Thread by @JewhadiTM

Europe’s Virtues Will Be Its Undoing - Quillette quillette.com/2019/09/14/eur…

When it comes to mass migrations, no one seems surprised that “migrants”—a vague all-purpose term—choose to journey exclusively to Western Europe rather than to the Maghreb, the Mashriq, the Gulf States, or Russia.

That is because they know that only in Europe will they find a sense of exacerbated culpability; it’s pretty much assured that they will be able to arrive on its shores, preferably under the gaze of the media, confident of being taken in, or at least listened to.

Pope Francis set the tone on July 8, 2013, when he visited the island of Lampedusa and castigated the “globalization of indifference.” For the sovereign Pontiff, the only acceptable immigration policy is unconditional hospitality.

“To welcome the Other is to welcome God Himself,” he declared in December, 2017. It was Pope Francis who advocated the opening of migrant corridors.

He demanded, in January, 2018, that keeping the family intact be given priority “by helping to reunite families, including grandparents, brothers and sisters and grandchildren, without ever requiring them to prove economic viability.”

But in the conflict between conscience and reality, the only solution can be compromise, which is in the hands of politicians. At a practical level, hospitality cannot be granted as a simple offering to the detriment of national sovereignty.

The fear, not of the foreigner, but of the stranger in one’s home, of not being protected by the state, the fear of cultural insecurity and expropriation—these are not reactionary fantasies.

How can the welfare state, already overstretched, cope with the costs of retirement benefits and medical care if it must also cater to the needs of new arrivals? In former times, such an influx would have been called an invasion, an occupation, colonization.

Today, such pejoratives are forbidden. From now on, it is simply a matter of love and listening and radiant outwardness instead of ugly inwardness. But we are forgetting a simple truism: were it a matter of just a few thousand people, one’s duty to help would be clear.

But when we talk about tens or hundreds of thousands, even millions, priorities necessarily shift—where there are overwhelming numbers, morale collapses.

Who is this Other that it is our unique moral duty, as equal parts savior and judge, to welcome? Numerous legal experts speak in his name.

In Le Monde on February 15, 2018, for example, professor Didier Fassin exclaimed: “France will be judged by History on its attitude to the migrants.”

The Africanist Jean François Bayart speaks of our “abject State” for having sought the assistance of the Libyans and Turks to help stem migrant flows.

“We demand that our African allies do our dirty work of sending back migrants… The Republic, its administration, its police and its political class, is losing its soul and its honor.”

Council of State member Thierry Tuot’s February 11, 2013 report to the PM on integration policy, opens with a quote from Novalis: “And more than any of them, the superb Foreigner with his deep gaze, his light step, his half-closed lips all aquiver with song.”

This remarkable quote can be read as a benign declaration of love, but anyone who fails to share these sentiments about this magnificent figure can now expect to be shunned for his inhumanity.

Nobel laureate Jean Marie le Clézio denounced the French Republic’s president’s “unbearable lack of human decency” for wanting to distinguish between economic migrants and political refugees.

Economic migrants should, after all, only be admitted according to the needs of the host country.

Let us remember that, since 2015, Europe has rescued 730,000 migrants from the Mediterranean. But this fact meets the immediate objection that thousands of others drowned there.8 In this way, our generosity is turned against us.

For having accepted the challenge of migration we have become accountable for every individual who has died at sea. In a strange twist, those who rescue people from the waves have become the executioners.

The European of virtue is thereby ensnared in his own trap: he has confused attention to a problem with a duty to fix it.

Today, the migrant has replaced the proletarian and the guerrilla warrior as the new hero of contemporary victimology. He is both the epitome of oppression and the source of our salvation. Every other consideration must fall before him.

One isn’t allowed to have one’s own thoughts or entertain any doubts about him, because his wretched condition demands only charity.

In the same way that a “racialized” person can never be a racist, the idea that someone wanting to leave his own country to come to Europe could be duplicitous, or lie about his identity or intentions, amounts to a thought crime.

Change the Climate Immediately

To every problem we encounter, we feel a need to offer the most unyielding solution, and then we torment ourselves when we don’t succeed. Another example of this moral maximalism is what we now call the climate emergency.

The reception given to a speech by the teenage Swedish activist Greta Thunberg at the National Assembly on July 23, 2019, is a case in point. Hailed like a Delphian oracle, Greta scolded the assembled deputies as if they were errant children.

The episode will be remembered as among the most risible in the history of the Fifth Republic.

Global warming places Europeans on the horns of a dilemma: either we change our way of life or we face imminent collapse within 10 to 20 years.

Ecology, in the sense of legitimate concern about animal suffering and the waste products of progress, has mutated into a doctrine of the Apocalypse.

In concrete terms this means that the generations to come have only two options: either widespread death in the near future or the halting of economic growth through some outbreak of unforeseen frugality.

This cataclysmic discourse is, however, based on a paradox: the claim that enterprise is in vain, only helps to discourage it. What good does it do to mobilize, to clean our rivers and oceans and lakes, to plant trees and decarbonize the economy, if we are doomed?

This doctrine of despair does less to mobilize our conscience than to thoroughly demoralize us.

Those who speak in the name of the planet seek to oppress.

As a terrifying catastrophe looms in the future, the human species must rely on experts and break the bad habits that have brought them to disaster. If we want to prevent temperatures from rising more than two degrees, per the Paris Accord, we must achieve carbon neutrality ASAP.

We know the solutions proposed by these prophets of doom: forego cars and planes and eliminate the meat-based diet, which adds methane emissions to animal cruelty.

With a straight face, the former green deputy Yves Cochet even proposed bringing back the horse-drawn coaches & ploughs of yesteryear, reducing travel distances, and putting an immediate stop to procreating so as to reduce humanity’s interference with the natural environment.

And it goes without saying that we must abandon all fossil fuels—gas, coal, petrol—as well as nuclear energy in favor of renewables.

We must voluntarily become poorer, divide our standard of living by 10, and choose a life-saving asceticism over the comfortable indecency of our present lifestyles.

Cleverly, the doomsayers locate the end of the world between 2020 and 2030. It’s close enough to terrify us but still far enough away to escape verification. The high priests of disaster don’t want to save the human race as much as they want to punish it.

The European desire to do away with violence forever by abolishing borders, by disparaging one’s sense of identity and the nation’s sense of history, also risks abolishing civilization itself. Tolerance is not policy.

It is a guardrail, not a governing principle. The law by itself does not bind a society together—on the contrary, it breaks it up into the various claims of all its different categories and minorities.

It is an inviolable rule that moralists don’t practice what they preach. Open-handed promises are broken as soon as they are made. Chaste believers trample on their faith, the friends of the indigent cry crocodile tears, the court disobeys the law it enforces.

History is full of preachers and zealots who are caught redhanded after they’ve sworn to live according to their pure principles. As for the celebrities, those paragons of virtue who call upon the people to tighten their ecological belt—

— they jet themselves around the globe increasing carbon emissions thousands of times more than the average citizen.

But, of course, they make up for this by their posturing of living the simple life, like Prince Harry delivering a climate-change speech barefoot, or Greta Thunberg crossing the Atlantic on a luxury sailboat, a journey that will produce 4X the emissions of an ordinary flight.

Unless Europe changes course, it will die of its virtues. Its discourse of guilt has metastasized into one of self-annihilation. When a section of the ruling class abandons its responsibilities, the commonwealth itself is attacked, moral perfectionism becomes abdication.