While Europe Slept by Bruce Bawer

To read this book is to suffer near constant astonishment and anger. I usually could read a book like this in a couple days, two sittings, but instead I took eight days to read this one, because I just could not read an entire page without having to stop, either to wonder in astonishment or to try to calm my rage. The book is filled with such unbelievable and outrageous things, it's as if he had written that, if you went to Europe, you would find that there really was a Land of Oz, and there really was an Emerald City, and you could go there and have a chat with Dorothy if you wanted to.

It's difficult to enumerate the stunning facts of the book, so I'll just focus on the parts I found most angering. First, Karl Marx, Trotsky, Lenin, and all the other heroes of the Reds are still alive and well in Europe. Not in Eastern Europe, where they hate those guys, but in Western Europe! Hardly any Western European nation recognizes any limitations on the powers of the government. This leads to government intrusion into everything, accompanied by big government subsidies for nearly everything--most troubling, into media and religion. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion are deeply compromised by government subsidy--not in the sense of forcing anyone to belong to any religion, but in preventing anything like a free and open debate about religion, or anything else. No one says anything that the government doesn't really want said, and the government especially does not want anyone to criticize anything that might lead to public disorder. Christianity can be assailed without much interference, since everyone knows that Christians mostly have lost faith and even the remaining faithful are not prone to violence. But any religious group that might be violently provoked has to be sheltered from public discussion, and since no religion turns to violence so quickly and happily as Islam, that means Islam, in all its aspects, is out of bounds for public criticism.

Second, Western Europeans are steadily commiting national suicide by refusing to breed. For every twenty adults, there needs to be twenty-one children, to keep the population steady, that is a birthrate of 2.1 per couple. Europeans don't manage anything near this. Sadly, Bawer buys into the theory that this means that Europe "needs" immigration. The more I hear this argument, and I've heard it from nearly everyone, Irshad Manji, Bruce Bawer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and so forth, the more I feel like tearing my hair out. Why is it that the only solution to a declining population is to bring in a horde of people from the Third World? Isn't there another rather obvious solution to the problem? How about HAVING MORE CHILDREN? Plus what the hell is so horrible about decreasing our numbers? We have way too damn many people on Planet Earth already. We've hit 6.5 billion! That's six hundred thousand million, plus an extra five hundred million thrown in! We destroy species every year, chop down more forest, turn more land into desert, and all because we cannot control our breeding. Why is it that Third World nations cannot control their breeding? There's always this hue and cry about some nation or other--oh, they're poor, they're starving, we must send them aid--and then it turns out that their population expands four or five percent a year! If they're so poor and starving how the hell do they have so many children?

So, between immigration and falling birthrates, Europe is turning into a colony of Islam. Depending on how things go, sometime this century the ethnic French, Dutch, Swedes, and so forth will be minorities in their own countries. France will become North Algeria, the Netherlands will become North Morroco, Sweden will become North Somalia, Germany will become North Turkey, England will become North Pakistan. And the horrible fact is that these will become Islamic Shariah states, because the immigrants in no way are becoming Europeans. They do not integrate, they bring every ugly aspect of the cultures they fled along with them: forced marriages of teens, huge families, female submission and male domination, the regular beatings of women and children, honor murders of daughters, sisters, and wives, totalitarian religious law, female genital mutilation, the rule of armed thugs, religious supremacy, a murderous hatred of Jews, a complete disregard for the lives, property and persons of non-muslims, a fierce hatred and rejection of Western life, freedom, democracy, values, customs, secularism and so on and on. Chiefly, they openly look forward to the day when they have the power to sweep all this away and replace it with a "noble, moral Islamic state."

The question is, when that bright and happy day arrives, to what new land will their children flee?