The New Europeans

Recently, long lines of African and Middle Eastern refugees were seen departing from the infamous refugee camp in Calais France in orderly lines, bound for government reception centers in various parts of the country. Meanwhile, the historical enmity between Britain and France flared up over unaccompanied children with families on the English side of the Channel.  These two events suggest that tomorrow’s Europe is as much a function of the historical inability of its member states to get along, as it is about the even greater ‘Otherness’ of new arrivals.

Seeing the immigrants on tv, mainly swarthy men, I realized that what I was looking at were the Europeans of the twenty-first century. Contrary to current assumptions, that picture illustrates the fact that Caucasians constitute 22% of the world’s population. Africans are about 16%, as are Middle Easterners, while Asians, at 4.5 billion, account for 60% of the current population of seven and a half billion. Europe’s population of 743.1 million (including Western Russia) is a paltry ten percent. 

Notwithstanding their minority status, Europe and North America have spent the entire twentieth century looting the African, Asian and Latin American world. Rudyard Kipling’s ‘white man’s burden’ (to ‘civilize’ the rest of the world), has involved wave after wave of killing and destruction that decimated ancient customs and civilizations. Initiated by the Europeans in the nineteenth century, then taken over by the United States, eventually assisted by Europe’s post-war ‘democracies’, how to imagine that these exactions would not sooner or later result in blowback?

After World War II, the ‘The Third World’, as the south was known, rose up and defeated its European colonial masters. But they had scarcely gained independence when the US mesmerized their new rulers with promises of ‘modernity’ and ‘wealth’.

This sleight of hand went on for several decades, eliminating jobs (however humble), while military assaults decimated farmland and resources, culminating in vicious wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and now Yemen. 

To expect the young to sit quietly at home under these circumstances was foolish.  Yet the leaders of the European Union — the closest thing to a paradise on earth — failed to take the full measure of the immigrant onslaught until they saw people sleeping under the bridges and elevated trains in Paris.  In the ultimate irony, Hungary —the first country to open its Cold War border with the West before the Berlin Wall came down, now puts up border fences to preserve this ‘Christian’ country from the presence of Muslims. (Hungary, like the other countries of Eastern Europe, where only one recent generation has lived independently of the Soviet Union, did not participate in the West’s conquest of the South, and having at last been admitted to its club via the EU, it resents being ordered to obey ethical principles it had no part in shaping.) 

At a just ended international forum in Sochi, Russian President Vladimir Putin noted that multiculturalism has failed, implying that Caucasians have the ability to prevent the world’s brown majority from turning the tables. But meanwhile, Paris officials, clearly at a loss over the ever timely question “What is to be done?”, claim against all evidence that the new arrivals setting up tents in their streets are not deserters from the government choreographed Calais exodus. 

Ultimately, arithmetic speaks louder than theories, plans or strategies, and tomorrow’s Europeans will be neither Christian nor white, but part of the honey-colored world that the North, and its creature, “the West,” have created.