“It feels great to be in this city,” said my French interlocutor, over dinner this week in a neighborhood Hungarian restaurant. “It feels like I’m back in Europe.”
I laughed, telling him that that is the second time since I moved to Budapest that I’ve heard those words from the mouth of a visitor from France. He smiled and said, “It’s true. I feel it also in Poland.”
He’s talking about migration and crime, of course. Since moving permanently to Europe last autumn, I have put myself on a crash course to learn what life is really like in Europe, as opposed to what the American media says it’s like. One would understand from paying attention to the US media that Europe has migration problems. But one would almost never grasp the depth and breadth of the problem if one did not have the chance to talk to Europeans who are living with it, but whose views do not fit the media’s preferred liberal narrative.
My dining companion was a French conservative who is active in political and civic affairs in his country. I will call him André, though that’s not his real name; I do this in homage to the celebrated 1981 Louis Malle film, My Dinner With André.
My André despairs for the future of France, and of Europe. He senses that most Europeans have become demoralized, and are willing to accept their decline and the end of their civilization.
“You hear more and more people saying they are thinking about leaving France,” he told me. “I would never leave France, but I understand why people feel this way. Nobody wants to be robbed. Nobody wants to be raped. Do you know that now they attack in gangs of twenty, and maybe they don’t kill you, but they destroy your health for life?
“It’s happening,” André continued. “There are so many places in France where you just don’t go. Where my grandmother lived, I would never go now. It would be seen as a provocation by the people who live there, and they would make me pay for it.”
What André didn’t say, because he didn’t have to, is that the no-go places are where immigrants, particularly Muslim immigrants, live. You don’t go there if you are a white French person. The criminals who carry out the robberies, the beatings, the rapes, and so forth, are migrants, or the sons of migrants.
“Did you read The Camp of the Saints? We are living it now!” he said, referring to the notorious 1973 novel by Jean Raspail. The book is considered to be taboo in part for its racist description of Third World peoples invading Europe in a million-man flotilla. I read it in 2015, and found it hard going because parts of it are genuinely racist. But it told some extremely important truths, in particular, predicting that the entire European establishment—politicians, academics, churchmen, media figures—would collaborate on surrender to the migrants.
“I don’t understand the Church in France, what it’s doing,” said André, who is Catholic. “It’s straight out of Camp of the Saints. The bishops, the priests, they all say we have to welcome them. And this Pape François …” he rolled his eyes at the mention of the pro-migration pontiff’s name.
I mentioned to my guest that I had been hearing stories, secondhand, from people in Budapest, saying that more and more French people are moving to Hungary, saying that they believe their own country is lost. The Frenchman had heard the same thing, but about Germans. Who knows for sure?
“Is there anywhere to go, really?” André mused. “The whole world is like this”—meaning, it seemed, all of Europe.
I mentioned that in the United States, we have had decades of politicians promising to seal the US southern border, and all have failed. Now you can see images of Africans pouring across the border. Africans! They had to cross an ocean to arrive there, but now they are in America, illegally.
It keeps happening, and neither Republicans nor Democrats will stop it. I don’t really think America will stop it, I told him. To stop it would require the willingness to apply lethal force to these invaders. Same as in Europe. If the only way to stop the migrant flotillas is to have European navies sink them, then they will not be stopped, as Europeans have no stomach for it.
Why is it, we wondered, that the Poles and the Hungarians retain a hard line on migration, and are willing to defend their borders? Neither of us knew, aside from the fact that both countries were led by politicians who had courage, will, and the backing of democratic majorities.
What about Giorgia Meloni, who was elected as the most right-wing Italian prime minister in ages, mostly out of voter frustration with the unceasing tide of migration? Italian friends who support Meloni say her hands are tied by the system. Douglas Murray’s most recent Spectator column explains why. In short, the laws on migration are set up to punish any official who tries to enforce the law against illegal entry into the country. Previously Matteo Salvini, as a government minister, tried to stop the migrants, and the Italian legal system shut him down. The same is bound to happen to Meloni.
It’s not only in Italy, either. Murray writes of a former Danish immigration minister who put a stop to the migrant tide, but who was later convicted of a crime in relation to her enforcement of the law, and forced to wear an ankle monitor to stay out of prison. The lesson of all this, says Murray:
Allow the daily erosion of your borders and you’ll be just fine. Keep allowing people with no discernible asylum claims to land by the thousands, from a continent with hundreds of millions more to come, and you will be fêted. Stop the law-breaking and you will find yourself prosecuted.
How long will this go on? How long will ordinary people tolerate the law interpreted as a suicide note? As I wrote in this space last week, it is not difficult to foresee exasperated Europeans turning to violence to defend the integrity of their home. This is what happens at the climax of The Camp of the Saints, and it is horrible, a fate devoutly to be deplored. But only a fool can fail to observe the lessons of history in such cases. Most peoples do not go passively to their fates, if they can help it.
My dinner with André ended before I could quiz the Frenchman on prospects for changing the laws in France to make it easier to prevent migrants from coming in, and to expel those already present. But something he said earlier might be the answer. He lamented the practical political alliance between the secular Left and Islamists—the Islamo-gauchiste phenomenon. It makes no sense to him that politicians like far-Left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon would embrace Islamic activists, except out of short-term political interests (votes, that is). The darker prospect, he conceded, is that these leftists genuinely hate Western civilization so much that they are happy to collaborate in its own dissolution and destruction.
It’s easy to see why he thinks so. Earlier in the week, I was in Brussels, admiring some of the gorgeous Art Nouveau architecture in the city. Then I read a New Yorker piece praising a movement to “decolonize” Belgium by possibly tearing down these buildings, because they were erected during the reign of King Leopold II, who reportedly mistreated and killed millions of Africans in his country’s Congolese colony. Leopold is known to the Belgians as the “Builder King” for pouring millions in his Congo profits into public works, including Art Nouveau buildings.
It is scarcely believable that Belgians would entertain for even a second dismantling some of Europe’s most beautiful buildings, because the buildings themselves are somehow tainted with the impurity of colonialism. But then, the mania for tearing down statues of great historical personages who were tied in some way to the slave trade is common now throughout the West—even in the United States, where the New York City Council, having earlier removed a statue of slaveholding Founding Father Thomas Jefferson from City Hall, discussed removing statues of George Washington and other greats of the same era.
The migration crisis is, of course, tied to the broader question of Western self-hatred. It is clear that there still exist many millions of people in Europe and the United States who do not hate their civilizational inheritance, and do not believe they should surrender their lands and their culture to those who do. The problem is that these people are mostly powerless. The elites have drunk the poison. And electing, over and over, politicians who promise to fix it but don’t, has an enervating effect on people.
“They are preparing us for soumission,” said André, speaking of European elites. He used the word for ‘submission’ as a clear reference to the 2015 Michel Houellebecq novel with that title. It tells the story of a demoralized and spiritually exhausted France that yields to Islamic rule out of a lack of anything more appealing. If there were any Frenchmen left to resist, they don’t exist in Houllebecq’s novel. Perhaps they have all moved to Poland and Hungary.
Americans don’t face that, but we do face a future defined by a reality in which elites, both in government and in private life, have dissolved nearly all sense of ties between new generations and what came before. They will have created a blank and malleable public onto which they can stamp their own post-Western, post-Christian ideological image.
We only had one bottle of wine at this dinner, André and I. It was not enough.
