What do Europeans think about what is happening?
Russell W. writes:
You may have addressed this before, but I was wondering what your thoughts were regarding the state of mind of liberal/leftist Europeans (i.e., most of Europe, and ALL of Europe’s elite) and how they see the suicidal changes gaining ground in Europe. The three most common explanations for their seeming lack of alarm at developments which are so manifestly alarming are:
(1) they genunely don’t realize where this is all headed (namely, towards Europe’s extinction and transformation into an outpost of the third world),
(2) they genuinely don’t care, as in, “I’ve got my pension and relative comfort, so who gives a fig if it all crashes after I’m dead?” and
(3) they genuinely favor it, which is of course the most extreme of the three, wherein the sins of the White west are so vile that the only proper remedy is to effectively exterminate the White west as an entity.
Is there a primary one, or are they all mixed up (I assume 3 is a very hardcore extreme minority)? Is there something left out?
My problem is that 1 and 2 seem equally plausible. Or rather, equally implausible, because it boggles my mind how they could possibly either fail to it or to have such selfish disregard for their progeny (the few that they have).
Sorry if you’ve discussed this before. I don’t mean to be duplicative, but I couldn’t think of an effective search query to check.
LA replies:
Your question is well-stated and will help us clarify the problem. I believe the key to this is that what you mean by “it” and what they mean by “it” are two different things. What you mean by “it” is the destruction of European civilization and the nations that constitute it, and you’re asking, “do they realize that, do they care about that, do they favor that?” But they don’t think in such terms. What they favor is “diversity, openness, tolerance.” And they don’t see that as a matter of destroying European civilization, because, as liberals, they have no sense of the larger nation and civilization of which they are a part.
So, they genuinely favor ever-increasing diversity, and they genuinely don’t care about the consequences of it, and they genuinely don’t realize where this is heading, because they have no notion of or identification with a larger whole to which they belong. “Nation” is not real to them or attractive to them; therefore they cannot conceive of a threat to nation. Yes, they identify with the “little” things they like, such as their symphony orchestras, their restaurants, their historic architecture, their standard of living, their welfare state, and so on, but they see these goods by themselves, not as products of a concrete nation and civilization, an “us.” As long as they have these little things, they will continue to fail to realize where this is headed and not to care where it is headed. Therefore the only way for them to change and wake up is through real damage to their way of life, real threats, real loss, real suffering. They must be made to feel the fear and pain in a personal sense, and in particular the helplessness of not having a nation that can defend itself, and this in turn may get them to realize that these things are happening because they gave up any belief in their nation and civilization, their concrete “us,” and that their nation and civilization are the indispensable condition for all the things they care about. And that (though it would have to be a long and arduous process given the depth of their liberalism) would slowly wean them from their complacence and get them to defend their country again.
(See also this related discussion about why Westerners cannot see their nation or any threat to their nation.)
Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 27, 2006 01:21 AM | Send