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Ed West

Ed West is a journalist and social commentator who specialises in politics, religion and low culture. Embarrassingly, he once wrote a book entitled How To Pull Women.

The immigration revolution: can Europe be the same with different people in it?

 

By Ed West Politics Last updated: July 8th, 2009

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Something explosive is about to hit the British political arena, a book with ideas so shocking it will change the debate on the most important issue in European politics.

For years, the European political class have told their peoples that mass immigration was beneficial, inevitable and historically precedented. It enriched our lives, it boosted our economy, it made us better people morally and it was a continuation of our countries’ histories of immigration, and anyone who disagrees is a racist bigot. The ruling class kitted the emperor out in his fancy new clothes and if people could not see them then there was something wrong with their eyes.

Well, the emperor is butt-naked and Financial Times journalist  Christopher Caldwell is the little boy. The publication of his bookReflections on the Revolution in Europe is a pivotal moment in the debate on immigration, and it heralds the start of a new era - an acceptance by the political mainstream that our system isn’t working, and that while a multi-racial society can work, the more multi-racial it is the less well it functions.

Caldwell is a reasonable, moderate man who has studied Europe and Islam for a decade, which makes his conclusions all the more astonishing. He argues that mass immigration and the formation of large ethnic bodies makes us unhappier as people, it damages rather than helps the economy, and threatens the basic principles of freedom. Most alarming of all, he shows just how deluded are those liberal thinkers who believe large Muslim immigrant communities can be assimilated into Europe, especially a hedonistic atheist Europe which has recently adopted values at odds with the rest of humanity.

Immigration of the sort we’ve had since the war is simply unprecedented. Part of the propaganda pumped out by the establishment is that Britain is a nation of immigrants. But, as Calwell writes: “Aside from the invasions of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes that started in the fourth century AD - and which brought, at the very most, 250,000 new settlers over a period of several centuries - British ’stock’ has changed little. Only about 10,000 people arrived with the Norman Conquest. Tens of thousands more Huguenots came after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. But, all told, three-quarters of the ancestors of contemporary Britons and Irish were already present in the British Isles 7,500 years ago. DNA from people who arrived after that makes up only 12 per cent of the Irish gene pool.”

In fact before 1945 there had only been one example of such immigration in Europe’s history and that was, ironically, produced by Nazi Germany.

“Europe’s path to mass immigration owes something to the intellectual habits of the statesmen and magnates who ran Europe’s economy in World War II - on both the Allied and Axis sides. In scale, today’s massive in-migration of ‘temporary’ labour has only one precedent, and it is a recent one.”

Nazi Germany is the key to all of this, the reason why we are unable to balance our Christian disdain for racism and our willingness to allow minority communities to live here with common sense. No society in history would ever have dreamed of doing what Europe did after 1945, inviting vastly different people over in such numbers, for the simple reason that no other society was so wracked with guilt and self-loathing for its “two historic misdeeds, colonialism and Nazism”.

This, combined with pressure from big business, which wanted cheap labour to run heavy industry (most of which was on its last legs anyway), and a welfare state that discouraged natives from taking menial jobs, caused Europe’s leaders to invite people in such large numbers as to make future ethnic conflict inevitable.

Caldwell continues: “If one abandons the idea that Western Europeans are rapacious and exploitative by nature, and that Africans, Asians, and other would-be immigrants are inevitably their victims, then the fundamental differences between colonisation and labour migration cease to be obvious.” And what we have in the suburbs of France and the inner cities of Holland and England is, whatever that word’s pejorative meaning, colonisation.

The reason Enoch Powell was wrong in predicting rivers of blood was that Powell, who loved the British Empire, did not understand the widespread feelings of liberal guilt among the middle class, nor that this would be transmitted to the nation as a whole (even though the poor had no reason to feel guilty about anything, and indeed would feel the worst effects of immigration).

And yet Powell’s population forecasts were spot on. He shocked his Rotary Club audience in 1968 by suggesting Britain’s non-white population would be 4.5 million in 2002 (in 2001 it was 4,635,296). Then in 1970 he told voters in Wolverhampton that between a fifth and a quarter of their city, as well as that of Birmingham and Inner London, would be non-white one day. According to the 2001 census the figures were 22.2 per cent, 29.6 per cent and 34.4 per cent respectively, and rising.

The subtitle asks: “Can Europe be the same with different people in it?” The answer, quite clearly, is no.

Tags: Christopher Caldwell, Enoch Powell, immigration

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West (Paperback)

Review
Combines an authentically Burkean historical breadth of vision with a reporter's keen eye for detail. No one can seriously doubt after reading this book that large-scale immigration, particularly of Muslims, is in the process of
transforming Europe profoundly. From the strife-torn banlieues of Paris to the multiplying minarets of Middle England, as Caldwell shows, we are a very long way indeed from the merry multicultural melting-pot of bien-pensant fantasy. --Niall Ferguson

Caldwell's analysis is calm and forceful, and it provides excellent background for a much-needed discussion.
--Kirkus 

Review

'Caldwell is a bracing, clear-eyed analyst of European pieties ... compared with most literature on migration, so often dull and cliché-ridden, this book pulsates with ideas.'

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Difficult questions for difficult times., 17 May 2009 By  Bobby Smith (United Kingdom) - See all my reviews I heartily applaud the author for addressing subject matter normally left to the far right, such as immigration, nationalism, the influence of well-meaning liberalism on Europe, diversity and integration and the 'threat' within. The author also makes the fair point that european societies were too rigid, weak and insecure to make incoming immigrants feel loyalty to their host - a point rammed home by the fact it has taken an American to write a book about immigrations impact on european culture.  Despite this being a serious book it is written in an accessible style - a bit like a toned down, more intellectual, Ann Coulter. I found this book so important and relevant to today's ever changing world that I read it in 3 days - it being a semi-permanent appendage to my right hand. If you want a thoughtful, well-argued book that will make you think again about issues you may have already decided upon, then this is a must buy. If you like this I also recommend another book about race and diversity - although from an English/Nigerian perspective, check out:One Love Two Colours: The Unlikely Marriage of a Punk Rocker and His African Queen by Margaret Oshindele - a book that shows how a Nigerian woman can integrate into the cultural way of life of England - without giving up her own Yoruba culture.  Another book that would serve as an interesting companion to this book is: Bloody Foreigners by Robert Winder.