Thursday, September 21, 2006

Maybe it's time to save what we can

Paul Belien writes in The Brussels Journal:

. . . one slogan of last Sunday’s Islamic hatemongerers in London may be more than just hate speech: “Islam will conquer Rome” may be prophetic. Here, however, we ourselves are to blame, because Islamists will not find it difficult to conquer Europe. Christianity in Western Europe has virtually ceased to exist. The spirit of secular relativism that originated from the French Enlightenment has persuaded Europe (including Europe’s churches) to commit a protracted, two centuries long suicide, the symptoms of which were visible in Communism, National-Socialism and moral relativism in general.

Man is a religious being and needs religious faith. If European Christianity had still been healthy today it would have proselytized, it would have reached out with missionary zeal to the millions of Muslims who migrated to Western Europe since the 1970s, it would have offered them Christ. Instead, it’s churches became bastions of religious relativism. Europe offered the newcomers only cultural decadence, from which decent people want to shield their children, and spiritual emptiness, which one can only despise.

The Europeans, who lost the missionary zeal to reach out to the immigrants, also lacked the zeal to pass on their own civilization to their offspring. Worse still, they lacked the zeal to have offspring. Since demographics is the mother of all politics, it is, barring a miracle, certain that Islam will become the old continent’s dominant religion.

Unless Europe rediscovers its will to survive – and it may already be too late (though as a Christian I do not exclude miracles) – soon furious Islamists may be holding sway over Europe in much the same way as the Taliban did over Afghanistan, removing all visible remnants of pre-Islamic culture. The Cathedrals of Europe may share the fate of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Christian works of art may be destroyed. Surely, a faith that forbids the depiction of human figures will be offended by the Christian art of medieval Europe and the nudes of the Renaissance. Perhaps it is wise to seriously consider salvaging as many European cultural treasures as one already can, before it is too late, and bringing them to safety elsewhere.

Mr. Belien is entirely correct. Europe’s loss of religious faith has been accompanied by a loss of the very will to live. The demographic time bomb of the Muslim birthrate versus the lack of native European reproduction and the unchecked rate of immigration from Islamic countries has doomed Europe to sharia and dhimminitude.

The suggestion that at least some of Europe’s artistic and cultural treasures be evacuated before inevitable Eurabian Caliphate can destroy or pervert them has a great deal of merit.

We should remember that the beautiful St. Sophia’s, once the heart of Orthodox Christianity in Constantinople is now a mosque in Istanbul. It would be difficult and expensive to take St. Patrick’s or Notre Dame apart stone by stone and relocate them, but might it not be worth it not to see them one day turned into mosques and filled with barely human savages ranting their hatred of the very culture which built them in the first place?

Certainly the contents of museums like the Louvre can be removed to places of safety. Of course this will not happen. If the governments of countries like France could recognize the danger well enough to take that kind of action they would be aware enough to take steps to reverse the decline before we see the Mona Lisa being thrown into a bonfire because it is a picture of a European whore with uncovered face painted by a homosexual.