This is getting ridiculous. I just finished nailing the last nail in Annie “Europe Sucks” Applebaum’s coffin, so I thought, when she uncorks a thoughtful, seriously pro-Europe review—a totally way pro-Europe review, actually—of Christopher Caldwell’s recent double-dome tome on Europe and the Muslim hordes, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.
I haven’t actually read Mr. Caldwell’s book, so I’ll have to take Annie’s word for it that RREIIW is “blessedly objective,” and “written in good faith,” which in fact I seriously doubt. The seriously la-di-da title doesn’t help, but what really ticks me off about Chris is this quote, which I’ve read several times now, predicting that in the future the immigrant Muslim masses are going to stomp all the lazy, lotus-eating Euros into the ground: “When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.”
Obviously, that’s supposed to be profound, but instead it’s entire bullshit. What’s Mr. Caldwell’s sample size? Probably, one. And Europe isn’t all that “insecure or malleable”—they certainly don’t have much of a problem resisting our attempts to tell them what to do—and Islam is far from being “anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines.”
Islam is basically a chunk of the Middle Ages that has yet to thaw. Islam has no independent science, little art, little anything except endless theological disputes that will end, a century or two from now, the same way that Christian disputes over transubstantiation et al. ended, in exhaustion. The reactions of previous “anchored, confident” cultures to the Enlightenment West—Germany and Russia being the prime examples—is not exactly cheering, but in the end it was sloppy, lazy, hedonistic, materialistic, relativistic liberalism that won, not the fanatics.
Unlike Nazism or Communism, Islam will be around a long time—forever, in human terms. With a billion followers, and endless oil wealth going to fund fundamentalist clerics in love with the sound of their own vituperation, the prospects for an early end to the culture war is close to zero. But we in the West have all the high cards.
Neocons like Caldwell are desperate for a hot war because they don’t have high cards when it comes to domestic politics. They need an “unlimited” emergency, constant crisis, in order to suspend normal political discussion and demand unquestioning loyalty to the “Commander in Chief,” who is not our commander. Which is why they turn out crap like this book.
But don’t take my word for it. Read Anne, whom I seem to have forgotten about. She knows a lot about Europe, and she’s lived there for years, which I haven’t, and she’s also read Chris’s book, which I haven’t either.
Afterwords
Actually, Anne is far too polite to call Caldwell’s book crap. She simply refutes him on the facts. So get your attitude from me and your facts from Annie.
