„Western Europe became a multiethnic society in a fit of absence of mind. Mass immigration began — with little public debate, it would later be stressed — in the decade after the Second World War. […] From 1945 on, Europe was preoccupied with rebuilding what the war had destroyed — streets and railways, houses and offices, rituals and roles. The continent’s labor force would have been inadequate to a task of that magnitude in any case, but the shortage of manpower was exacerbated by the loss of millions of working-age people in the war. The memory of World War II (in which the vanquished enemy was racist) and the gradual hardening of the Cold War (in which the West vied with the Communist bloc to flatter the masses of the non-European world) combined to mute the misgivings that would have arisen at any other point in European history about welcoming large numbers of people from other races and cultures.“
„The European obsession with Third World ‚causes‘ was a function of Europe’s new, guilt-based moral order. Immigrants and their children were at liberty to express politically their wishes as a people, in a way that European natives were not. […] The Holocaust has in recent decades been the cornerstone of the European moral order. […] Once on the continent, Muslims took up a privileged position in any public debate on minority rights: they, too, were ‚victims.‘ […] It takes very little reflection to know how Europe — minus its guilt over the Holocaust — would have reacted to a radical Arab nationalist pressure group headquartered in Flanders.“
„Europeans are confused about whether they are citizens of the world or citizens of their own nations.“
„Non-European immigrants may not have been enviable in a socio-economic way, but they were enviable in an existential way. They were cooler. They were aristocrats of identiy. […] Europeans beagn to feel contemptible and small, ugly and asexual. […] The brilliant novels of Michel Houellebecq, which minutely dissect such worries […]“
„The message that majorities have needs, too, is often unwelcome. […] Europe was a place of aspiration for immigrants, and of deference and restraint for the native born.“
„Not every country, not every culture, not every language is going to survive this big latter-day Völkerwanderung.“
„Europeans in general could not figure out whether these immigrants were desperate wards, diligent workingmen, or ruthless invaders, and lacked the imagination to admit that they could be all of these things or none. What Europe needed under the circumstances was a moral code that would give answers about what it owed these people. It does not have one. A vague idea that Europe needs labor coexists with a lack of curiosity about whether migrants are indeed coming to work; a vague idea that migrants need to be cared for as refugees makes it seem impolite to count the cost of assuming responsibility for the world’s poor. To roll out the welcome mat for all these people would be nuts; to turn them away would be racist. Unable to muster the will for either a heartfelt welcome or for earnest self-defense, they hope the world will mistake their paralysis for hospitality.“
„Immigration is a fait accompli for which people are scrambling to find a rationale.“
„In very few parts of Europe are active steps taken to send rejected asylum seekers home. The number of rejected applicants who stay may run as high as 80 percent.“
„Asylum upsets voters because it is a different bargain than they were promised when mass immigration began. […] These new immigrants who come as relatives and refugees aren’t coming to do, the’re coming to be.“
„In the name of universalism, many of the laws and customs that had held European societies together were thrown out the window. Tolerance became a higher priority than any of the traditional preoccupations of state and society — order, liberty, fairness, and intelligibility — and came to be pursued at their expense.“
„Diversity meant rooting out traditions that excluded people and trammeled the liberties of newcomers. All cultures have many such traditions. But while Europeans could easily dismantle their own prejudices, the prejudices of other ethnic groups were, quite naturally, invisible to them. At the heart of European universalism was European provincialism.“
„The philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff coined the term immigrationisme to describe the regnant ideology that immigration is always ‚both inevitable and good.'“
„But of course you have to obey the law! That’s what makes it the law. To demand that immigrants must obey the law is to demand exactly nothing from them.“
„Islam has ever been understood as a mighty identity, shaping every aspect of a believer’s life and reducing lesser allegiances to unimportance. […] This, indeed, is the view not just of Islam’s detractors but of its adherents, especially when they are trying to present Islam as a source of brotherhood […]“
„That Muslims suffer the most is the focal point of an increasing number of European Muslims‘ identity. […] Imagine that the West, at the height of the Cold War, had received a mass inflow of immigrants from Communist countries who were ambivalent about which side they supported. Something similar is taking place now.“
„In its heyday, Communism was frequently compared to Islam […]“
„As Hans Magnus Enzensberger has noted, this rise in rancor is part of a paradox of liberal progress. The fairer, the more egalitarian, the less racist society becomes, the more humiliating failure in it is felt to be. People become more ‚disappointable‘ […]“
„The transition from an industrial to a service economy, which has ‚humanized‘ the workplace for many people, has also created new opportunities for humiliation, envy, and ethnic resentment. […] Today’s Western service economy […] involves a lot of self-expression […]“
„But to describe Islam as the second religion of Europe is actually to sell it short. If you measure Islam by the intensity of its followers‘ convictions, by its importance in political debates, by the privileges it enjoys under the laws of many European countries, or by its capacity to intimidate potential detractors, then Islam is not the second religion of Europe but the first.“
„Interreligious dialogue was based largely on a Christian misunderstanding […] [T]he currency in religious dialogue […] is religious belief. The gains from interreligious dialogue go to religious people. Those who no londer believe get nothing out of it.“
„Western Europe’s system of separation of church and state […] is inadequate to address Islam. […] All European regimes for regulating religion were designed to constrain not religion in the abstract but Christianity in particular. In European secularism, there is always a tacit balance between Christianity and Enlightenment skepticism, and sometimes the balance is explicit.“
„A main weapon in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment’s attacks on Christianity was ridicule. But while hoping that Muslims learn the lessons of Voltaire, Europeans have gone to great lengths to insulate Islam from Voltaire’s methods.“
„The price for managing Islam would be paid in rights.“
„Like the system of separation of church and state, our present sexual morality was forged in opposition to Christianity, not in opposition to religion in general. The West’s new, ‚loose‘ sexual morality is ordered more around male prerogatives than around female ones. It may fit traditional Muslim thinking better than it fits traditional Western thinking. If the besetting sexual failure of Christianity is prudery, the besetting sexual failure of Islam is sexism. Traditional Islam is only partially at odds with present-day sexual practice, not totally at odds, the way Christianity is.“
„Natives expect immigrants to become like natives themselves before they start throwing their political weight around. […] The moment when natives discover they must share power with the semi-foreigners living among them is as fraught with tension as the moment of arrival […] The Muslim vote is […] already influential.“
„It took fifty years of mass immigration for Europeans to grow frightened of their minorities. When people start doing out of fear what they previously did out of conviction or generosity, they often do not notice the transition.“
„Twentieth-century Islamists thought they could make cynical use of Western technological innovations while holding in contempt the culture out of which they sprang. Twenty-first-century Islamists such as Ramadan take the same attitude towards Western freedoms and rights. For Ramadan, freedom of religion is not a good in itself. It is good because it allows the practice and consolidation of Islam. Like al-Banna, Ramadan says what he says and does what he does in the confidence that the West is in eclipse.“
„Renewed acquaintance with Islam has given Europeans a stronger idea of what Europe is, because it has given them a stronger idea of what Europe is not.“
„Indeed, even to raise the question of whether immigration will promote or endanger European survival is considered vulgar and un-European at best, extremist at worst. […] Europe’s basic problem with Islam, and with immigration more generally, is that the strongest communities in Europe are, culturally speaking, not European communities at all. This problem exists in all European countries, despite a broad variety of measures taken to solve it […] Clearly Europe’s problem is with Islam and with immigration, and not with specific misapplications of specific means set up to manage them. Islam is a magnificent religion that has also been, at times over the centuries, a glorious and generous culture. But, all cant to the contrary, it is in no sense Europe’s religion and it is in no sense Europe’s culture. It is certain that Europe will emerge changed from its confrontation with Islam. It is far less certain that Islam will prove assimilable. Europe finds itself in a contest with Islam for the allegiance of its newcomers. For now, Islam is the stronger party in that contest, in an obvious demographic way and in a less obvious philosophical way. In such circumstances, words like ‚majority‘ and ‚minority‘ mean little. 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.“
(Alle Zitate aus Caldwells hervorragendem Buch „Reflections on the Revolution in Europe“, erschienen 2009, also einige Jahre vor Beginn des Merkel-Wahnsinns.)
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