H.L. Mencken, the satirical wit of Baltimore who rooted for the Kaiser during World War I and rooted against President Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression, once categorized America’s middle class as the Boobus americanus. Mencken looked around the 1920s and instead of seeing increased prosperity and contentment, he saw a vacuous culture that bounced back and forth between self-satisfaction and self-righteousness. Well, at the sake of aping Mencken, I would like to hereby provide a new taxonomic classification: the cuckus Europeanicus.
While this term is an uncomfortable tongue-twister, it nevertheless gets at a glaringly obvious truth: Europe, like panda bears, seems little interested in saving its own species. Despite the fact that anyone with eyes can see that the recent influx of “refugees” from North Africa and the Middle East (a majority are not from Syria—don’t believe that lie) has been a cultural disaster, few leaders and not enough voters seem to recognize it as a problem. Exhibit A: even despite the recent terrorist attack that struck a Christmas market and killed twelve in Berlin on December 19th, and despite a summer full of machete attacks, a suicide bombing outside of a music festival, and multiple shootings, German support for Angela Merkel has actually increased. One of the primary architects of Europe’s rapid decline has suffered little for telling Germans to go to a church or a museum to find culture while women in Cologne are raped by the thousands.
West of Germany isn’t much better. Following the Berlin attack, Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister and current candidate for the president of the EU Parliament, asserted that the answer to increasing terrorism in Europe was more Europe, i.e. more European Union, more European federalism, more European autocracy. Brexit and the recent elections in Italy be damned; Europe’s ruling class and many Europeans themselves see their cult of multiculturalism as non-negotiable. The more they die, the more they rush to secure their permeable borders against “Islamophobia.”
Occasionally, Europe offers faint glimpses of reason. These moments are like flashes of gold in an otherwise barren desert. The recent rise of populist parties like the National Front in France, the Sweden Democrats, and the Five Star Movement in Italy promises to once and for all bury the internationalist dreams of the EU, while France’s extended state of emergency following the Paris attacks of November 13, 2015 proves that even lily-livered socialists like Francois Hollande can put on the iron glove. Tougher police action has already proven successful. In Belgium, police officers conducted numerous raids that led to the capture of Salah Abdelsalam, one of the masterminds of the attacks in Paris. Most recently, French police officers in the department of Haute-Garonne captured three Islamists suspected of plotting a terror attack designed for New Year’s Eve. With each new arrest, and each new revelation about how the Islamists were radicalized in Europe while simultaneously living off of welfare, one would think that Europe would move closer to the brink of sanity.
Don’t hold your breath.
The cuckus Europeanicus refuses to concede that Islam is more of a danger than the far-right. Instead of closing down extreme mosques, police in Germany decided to ban the National Democratic Party from holding a demonstration in Cologne in order to protest the nationwide cover-up that kept the sexual assaults out of the news for weeks. The reason for the ban: “serious threats to public safety.” It’s not entirely clear who the police see as the threat—bearded Wahhabis or native Germans with short haircuts and black t-shirts.
In Europe, there is no analog to Dirty Harry or even Sheriff David Clarke. The closest Europe has come is in Norway, where Police Inspector Thomas Utne Pettersen had the gall to release statistics showing that mostly Muslim immigrants were responsible for the majority of arrests involving drug dealing, petty theft, vandalism, and violence against children. Pettersen is a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Most Euro top cops are like Sweden’s national police commissioner Dan Eliasson, a civilian and former punk rocker who tweeted that the sight of Jimmie Akesson, the leader of the Sweden Democrats, makes him vomit. While Eliasson uses his pudgy body to virtue signal, a report released in September revealed that a full eighty-percent of Swedish police officers were considering quitting over the dangerous conditions that come with policing immigrant-heavy neighborhoods.
The cuckus Europeanicus is a blind, stubborn creature that refuses to smell the shawarma cooking right under its nose. It clings to the laughable shibboleths of “religion of peace” and “but, the Crusades” like manna repeatedly sent from heaven (well, except that heaven doesn’t exist for the cuckus Europeanicus). Nothing can crack Europe’s strong sense of its moral and intellectual superiority. Not new terror attacks, and certainly not the revelations made by French journalist David Thomson, whose new book The Revenants clearly shows that constantly mouthing the words “nothing to do with Islam” drives susceptible youths to investigate the religion for themselves. More often then naught, they find and embrace the extremism they were looking for.
The traditional parties have offered nothing that would hold back Europe from the continuous deluge. Champagne socialism and decadent secularism are false idols that lead to spiritual vacancies that are often filled by religion. The only thing Europe offers us is an example of the conundrum of the enlarged state. A stupidly ideological state cannot and will not change its stripes. Furthermore, giving increased powers to a central state in the name of fighting terrorism will ultimately backfire. Why? Because the state gets to define who the terrorists are. In Europe, each fresh arrest of Islamists necessitates a crackdown on the type of political entities that would’ve kept the Islamists out of Europe in the first place. The vicious cycle turns.
Benjamin Welton is a freelance writer from West Virginia, but based in Boston. He’s currently working on his second book.