France: A Revolt against Europe's Elites?
For years, those of us who write and worry about the rise of Islam in Western Europe have known that eventually, if the governments of these countries did not change course dramatically, something had to give. So far, the natives had, for the most part, been remarkably tame. They had swallowed a lot. Their leaders had filled their countries with huge numbers of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, a disproportionate number of whom were making it clear that they had no intention of fully joining or contributing to their host societies but, rather, were content to take, to harm, to damage, and to destroy, and were determined, in the long run, to conquer and rule. No one had ever asked the citizens of Western Europe whether they wanted their countries radically transformed in this manner. This transformation, moreover, was intensifying by the year. At some point, surely, the native peoples of Western Europe would react. But what form would it take? Those of us who are professionally preoccupied with these topics spent untold hours pondering this question. We asked one another: what do you think will happen? Some prophesied Balkanization. Already there were no-go zones – enclaves in and around major cities where "infidels" were unwelcome and where police and fire personnel were routinely pelted with rocks if they dared to intrude. It was easy enough to imagine those areas expanding, their de facto sovereignty under sharia law officially recognized and some kind of relatively stability established. Other observers forecast riots by natives -- not the elites whose personal lives were minimally affected by the Muslim presence in their countries, but the less privileged types whose neighborhoods and schools had become danger zones, whose taxes had been raised repeatedly to bankroll massive payouts to immigrant-group members, and whose doctors and hospitals had been so overburdened by the newcomers that vital treatments were increasingly rationed and waiting times increasingly long. In 2016, the British shocked the world by voting for Brexit, and later the same year Americans pulled off an even bigger stunner by electing Donald Trump to the presidency. Some commentators expected that elections in France, Sweden, and the Netherlands would also yield sensational results, but although there were advances for parties that favor immigration controls, such as Marine Le Pen's National Rally (formerly National Front), the Sweden Democrats, and Geert Wilders's Freedom Party and Thierry Baudet's Forum for Democracy, both in the Netherlands, those gains were smaller than expected. On the other hand, last year the Austrians elected as their Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, a vocal opponent of EU-imposed asylum quotas, and this year the Italian premiership went to Giuseppe Conte, who takes a strong stance against illegal immigrants and has barred migrant ships from Italian ports. The most important news on this front, however, has not been at the ballot box. This year Brits expressed growing outrage over Theresa May's bungled Brexit and, during the summer, took to the streets to protest the illegitimate incarceration of Tommy Robinson, who in that country had become the very face of resistance to Islamization. Furthermore, in recent weeks, citizens of France from across the political spectrum, and mostly hailing from small towns and rural areas, have been engaged not just in standard-issue public protests -- that perennial Gallic recreational activity -- but have been rioting and committing acts of vandalism in Paris and other major cities, despoiling iconic locations such as the Champs-Elysées, forcing the Eiffel Tower and Louvre to close, and even causing damage to the Arc de Triomphe. At first it was reported that the French rioters were angry about a hike in fuel taxes that had been motivated by President Emmanuel Macron's environmental priorities. "The price of gas has become incredible," Ghislain Coutard, credited with starting the so-called Yellow Vests movement, said the other day, then cited friends who "are barely surviving" because of the costs of owning a car. "The smallest problem with the car becomes a catastrophe," he explained. "You have to go into debt and then it never ends." Unfortunately, even after Macron, realizing he had overreached, canceled the tax hike, the rioting continued. Journalists have had trouble getting clear and concise explanations from the rioters of their motives and goals. Perhaps the rioters cannot find the words -- perhaps they are expressing a rage that they have yet to be able to articulate. Or perhaps they are reluctant to speak their minds out loud for fear of being called xenophobes, Islamophobes, or racists. In an interview the other day, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut attributed the riots to economic and cultural insecurity on the part of the ethnically French lower and middle classes -- people who have been driven out of the major city centers by rising rents, who have seen their jobs and small businesses destroyed by "green" taxes and regulations, who feel they have lost a power struggle with Muslim immigrants, and who sense that their ruling classes have more sympathy for immigrants than for them. Now the riots have spread to Belgium and the Netherlands. There, too, the rioters' goals can be elusive. The Associated Press quoted one older Dutch women's complaint about high taxes, the housing shortage, and the loss of welfare benefits: "The social welfare net we grew up with is gone," she said. "The government is not there for the people. It is there to protect its own interests." Of course, those "interests" include prioritizing freebies for immigrants at the expense of Dutch people who have put in a lifetime of work. Even today, however, for many Western European natives, it can be easier to be an insurrectionist than to speak honestly about Islam and immigration. Will these riots spread even further? Somehow it is hard to picture ordinary Scandinavians rioting -- they are just too low-key. Their idea of public demonstration is a quiet candlelight vigil. As for Germans, they are too orderly to erupt in spontaneous uprisings. Yes, they are good at marching in lockstep to the orders of some hysterical fascist maniac, but they are not individually inclined to break into violence. Then again, that impression may be wrong. After all, it was quite a surprise to see so many ordinarily polite, even repressed, Britons piling into London squares to voice their solidarity with Tommy Robinson. So maybe these French riots will spread across Western Europe. Maybe this is it -- the start of the Western European public's pushback against the elites' disastrous multicultural and globalist project. Or maybe it is just one more step that is bringing us closer to the continent's day of reckoning. We shall soon find out soon enough. Bruce Bawer is the author of the new novel The Alhambra (Swamp Fox Editions). His book While Europe Slept (2006) was a New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His other books include A Place at the Table (1993), Stealing Jesus (1997), Surrender (2009), and The Victims' Revolution (2012). A native New Yorker, he has lived in Europe since 1998.
© 2018 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.
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Showing posts with label Wilders. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wilders. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
The Natives Are Getting Restless
Sunday, November 26, 2017
The World Needs A Giant Vacuum! To Drain The Swamp!!
Time to Drain the Swamp - Also in Europe
Next month, I will be visiting Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. I have been invited to speak to a group of Czech patriots. The Czechs are a freedom loving people. In 2011, on the occasion of the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan, they named a street in Prague after this great American president and freedom fighter.
This fact reminded me of a shameful event in my home town of The Hague, the seat of the Dutch Parliament and the government of the Netherlands. Look for a Ronald Reagan Street in The Hague and you will find none. A proposal in 2011 to name a street in The Hague after Reagan ran into fierce political opposition. Leftist parties, such as Labor, the Greens and the liberal D66 party, argued that naming a street in honor of Reagan would "do the image of the city no good." The whole affair ended in a disgraceful political compromise. Last year, a short stretch of a local bicycle path was named the "Reagan and Gorbachev Lane". This anecdote is indicative of the difference between East and West in Europe. We can see the same difference in the attitude of their ruling elites towards Islam, the new totalitarianism that is threatening Europe today. In the East, political leaders oppose Islam; in the West, they surrender. Islam has already gained a strong foothold in Western Europe. Its streets have come to resemble the Middle East, with headscarves everywhere. Parts of Western Europe, such as the Schilderswijk district in The Hague, the Molenbeek borough in Brussels, the banlieues [suburbs] of Paris, Birmingham in Britain, the Rosengård area in Malmö, Sweden, and many other neighborhoods, have become hotbeds of Islamic subversion. Islam's totalitarian nature cannot be denied. The command to murder and terrorize non-Muslims is in the Koran. Islam's prophet Muhammad was a mass murderer and a pedophile. Those who leave Islam supposedly deserve death. And everyone who criticizes Islam and exposes what it actually says, ends up like me: on an Islamic death list. In the past decades, Islam has entered Western Europe with the millions of immigrants from Islamic countries. Now, the European Union wants to distribute third-world immigrants over all the 28 EU member states. The nations in Central and Eastern Europe reject the EU plans to impose permanent and mandatory relocation quotas for all EU member states. They warn about the dilution of their identity, which is not Islamic, but Judeo-Christian and humanist -- rooted in the legacy of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome; not Mecca. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has denounced the EU's pro-immigration agenda as a means to eradicate the culture and Christian identity of Hungary. Czech President Miloš Zeman is an outspoken opponent of immigration and the Islamification of the Czech Republic. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has said that "Islam has no place in Slovakia" and warns that "migrants change the character of our country." Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydło staunchly defendsPoland's refusal to accept the EU-imposed immigration quotas. "We are not going to take part in this madness," she says. In the Eastern part of Europe, anti-Islamification and anti-mass migration parties see a surge in popular support. Resistance is growing in the West, as well. This year, we have seen my party, the Party for Freedom (PVV), become the second-largest party in the Netherlands. This is a great achievement in a country with 13 parties in Parliament. In France, Marine Le Pen made it to the second round in the French presidential elections and her party, the Front National, got more votes than ever. In Austria, the FPÖ became the second biggest party. In Germany, the patriots of the AfD forced their way into the Bundestag.
However, the political elites in the West do all they can to keep the winners of the elections from power. Last month, in my country, the Netherlands, a new government coalition consisting of no less than four parties was formed. Because they stubbornly refused to talk to PVV, it took the political elites a record seven months to put together a coalition. They preferred to take in D66, the party which had denied Ronald Reagan his street in The Hague, and still they were only able to form a government with a majority of just one single seat in Parliament. Our democracies in the Western half of Europe have been subverted. Their goal is no longer to do what the people want. On the contrary, our political elites often do exactly the opposite. Our parliaments promote open-door policies that the majority of the people reject. Our governments sell out sovereignty to the EU against the will of the people. Our rulers welcome ever more Islam, although the majority of the people oppose it. Our democracies have become fake democracies. They are multi-party dictatorships, ruled by groups of establishment parties. They wheel and deal, often selling away the principles for which they have been elected. The establishment parties control everything, not just the politicians in their pay, but also the top brass of the civil service, the mainstream media, even the courts. Parties such as mine are excluded from coalition talks. They call us "populists" because we stand for what the people want. They even drag us to court. Three decades ago, the countries in Central Europe witnessed a Velvet Revolution: Democratic, political and peaceful. They took to the streets. They decided that enough was enough. Thanks to their Velvet Revolution, they have leaders today who truly represent the people and who are not afraid to stand up for their nation and its identity. We, in Western Europe, can learn lessons from the Velvet Revolution in the East. We, too, urgently need to make clear that enough is enough. In Western Europe, too, it is time to drain the swamp and to drive the elites from power. Peaceful and democratic, but thorough. We have to make our so-called democratic systems truly democratic again. The political actors should no longer be the professional politicians alone. The crisis is existential. It is time for every man and woman to do his and her duty. Because the survival of our nations itself is at stake. We, too, have to make it very clear that we no longer want to take part in the madness of leaders, who sell out their country to the EU institutions in Brussels, and the madness of the EU elites, who sell out our continent to mass-immigration and Islam. That is why the PVV will demonstrate in the streets of Rotterdam on January 20th. We need to show that Europe's streets are our streets, that we want to stay who and what we are, and do not want to be colonized by Islam. Europe belongs to us! Geert Wilders is a member of the Dutch Parliament and leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands.
© 2017 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.
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