Will
these migrants and asylum seekers become good Europeans? Or will they create in
the great cities of Europe enclaves that replicate the conditions in the
African and Middle East countries whence they came?
“Fortress Europe is an
illusion.”
So declares the Financial Times in the
closing line of its Saturday editorial: “Europe Cannot Ignore Syrian Migrant
Crisis.”
The FT undertakes to instruct the Old
Continent on what its duty is and what its future holds: “The EU will face
flows of migrants and asylum seekers across the Mediterranean for decades to
come.”
Can Europe not repel this unwanted home
invasion from the Global South?
It
is “delusional” to think so, says the FT. Europe must be realistic and set
about “providing legal routes for migrants and asylum seekers.”
What
occasioned the editorial was Greece’s rough resistance to Turkish President
Erdogan’s funneling of thousands of Syrian refugees, who had fled into Turkey,
right up to the border with Greece.
Erdogan
is threatening to inundate southeastern Europe with Syrian refugees to extract
more money from the EU in return for keeping the 3.5 million Syrians already in
Turkey away from EU frontiers.
Another
Erdogan objective is to coerce Europe into backing his military intervention in
Syria to prevent President Bashar Assad from capturing all of Idlib province
and emerging victorious in his civil war.
In
the human rights hellhole that is Syria today, we may see the dimensions of the
disaster wrought when Wilsonian crusaders set out to depose the dictator Assad
and make Syria safe for democracy.
A
brief history.
When
the Arab Spring erupted and protesters arose to oust Assad, the U.S., Turkey
and the Gulf Arabs aided and equipped Syrian rebels willing to take up arms.
The “good rebels,” however, were routed and elements of al-Qaida soon assumed
dominance of the resistance.
Facing
defeat, Syria’s president put out a call to his allies — Russia, Iran,
Hezbollah — to save his regime. They responded, and Assad, over four years,
recaptured all of Syria west of the Euphrates, save Idlib.
There,
the latest fighting has pushed 900,000 more refugees to Turkey’s southern
border.
The
21st-century interventions and wars of the West in the Islamic world have not
gone well.
George W. Bush was goaded
into invading Iraq. Barack Obama was persuaded to overthrow Colonel Moammar
Gadhafi in Libya and the Assad regime in Damascus. Obama ordered U.S. forces to
assist Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in his war to crush Houthi rebels
who had ousted Riyadh’s resident puppet in Yemen.
And what has the West reaped from our
Mideast wars?
In
Syria and Yemen, we have helped to create two of the world’s greatest human
rights disasters. In Libya, we have a new civil war. In Iraq, we now battle
Iran for influence inside a nation we “liberated” in 2003
In
Afghanistan, we have concluded a deal with our enemy of two decades, the
Taliban, that will enable us to pull our 12,000 troops out of the country in 14
months and let our Afghan allies work it out, or fight it out, with the
Taliban. America is washing its hands of its longest war.
In
five wars over 20 years, we lost 7,000 soldiers with some 40,000 wounded. We
plunged the wealth of an empire into these wars.
And
what did these wars produce for the peoples we went to aid and uplift, besides
hundreds of thousands of dead Afghans and Arabs and millions of people uprooted
from their homes and driven into exile?
Now,
Europe is being admonished by the FT that, having done its duty by plunging
into the Mideast, the continent has a new moral duty to take in the refugees
the wars created, for decades to come.
But
if the EU opens its doors to an endless stream of Africans and Arabs, where is
the evidence that European nations will accept and assimilate them?
Will
these migrants and asylum seekers become good Europeans? Or will they create in
the great cities of Europe enclaves that replicate the conditions in the African
and Middle East countries whence they came?
The
history of the last half millennium tells the story of the rise and fall of a
civilization.
In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries,
Spain, Britain, France and Portugal, and then Belgium, Italy, Germany and America,
all believing in the superiority of their civilization, went out into the world
to create empires to uplift and rule what Rudyard Kipling derisively called
“the lesser breeds without the law.”
After two world wars, the rulers of
these empires embraced a liberalism that now proclaimed the equality of all
peoples, races, creeds, cultures and civilizations. This egalitarian ideology
mandated the dismantling of empires and colonies as the reactionary relics of a
benighted time.
Now the peoples of the new nations,
dissatisfied with what their liberated lands and rulers have produced, have
decided to come to Europe to enjoy in the West what they cannot replicate at
home. And liberalism, the ideology of Western suicide, dictates to Europe that
it take them in — for decades to come.
The colonizers of yesterday are
becoming the colonized of tomorrow. Is this how the West ends?