Marching Toward Hell?

I’m reading Michael Scheuer’s Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq at the moment; an interesting book by the author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America and former chief of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit. As an aside, his books have also been recommended [pdf] by Osama Bin Laden (“If you want to understand what’s going on and if you would like to get to know some of the reasons for your losing the war against us, then read the book of Michael Scheuer.”).

In one of the chapters in the book, Scheuer discusses the future of Europe, arguing that a “shrinking and aging native population” will require an “ever increasing flow of immigrants to maintain a workforce to keep its social welfare system from bankruptcy for a bit longer.”

But who will these immigrants be? To quote Mark Steyn, “[a] talented ambitious Chinese or Indian has zero reason to immigrate to France, unless he is consumed by a perverse fantasy of living in a segregated society that artificially constrains his economic opportunities yet imposes confiscatory taxation on him in order to support an ancient regime of indolent geriatrics.”

The answer, therefore, is for this demand for workers to be met by the already sizable Muslim population in these countries, their children, and the Muslim immigrants who continue to be drawn to the region.

As a result, Scheuer argues, these European societies are likely to undergo several changes as their dependence on Muslim taxpayers grows and as those Muslims start exerting more influence on the society and its politics. He writes, “as things stand, Europe seems destined to leave its decaying and bankrupt hulk in the hands of a vibrantly religious, semi-martial, youthful and hardworking Muslim population.”

Although Europe may be becoming, to use the author’s colourful description, a “passive, homogeneous, self-centered, non-competitive, bureaucrat-ruled, militantly secular, and anti-military society”, it’s possible that the future may be somewhat unpleasant. He continues:

The end of French Enlightenment thought, the end of all efforts to produce the perfect European man, has been massive human destruction. From the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars through the eras of fascism, Communism, and Nazism, totalitarianism and mass murder have been the end-state of political systems aimed at perfecting humanity. Total warfare and genocide, moreover, are European inventions and thus reside in the history locker that contemporary Europeans have kept double-padlocked and tried to ignore. Who is to say that Europe, in extremis, will not try to save itself by taking recourse to that at which it has traditionally excelled: chauvinistic nationalism, government-sponsored persecution of minorities, and unlimited warfare? And because history suppressed has a way of roaring back to life, might not a last-ditch European survival effort wage its battles under the banner of a revived Christianity? EC leaders already have fully absorbed the attitude Walter Bagehot attributed to the French philosophes –”everything for the people, nothing by them … they wished to do everything by fiat of the sovereign” — and might well turn into supernationalists order to save their own skins.