What has been going on this summer on the southern borders of Europe? That’s a trick question: Europe no longer has any borders at all. Consider the situation on the Italian Island of Lampedusa, where, in the space of a mere four days in September, around 12,000 illegal immigrants from Africa and the Muslim diaspora came ashore in their boats—that’s double the actual resident population of 6,000 Italian citizens. Fast forward fifty to a hundred years, and it’s a fair bet that’s what the formerly Christian continent will look like as a whole.
Yet Pope Francis, who may reasonably be expected, given his title, to act as a guardian of Christian Europe, seems to think this is nothing much to be concerned about. Speaking at a conference in Marseilles on 23 September, Francis warned of the pressing need not to call the current invasion an invasion at all: “Those who risk their lives at sea are not invading, they are seeking welcome, they are seeking life.” Mass immigration, he continued, was “not so much a momentary emergency, which is always good for alarmist propaganda, but a fact of our time.” Translation: this is going to go on forever, so just get used to it.
Arguing for an innate human “right to emigrate,” Francis naively seeks to end the current wave of illegal immigration by urging European nations to “ensure … a large number of legal and regular pathways for entry” instead; that is, to dismantle Europe’s borders wholesale. “To say ‘enough’ … is to shut one’s eyes; to try to ‘save oneself’ now will turn into tragedy tomorrow,” he concluded. The true tragedy of tomorrow, a sceptic might argue, would be the inevitable demographic transformation of Europe into little more than the northernmost outpost of Islam—a tragedy towards which Francis himself seems all too happy to “shut one’s eyes.”
God’s Own Country
Pope Francis has long been an advocate of dismantling national borders, but the Bible itself offers nothing very much on the topic, which is why two highly different Christian schools of thought have today arisen. One man very much on the side of building walls is the Israeli-American political philosopher and biblical scholar Yoram Hazony, author of the 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism, which argues that the nation state was an inherently God-given mode of governance, as shown in particular by the biblical experiences of the early Hebrews of the nation of Israel. A nation state with clear borders, argues Hazony, is the best guarantee of a stable internal political order, even if such entities end up necessarily excluding many persons from without as agents of potential civilizational dilution.
The biggest rival to the nation state today, continues Hazony, is the empire, embodied by globalist institutions like the EU or UN, which seeks only to dissolve the natural boundaries between people and lands in order to impose a set of universal values upon all mankind whether they like it or not. By endlessly hymning that excessively homogenized fiction named humanity, empires end up erasing all individual human beings from the intellectual map, replacing them with generic economic and political units, often by force (as in the old USSR).
For Hazony, the Tower of Babel story provides a parable for the folly of trying to unite all individual peoples under one single imperial tongue, or ‘language of civilization.’ Such an ideal is doomed to failure because it is, quite simply, unnatural—or, to put it another way, it contradicts the will of God. Hazony argues that empires are abstract and global in nature, and God dislikes them, whereas nations are concrete and particular, something of which God approves; otherwise, why would he have made all the different races and languages in the first place?
The Wandering Jews
Some Christians disagree. A 2019 book which reads like a direct response to Hazony is The Bible and Borders: Hearing God’s Word on Immigration by M. Daniel Carroll R. (let’s just call him Carroll). Carroll’s text hinges upon the argument that the Book of Genesis explicitly says that all men are made in the Imago Dei, or ‘Image of God,’ and so to prevent any man crossing the border into another country is akin to rejecting God Himself—the kind of argument also adopted by Pope Francis. For Carroll, the central immigration-related lesson of the Old Testament is not that the people of Israel were a nation, but that they were once a wandering nation—a caravan of immigrants rather like those continually winding through Mexico in search of entry (legal or otherwise) into Biden’s increasingly borderless America.
Carroll’s reading of the Bible argues that immigration is “the default experience of the people of God,” from Moses to Ruth, standing forlorn and lost “amidst the alien corn,” as Keats puts it. From this, he extrapolates to claim that migration is in fact the default experience of mankind in general throughout recorded history, making us all into a race of nomads. Such arguments recall the common (but highly anachronous) line that Jesus Himself was both a refugee and an immigrant during the Flight into Egypt, when the infant Christ was taken from his homeland by Mary and Joseph in order to escape King Herod’s murderous designs. The Bible Society, a British Christian association, has a whole webpage devoted to making this very claim, headed by a large photograph of some of the many thousands of Middle Eastern and African ‘refugees’ who have illegally made their way onto British beaches in recent years, no doubt seeking haven from that notorious totalitarian dictatorship, France. However, it is worth considering that these huddled masses are not really coming as friends—in the way that bridge-building, wall-demolishing Pope Francis airily claims—but rather as invaders.
A Bridge Too Far
As long ago as 1999, the Catholic Archbishop of Izmir alleged that an Islamic scholar had openly told a Turkish meeting of Islamic-Christian dialogue that “Thanks to your democratic laws we will invade you; thanks to our religious laws we will dominate you.” At least the unnamed imam was honest, unlike the West’s own border-dismantling politicians.
Also honest were the Muslim youths of Sweden who, earlier this century, used to wander around Stockholm wearing a popular T-shirt bearing the phrase “2030—then we take over,” referencing an inaccurate demographic forecast that 2030 would be the year in which non-white Muslim immigrants and their descendants outnumbered native white Christian Swedes (on current trends this joyous occasion is now predicted to occur somewhere around 2125 instead). Also honest was Turkey’s President Erdogan when, in 2008, he told a crowd of 20,000 ethnic Turks squatting in Europe that “Assimilation is a crime against humanity.” Instead, he urged them to enter politics, so that they would be able to wield “a constitutional element” against their hosts—a polite way of saying ‘colonise them.’
In 2018, one deeply appreciative Syrian immigrant, 18-year-old Aras Bacho, complained of feeling unwelcome amongst the native German Volk. He suggested an innovative solution—the native Germans should all leave: “Germany does not fit you, why do you live here? … Look for a new home.” Apparently, many soon took his advice. Aras did not make his pronouncement on a German street-corner in a fit of fleeting anger; rather, he was given his own opinion column in a pair of reputable German newspapers, so that he could more authoritatively order their readers to flee the home of their ancestors forever.
Those few Western leaders who refuse politely to submit to future slavery and dhimmitude, like Hungary’s admirable PM Viktor Orbán, are, quite predictably, smeared as ‘racist’ for saying common-sense things like the following (from a 2016 speech):
Mass immigration is a slow stream of water persistently eroding the shores. It is masquerading as a humanitarian cause, but its true nature is the occupation of territory. And what is gaining territory for them is losing territory for us … Those who have come here with the intention of changing our country, shaping our nation in our own image … have always been met with resistance.
“Met with resistance” once, maybe—but not any more. In an effort to ruin Christmas 2014, the then-PM of Sweden, Fredrik Reinfeldt, gave a TV interview in which he claimed that borders are wholly fictional constructs, and that Swedish territory does not really belong to the Swedes at all:
What is Sweden as a country? Is this nation owned by those who have lived here for four generations, or by those who invent some borders? Or is this an open country made up of people who arrive here in midlife, perhaps born in another country? And it is what they make of Sweden that is Sweden.
Funny; I’d always thought Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian.
Go Forth and Multiply
The now-familiar idea of the ‘Great Replacement’ is often dismissed these days as a mere ‘conspiracy theory,’ but works of mainstream academic demography show that it’s an obvious fact. As French theorist Renaud Camus—the man who coined the term ‘Great Replacement’ in the first place—recently argued, his idea is “not a conspiracy; it’s an observation.” No doubt many Muslims (and others) who enter post-Christian Europe are not consciously or maliciously coming to deliberately replace the historically white Christian population of the continent. But whatever their individual desires may be, the ultimate effect of their mass immigration into the West will be the replacement of the West’s historic white Christian populations, intentional or not.
Nevertheless, Islam’s forthcoming Reconquista of Europe might yield some positive consequences for Christians. In 1999, American playwright Terrence McNally staged a fashionably blasphemous play in London, Corpus Christi, depicting Jesus Christ as a homosexual crucified as “King of the Queers,” not of the Jews. Despite posing as being ‘daring’ and ‘subversive,’ McNally was not expecting to suffer any meaningful consequences whatsoever within now-secular Britain. However, he seems to have forgotten that Jesus is also considered a holy figure in Islam, leading representatives of the self-styled ‘Shariah Court of the UK’ to issue a fatwah against the playwright, calling for his death on the grounds that the spineless Church of England had unaccountably failed to do so themselves.
So, take solace in your future replacement, faithful Christians: after all, there might be something to be said for a European future in which Christ would be defended, rather than routinely denigrated, by figures of public authority. Maybe that’s why Pope Francis actually wants to bring them all over here by the boatload?
We have published a series of pieces to explore the ideas of Renaud Camus. The first was Anthony Daniel’s commentary published here, the second was by Pierre-Marie Sève here. Filip de Winter discusses Camus’ ideas in an interview here. We previously also published Rod Dreher’s birthday tribute to Camus here. We hope these various articles will reinvigorate discussion over immigration and its challenges today.
We hope to help raise awareness of his works, nearly all written in French, to coincide with the publication of the first English-language collection of essays by Camus, Enemy of the Disaster, released on October 15th in the United States and on October 17th in Europe and the rest of the world. Enemy of the Disaster can be ordered from Amazon or from the publisher’s distributor, Itasca Books. You may read an excerpt here.
The European Conservative is hosting a panel discussion on Wednesday, October 25th in Brussels entitled Lampedusa: The Broken Gate of Europe. At this event, our speakers will provide an overview of the last decade of illegal migration through the Mediterranean.
