Bruce Bawer on narcoleptic Europe

Bruce Bawer lives in Norway, but has the benefit of an outsider's perspective on Norwegian life in general and the political discourse in particular. His latest book is While Europe Slept : How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, published very recently.

For a Norwegian like me, it's not a pleasant read. While it's easy to be disgusted by the state of affairs in politics here, there, and everywhere, I cling to an illusion that sooner or later, intellectual integrity is forced upon the politicians, that they can defer and obfuscate for a while, but things eventually catch up. Also, we live under the hope that Europe is in fact enlightened from its history, that the carnage brought up about by naivete in the face of naked aggression has made an impression.

Let's face it: it's confusing.

I'll be writing more on this book as thoughts occur to me, but here are some immediate reactions as I'm about halfway through.

First and foremost, Bawer provides pretty compelling evidence that European popular opinion and public policy is horribly bigoted. We are talking the "soft bigotry of low expectations" here, the type that seeks to excuse all kinds of horrible behavior on the basis that these poor people somehow can't help themselves, since they are discriminated against/are poor/come from a "different" cultural background. It may be debatable whether "Islamic" cultures nurture extremism, but there is no question Norway, for one, is happy to excuse this.

This would be bad enough, but Bawer points to another problem, namely that ethnic Norwegians at the same time make every effort to keep the "foreign" elements segregated. It is, in other words, not just that immigrant groups keep to themselves in Norway; they are tacitly discouraged from putting a brown face underneath that knit hat.

Comments

[John Sobieski]

I have not read Bawer's book yet. Interestingly, Claire Berlinski's book is now out Menace In Europe. That is if you want a double dose of depressing news. She was on Bill O'Reilly (Fox) this past week discussing the situation.

If the West was not politically correct and multicultural obsessed, they would ban all Muslim immigration. I said if.