The rise of Europe?

Here’s a European who Gets It. Wolfgang Bruno has an article at his own blog and at Dhimmiwatch (I recommend the former, as the font is more readable) that hits all the right notes. He starts off by nailing the chest-beating defeatism of Mark Steyn (mentioning my critique of Steyn); then he compares the awakening among Westerners caused by the cartoon jihad to the end of the Phony War of 1939-1940; then he goes on to a call for Europe to arise and begin to confront the Muslim menace; then he focuses on the need to battle the European Union, which he (like me) calls “evil.” Recognizing that Europe needs to create a new politics if it is successfully to fight Islam, he calls for a new Renaissance. (Maybe Bruno should start a magazine called European Renaissance?) While he doesn’t make specific proposals, such as the removal of Muslims from Europe, the entire drift of his argument is toward a European self-defense against Islam and a world-wide weakening of Islam that would seem to assume such measures.

The appearance of a European saying the kinds of things Bruno is saying is a very hopeful sign.

I find only one tiny wrong note in the article, when Bruno speaks of the “pre-Enlightenment ideology of Multiculturalism.” I know what he means; he’s talking about multiethnic and multireligious societies lacking national unity and real political representation, such as have always existed in the Near East. But that is not multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a modern leftist ideology—the very term has only existed since the 1970s—created for the specific purpose of destroying the Western nations by defining each nation as a collection of equal cultures and so delegitimizing its majority culture. Calling multiculturalism “pre-Enlightenment” only confuses. There is nothing Renaissance about it, there is nothing medieval about it. It is a modern, leftist, egalitarian ideology.

Bruno identifies himself as a “European author.” I hope he will tell us his nationality, since an important aspect of the new European Renaissance he hopes for is the revival of individual nations. The Renaissance was a European-wide phenonomon; but the actual work of the Renaiisance was focused in individual nations and even regions or cities, such as Flanders and Florence.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 05, 2006 06:54 PM | Send