Waking up to the civilizational threat

Things are definitely changing, when even a such an easy-going fellow as Andrew Stuttaford at NRO’s The Corner is acknowledging that immigration may pose a threat to Europe as grave as that posed to Rome by the Germanic invasions of the fourth and fifth centuries. He discusses a paper by Rear Admiral Christopher Parry of the Royal Navy to the effect that “future migrations would be comparable to the Goths and Vandals while north African ‘barbary’ pirates could be attacking yachts and beaches in the Mediterranean within 10 years. Europe, including Britain, could be undermined by large immigrant groups with little allegiance to their host countries—a ‘reverse colonisation’ as Parry described it…. The result for Britain and Europe, Parry warned, could be ‘like the 5th century Roman empire facing the Goths and the Vandals.’”

It seems to me that Admiral Parry’s thesis could change the way people think about Third-World immigration into Europe in somewhat the same way as my article, “The Second Mexican War,” changed the way some people think about Mexican immigration into the U.S. In both cases, the prior existing paradigm is one of individual, right-bearing humans escaping hard conditions at home or coming to better their condition here, a picture liberal Westerners find impossible on moral grounds to resist. But once the paradigm shifts to a mass invasion, to a destructive force on the order of war, that may snap liberal Westerners out of their sentimentalization of the Other and make them see the Other as an existential threat, which will completely change the way they think about immigration.

As if in illustration of Parry’s thesis, thousands of Malians and Senegalese have been attempting to cross the open sea in primitive boats to get to Spain. Their willingness to risk their lives is an index of how much the Africans expect to better their condition by getting to Spain. If they are willing to do this, there is nothing they would not be willing to do. Migrants, thousands of migrants, millions of migrants, a whole continent of migrants willing to do anything to get into the West obviously represent a danger that cannot be ignored.

Ken Hechtman comments on the West African boat people:

It’s still relatively small compared to the size of other migrations going on and a lot of them die before making it to Europe (like 40 percent die at sea, worse than the Middle Passage). But if anything goes really wrong in West Africa, a drought like Ethiopia had 20 years ago or a war like the Congo had 10 years ago, it could ramp up by a couple orders of magnitude.

Michael K. writes:

The Germanic barbarians who invaded and sacked Rome had “great civilizational potential,” as Clyde Wilson observed in response to a Chronicles poster who compared the “Hispanic” invasion of America to the Germanic invasion of ancient Rome. Wilson doubted that “Hispanics” have similar potential.

And, of course, the Germanic peoples (the English, the French, the Dutch, the Northern Italians, as well as Germans) ultimately created a civilization far superior to that of Rome, a civilization that still prevails, however precariously, in Europe, North America, and Australian/New Zealand.

Does anyone believe that Muslims and blacks and other nonwhites will create a superior civilization to that of the European civilization they will ineluctably destroy if present trends continue? Or that “Hispanics” and blacks and Muslims will create a superior civilization to that of the historic America they will surely destroy if massive Third-World immigration continues?

And why, genetically, did the Germanic tribes possess “great civilizational potential”? Probably because they had slightly greater innate intelligence than the Romans. Conversely, whites in Europe and the United States are being supplanted, predominantly, by nonwhites of significantly lower intelligence and civilizational abilities.

LA replies:

I don’t think anyone at VFR would disagree with you. But the fact remains the Germanic peoples destroyed Roman civilization and sent Western Europe into five centuries of chaos before the new civilization created by those Germanic peoples reached a stage of maturity and stability. So let’s not be sanguine about what it means to be in a Dark Age.

Howard Sutherland writes:

Your last comment puts the danger in context. No Fourth Century Roman would have wanted to live in Seventh Century Gaul—or Italy. Mestizos are our barbarians, more like Huns than Goths.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 12, 2006 12:25 PM | Send