -- it's still in print, and republished as an e-book -- to see how our "leaders" ignored such warnings and led us into the decline and fall playing out today.

A summary on the Amazon and Encounter Books websites says:
Suicide of the West remains a startling account on the nature of the modern era. It offers a profound, in-depth analysis of what is happening in the world today by putting into focus the intangible, often vague doctrine of American liberalism. It parallels the loosely defined liberal ideology rampant in American government and institutions, with the flow, ebb, growth, climax and the eventual decline and death of both ancient and modern civilizations.

Its author maintains that western suicidal tendencies lie not so much in the lack of resources or military power, but through an erosion of intellectual, moral, and spiritual factors abundant in modern western society and the mainstay of liberal psychology. Devastating in its relentless dissection of the liberal syndrome, this book will lead many liberals to painful self-examination, buttress the thinking conservative’s viewpoint, and incite others, no doubt, to infuriation. None can ignore it.

Book review: Pat Buchanan blames Churchill (et al.) for both World Wars and the decline of the West -- an argument worth reading

Western civilization is dying! That's hardly an original thought. For the last half-century -- since the flourishing of flower-power and antiestablishmentarianism in the `60s -- many learned and thoughtful commentators have written variations on the theme. Leading the way was James Burnham, whose Suicide of the West (1964) has pride of place on Walt's bookshelf.

Beside it will be placed, very soon, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, by Patrick J. Buchanan (Three Rivers Press, 2008). Walt is awarer that any mention of Mr. Buchanan is met with snorts of derision from the liberal establishment and their lickspittle lamestream media. But there is no denying that he is an educated and thoughtful man, a keen student of history, whose insights, however contrarian, deserve consideration.

In this monumental and provocative history, the author argues that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen -- Winston Churchill first among them -- the horrors of two world wars might have been avoided, and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of hundreds of millions under the iron boot of Communist and Maoist tyrannies might never have happened, and Europe's central role in world affairs might have been sustained for many generations.

Walt has just begun reading the book -- it takes me time to get through the books I buy [He moves his lips when he reads. Ed.] -- and, right at the beginning of the Preface, found an analysis worth posting here.

All about us we can see clearly now that the West is passing away.

In a single century, all the great houses of continental Europe fell. All the empires that ruled the world have vanished. Not one European nation, save Muslim Albania, has a birthrate that will enable it to survive through the century. As a share of world population, people of European ancestry have been shrinking for three generations. The character of every Western nation is being irremediably altered as each undergoes an unresisted invasion from the Third World. We are slowly disappearing from the Earth.

What happened to us? What happened to our world?...

Somewhere in the last century, Western man suffered a catastrophic loss of faith -- in himself, in his civilization, and in the faith that gave it birth.

That Christianity is dying in the West, being displaced by a militant secularism, seems undeniable.... But there is no dispute about the physical wounds that may yet prove mortal. These were World Wars I and II, two phases of a Thirty Years' War future historians will call the Great Civil War of the West. Not only did these two wars carry off scores of millions of the best and bravest of the West, they gave birth to the fanatic ideologies of Leninism, Stalinism, Nazism, and Fascism, whose massacres of the people they misrules accounted for more victims than all of the battlefield deaths in ten years of fighting.

Walt recommends Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, if only for the Preface and Introduction -- all ye know and all ye need to know.