Bruce Bawer on the European insanity

In an interview at FrontPage Magazine, Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within, offers some of the clearest and most disturbing insights I’ve yet seen into the Europeans’ attitude toward Muslim and other Third-World immigrants. Unlike in America, where, at least among conservatives, immigrants are at least formally expected to become a part of the host society, the Europeans imported millions of Third-World exotics, expecting and wanting them to remain exotics. It sounds crazy, but when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. If the Other ceases to be totally Other, how can you experience the delicious thrills of tolerating, approving, and subsidizing his totally alien presence? In accord with Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society, the more alien and threatening the Other is, the more highly is he esteemed. Furthermore, how can you enjoy his presence, if he is not actually present? So, instead of constructing daydreams about Noble Savages in foreign lands and climes, the Europeans had the brilliant idea of bringing the Noble Savages en masse into their own lands. This move perfectly satisfied the Europeans’ psychic need for romantic frisson and liberal moral validation, by transforming their society into a tripartite system consisting of (a) “us,” the virtuous Europeans; (b) the exotics whom “we” tolerate and celebrate; and (c) the less enlightened Europeans who are vocally unhappy about this program, and in comparison with whom we virtuous ones appear even more virtuous and broad-minded and thus affirm our right to rule.

The only flaw in the interview is Bawer’s silly and dangerous insistence that America has rejected multiculturalism and is successfully assimilating its non-Western immigrants. The fact that Europe is in vastly worse shape than we are doesn’t mean that we are in good shape.

(An oddity is that in the photo accompanying the article Bawer looks black, something I had never seen any reference to before in various articles dealing with his homosexuality. Perhaps it is just a photographic overexposure.)

Reader N. comments:

Have you read his book “Stealing Jesus”, or even the first chapter of it on the web? His hatred for traditionalist, socially conservative Christians is, or at least was, much deeper than that of Hirsi Ali; recall that he moved to Europe to get away from “homophobia” and those evil “fundamentalists” that scared him so much. So when we read him, even now, we must bear in mind that he is a homosexual-marriage activist, that he is of the Spong branch of the Episcopal church, that he does not really understand American Protestant Christianity very well (or at all), and that he’s another commentator driven more by emotion than by reasoning.

His interview is interesting, perhaps his sojourn in Europe is teaching him a bit of tolerance for his fellow Americans. But I still do not trust his judgment.

Laura writes:

I second Reader N.’s comments about Bruce Bawer. I received a copy of While Europe Slept a few weeks ago from my local library, but I’m going to return it unread. I simply can’t muster any interest in this guy’s insights after reading Stealing Jesus. He struck me as ignorant, a clumsy writer, and so free with his disdain of Christian America that he is guaranteed to be a darling of the publishing world for a long time.

LA writes:

Here is chapter one of Stealing Jesus. Also, I don’t know that Bawer is anti-Christian. His book seems to be against “fundamentalists.” And Bawer himself is a Christian, though of course there are many anti-Christian Christians.

Curiously, Bawer was baptised at and was a parishioner at the same church where I was baptised, St. Thomas Episcopal (though he apparently moved to Europe around the time I came on the scene, in the late ’90s). When I began attending St. Thomas, one of the main appeals was that the sermons (at least the sermons by the main priests, not by visiting bishops who tended to be hateful and sometimes openly anti-Christian liberals) were devoid of politics whether liberal or conservative; they were about the Gospels and Christ; and there was no visibly homosexual presence in the parish. Perhaps things were different under the previous rector, Fr. John Andrew.

Spencer Warren writes:

Bawer was film critic of the American Spectator for many years!

Bawer, Sailer, John Simon, Medved, J Podh — No wonder “conservatives” are lost in the culture war.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 24, 2006 07:50 PM | Send