It is by now a common experience for us Budapesters to host visitors from Western Europe and to hear them utter a version of this sentiment: “I love this city—it feels like I’m living in Europe again.” What they mean is plain: because Hungary does not suffer from uncontrolled mass migration; its low-crime capital reminds them of what they have lost back home.
There’s no point in pretending that there isn’t an ethnic aspect of all this. To visit Rome, Paris, and other major western European cities these days requires being prepared to run a gauntlet of menacing-looking foreigners—black and brown young men from abroad—who loiter near train stations and public parks. We are all trained to suppress any thoughts that might be racist, but it requires a Herculean effort to overcome one’s self-protective instincts, given crime statistics.
Sweden offers perhaps the starkest example of what mass migration has done to Europe. The country was once a model of mild-mannered social democracy. Then, in 2015, it opened its doors wide to migrants, particularly from the Muslim world. The country hit a record for migration in 2016, but migration levels have not returned to pre-2016 levels.
Today, Sweden is the gun violence capital of Europe. Last year, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said, “Sweden has never before seen anything like this. No other country in Europe is seeing anything like this.”
Migrant crime is, alas, an all too familiar story, one that most European leaders can’t deal with because it would require them having to abandon certain progressive shibboleths. One of those shibboleths is that all migrants are the same. They aren’t. For example, many Ukrainian migrants living in Ireland are integrating; many migrants from Islamic countries are not. The refusal of European leaders to make the kinds of distinctions among migrant populations—distinctions that are obvious to ordinary Europeans who use the streets of major cities—exacerbates the crisis.
But what about the migrants who do integrate well? You know, the ones who live peaceably, work hard to become productive citizens, and to serve the broader society of which they have become a part? Who can complain about them?
Certainly European conservatives have far bigger migration-related problems to deal with than worrying about the Ukrainian barista pulling espressos in Dublin. It can even be argued that given that all European countries struggle with fertility rates below the population replacement level, it’s in the long-term interest of European countries to identify, welcome, and integrate foreigners who stand a good chance of becoming good citizens.
With a replacement rate of only 1.19 births per woman (2.1 is required for population replacement), Spain would do well to increase migration from Latin America. Latin Americans, who share the language and much of the culture of Spaniards, are well placed to move into education and employment there in ways that African and Middle Eastern migrants are not. This is simply common sense.
It is difficult to have a meaningful public discussion of which kinds of immigrants to accept, because Europe, alas, is cursed with an elite leadership class that seems to hate European cultural distinctiveness. They stand for nothing less than the annihilation of Europe.
A perfect example is the recent declaration on French television, by the Sorbonne intellectual Mathieu Slama, who said, “The identity of Europe is to be without identity. It is to be the place of human rights and openness.”
These could be the opening lines of a cultural suicide note. Slama, and the class he represents, despise the things that make Europe, Europe. For them, everything is abstract. They are the kinds of intellectuals whose minds are so open that their brains fall out.
They are what the British public intellectual David Goodhart once identified as Anywheres. In his 2017 book The Road To Somewhere, Goodhart said the most important fault line in the UK (and elsewhere) is between the cosmopolitans who have no loyalties to a place or a people—the Anywheres—and the Somewheres, those who feel rooted in a particular place, and hold themselves to be members of a distinct people.
Goodhart writes that you can tell who belongs to which “values tribe” by asking them: “Does where you live feel like a foreign country?” In 1961, the population of London was 98% white. Today, only 37% of Londoners are white British, with an additional 17% being white foreigners. In only 60 years, the population of white Britons in the capital of Great Britain dropped by 60%.
Is this a good thing? A bad thing? A bit of both? Wherever you come down on the question, it is undoubtedly a massively important thing. The contempt that elites, especially (but not exclusively, as the Tory Party has shown us) on the Left, have for the Somewheres who object to their displacement and replacement, is palpable.
Progressives have a neat trick. If you are a white person who moves into a predominantly non-white neighborhood, you stand condemned as a “gentrifier.” If you are a white person who moves out of a neighborhood that is in transition to majority-minority status, you will be denounced as a racist guilty of “white flight.” The important thing is that the Anywheres—and the Left today is all Anywheres, and their clients—will stigmatize you. It’s how they locate their own identity.
The struggle between the Somewheres and the Anywheres is, at bottom, a culture war between white Europeans (and, in the United States, between whites of European descent). This is a big reason why, in both the U.S. and Europe, the borders remain more or less open, even though most people in our democracies do not want them to be. In 2010, then-UK prime minister Gordon Brown, a Labour leader, was caught on an open microphone insulting an elderly Labour voter who had challenged him on migration policy. He called her a “bigoted woman.” That is the Left’s answer to any challenge over migration and multiculturalism: to call those who complain bigots, or agents of the ‘far right.’ It is the Left’s way of avoiding responsibility. It is the default response of the Anywheres.
To be fair, as an American expatriate living for now in Hungary, I am partly an Anywhere. Yet I am grateful for what makes Hungary Hungary—and if the Hungarians decided that having an American expat living among them hurts their country, I fully recognize their right to send me on my way. One of the things I most admire about the Magyars is their sense that their culture is meaningful to them, and their willingness to defend it.
Hungary is a Somewhere Nation that is governed by a Somewhere party. Most European countries are still Somewhere Nations that are governed by Anywheres. Sir Roger Scruton coined the word “oikophobia” to describe “the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’.”
Scruton went on:
The oik repudiates national loyalties and defines his goals and ideals against the nation, promoting transnational institutions over national governments, accepting and endorsing laws that are imposed on us from on high by the EU or the UN … and defining his political vision in terms of universal values that have been purified of all reference to the particular attachments of a real historical community. The oik is, in his own eyes, a defender of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism. And it is the rise of the oik that has led to the growing crisis of legitimacy in the nation states of Europe.
With his thoughtless remark, Mathieu Slama outs himself as a pure distillation of the oik mentality. In the end, the real enemy of European civilization is not the migrant criminals, jihadists, and terror supporters in our streets. It is the oiks of both the left-wing and the right-wing establishments who have permitted them to come, and who denigrate their countrymen who object as bigots, fascists, and (to use Hillary Clinton’s infamous term) “deplorables.”
The coming European elections will be a showdown between the Somewheres and the Anywheres, between the oiks and European peoples who have the audacity to believe their countries are worth loving and preserving. The culture war on European nations and peoples is felt most acutely on the streets and in the public squares of European cities, but the generals and the officer corps are well-positioned in the halls of government, academia, and media.
What those fools do not recognize is that should they achieve victory over the Euro-deplorables, the Others on whose behalf they are fighting will turn on them. In half a century of mass migration from the Third World into Europe, nobody has succeeded in turning most of the migrants into docile Europeans. “Multiculturalism has failed,” said Angela Merkel in 2010; five years later, she opened the passageway for over one million Middle Eastern migrants into Europe.
And why should these migrants transform themselves into Europeans, given that the ruling classes throughout Europe seem eager to see European culture destroyed for the sake of an abstraction? The thousand-strong demonstration in Hamburg over the weekend demanding the establishment of a caliphate on German soil, was not filled with protesters waving rainbow flags and calling for the Rights of Man.
One doesn’t expect self-blinded oiks like Mathieu Slama to recover their ability to see what is in front of their noses, but there is yet hope that European voters will trust their own common sense. If they have lost sight of the Europe that used to exist before the oikophobic elites destroyed it, let them come to Budapest, look around, and be enlightened.
Down With the Oikophobic Ruling Class
It is by now a common experience for us Budapesters to host visitors from Western Europe and to hear them utter a version of this sentiment: “I love this city—it feels like I’m living in Europe again.” What they mean is plain: because Hungary does not suffer from uncontrolled mass migration; its low-crime capital reminds them of what they have lost back home.
There’s no point in pretending that there isn’t an ethnic aspect of all this. To visit Rome, Paris, and other major western European cities these days requires being prepared to run a gauntlet of menacing-looking foreigners—black and brown young men from abroad—who loiter near train stations and public parks. We are all trained to suppress any thoughts that might be racist, but it requires a Herculean effort to overcome one’s self-protective instincts, given crime statistics.
Sweden offers perhaps the starkest example of what mass migration has done to Europe. The country was once a model of mild-mannered social democracy. Then, in 2015, it opened its doors wide to migrants, particularly from the Muslim world. The country hit a record for migration in 2016, but migration levels have not returned to pre-2016 levels.
Today, Sweden is the gun violence capital of Europe. Last year, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said, “Sweden has never before seen anything like this. No other country in Europe is seeing anything like this.”
Migrant crime is, alas, an all too familiar story, one that most European leaders can’t deal with because it would require them having to abandon certain progressive shibboleths. One of those shibboleths is that all migrants are the same. They aren’t. For example, many Ukrainian migrants living in Ireland are integrating; many migrants from Islamic countries are not. The refusal of European leaders to make the kinds of distinctions among migrant populations—distinctions that are obvious to ordinary Europeans who use the streets of major cities—exacerbates the crisis.
But what about the migrants who do integrate well? You know, the ones who live peaceably, work hard to become productive citizens, and to serve the broader society of which they have become a part? Who can complain about them?
Certainly European conservatives have far bigger migration-related problems to deal with than worrying about the Ukrainian barista pulling espressos in Dublin. It can even be argued that given that all European countries struggle with fertility rates below the population replacement level, it’s in the long-term interest of European countries to identify, welcome, and integrate foreigners who stand a good chance of becoming good citizens.
With a replacement rate of only 1.19 births per woman (2.1 is required for population replacement), Spain would do well to increase migration from Latin America. Latin Americans, who share the language and much of the culture of Spaniards, are well placed to move into education and employment there in ways that African and Middle Eastern migrants are not. This is simply common sense.
It is difficult to have a meaningful public discussion of which kinds of immigrants to accept, because Europe, alas, is cursed with an elite leadership class that seems to hate European cultural distinctiveness. They stand for nothing less than the annihilation of Europe.
A perfect example is the recent declaration on French television, by the Sorbonne intellectual Mathieu Slama, who said, “The identity of Europe is to be without identity. It is to be the place of human rights and openness.”
These could be the opening lines of a cultural suicide note. Slama, and the class he represents, despise the things that make Europe, Europe. For them, everything is abstract. They are the kinds of intellectuals whose minds are so open that their brains fall out.
They are what the British public intellectual David Goodhart once identified as Anywheres. In his 2017 book The Road To Somewhere, Goodhart said the most important fault line in the UK (and elsewhere) is between the cosmopolitans who have no loyalties to a place or a people—the Anywheres—and the Somewheres, those who feel rooted in a particular place, and hold themselves to be members of a distinct people.
Goodhart writes that you can tell who belongs to which “values tribe” by asking them: “Does where you live feel like a foreign country?” In 1961, the population of London was 98% white. Today, only 37% of Londoners are white British, with an additional 17% being white foreigners. In only 60 years, the population of white Britons in the capital of Great Britain dropped by 60%.
Is this a good thing? A bad thing? A bit of both? Wherever you come down on the question, it is undoubtedly a massively important thing. The contempt that elites, especially (but not exclusively, as the Tory Party has shown us) on the Left, have for the Somewheres who object to their displacement and replacement, is palpable.
Progressives have a neat trick. If you are a white person who moves into a predominantly non-white neighborhood, you stand condemned as a “gentrifier.” If you are a white person who moves out of a neighborhood that is in transition to majority-minority status, you will be denounced as a racist guilty of “white flight.” The important thing is that the Anywheres—and the Left today is all Anywheres, and their clients—will stigmatize you. It’s how they locate their own identity.
The struggle between the Somewheres and the Anywheres is, at bottom, a culture war between white Europeans (and, in the United States, between whites of European descent). This is a big reason why, in both the U.S. and Europe, the borders remain more or less open, even though most people in our democracies do not want them to be. In 2010, then-UK prime minister Gordon Brown, a Labour leader, was caught on an open microphone insulting an elderly Labour voter who had challenged him on migration policy. He called her a “bigoted woman.” That is the Left’s answer to any challenge over migration and multiculturalism: to call those who complain bigots, or agents of the ‘far right.’ It is the Left’s way of avoiding responsibility. It is the default response of the Anywheres.
To be fair, as an American expatriate living for now in Hungary, I am partly an Anywhere. Yet I am grateful for what makes Hungary Hungary—and if the Hungarians decided that having an American expat living among them hurts their country, I fully recognize their right to send me on my way. One of the things I most admire about the Magyars is their sense that their culture is meaningful to them, and their willingness to defend it.
Hungary is a Somewhere Nation that is governed by a Somewhere party. Most European countries are still Somewhere Nations that are governed by Anywheres. Sir Roger Scruton coined the word “oikophobia” to describe “the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’.”
Scruton went on:
With his thoughtless remark, Mathieu Slama outs himself as a pure distillation of the oik mentality. In the end, the real enemy of European civilization is not the migrant criminals, jihadists, and terror supporters in our streets. It is the oiks of both the left-wing and the right-wing establishments who have permitted them to come, and who denigrate their countrymen who object as bigots, fascists, and (to use Hillary Clinton’s infamous term) “deplorables.”
The coming European elections will be a showdown between the Somewheres and the Anywheres, between the oiks and European peoples who have the audacity to believe their countries are worth loving and preserving. The culture war on European nations and peoples is felt most acutely on the streets and in the public squares of European cities, but the generals and the officer corps are well-positioned in the halls of government, academia, and media.
What those fools do not recognize is that should they achieve victory over the Euro-deplorables, the Others on whose behalf they are fighting will turn on them. In half a century of mass migration from the Third World into Europe, nobody has succeeded in turning most of the migrants into docile Europeans. “Multiculturalism has failed,” said Angela Merkel in 2010; five years later, she opened the passageway for over one million Middle Eastern migrants into Europe.
And why should these migrants transform themselves into Europeans, given that the ruling classes throughout Europe seem eager to see European culture destroyed for the sake of an abstraction? The thousand-strong demonstration in Hamburg over the weekend demanding the establishment of a caliphate on German soil, was not filled with protesters waving rainbow flags and calling for the Rights of Man.
One doesn’t expect self-blinded oiks like Mathieu Slama to recover their ability to see what is in front of their noses, but there is yet hope that European voters will trust their own common sense. If they have lost sight of the Europe that used to exist before the oikophobic elites destroyed it, let them come to Budapest, look around, and be enlightened.
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