Europe is, as my British friend would say, a right old mess — and the United Kingdom may be headed for a disaster of proportions unheard of since Oliver Cromwell was ordering heads separated from bodies in great carload lots. I've been writing about the decline of the once-Great Britain for years, and things just seem to keep getting worse. The Labour government insists on welcoming streams of Third World "migrants," who we would call illegal aliens, and the British people are growing restive.
It's not just a British problem, either. Nor it it just a European problem. But the UK seems to be leading the way towards what may be a major challenge, even an existential challenge, for Western civilization. And that's another thing I've been writing about for years; watch Europe, watch the United Kingdom, because what's happening there now, the American left want to have happen here tomorrow.
The Daily Sceptic, one of the better sites for tracking the failures of the British government, has a piece by David Betz and Michael Rainsborough where they point out, aptly, that Britain's failures will likely lead to the less of their national identity, and how the British government is reacting to this not by closing or even controlling their borders, but by clamping down on dissent by the British people. It's a problem that is cropping up all over Europe.
Something is going badly wrong across Western societies, and the sense of political dislocation is no longer a fringe concern. Trust in institutions has fallen, established political parties are losing support and arguments over immigration and national identity have become sharp dividing lines.
In Germany, the President now warns openly of a return to the political divisions of the Weimar era. In France, a protest movement that began in schools has spread across the country, bringing arson, mass arrests and violent clashes with riot police to cities from Strasbourg to Marseille. Across Europe, insurgent parties of Left and Right prosper on dissatisfaction with political systems that seem increasingly unable to correct themselves. Britain exhibits the same symptoms. The question is why governments confronted by such conditions so often appear to aggravate the problems rather than address their causes.
Germany may be on the cusp of a turnaround, but it may already be too late. France is on the verge of civil war, and despite the repeated efforts to cast the troubles there as student protests, a significant proportion of the protestors have a distinctly non-French look to them. All of these countries have one thing in common: Their governments seem to feel some responsibility to feed, clothe and house waves upon waves of Third World "migrants" who have a birthrate and an unemployment rate far higher than the ethnic Europeans whose nations they are swarming into. Poland, however, is a remarkable exception: They aren't letting any of the "migrants" in.
Things, furthermore, may be getting worse, on a logarithmic curve.
Aggravating the conditions driving the crisis follows the logic of accelerationism. Most closely associated with the British philosopher Nick Land, accelerationism holds that an existing order contains forces which, once unleashed, drive change forward and ultimately overwhelm attempts to restrain them. Rather than arrest the process, accelerationist thought embraces its intensification, although versions of the idea on Left and Right differ markedly over where it might lead. The essential rationale remains: if the existing order contains forces capable of destroying or transforming it, remove the restraints and let them run their course.
That seems to be what the governments of Europe are doing, and none more so than Britain's Labour government, who are dealing with their many and varied problems, not by regaining control of their country's borders, but by cracking down on any objection by the British people who are paying for it all.
Judged by that standard, Britain’s ruling classes are accelerationists par excellence. They oversee economic stagnation, mounting national debt, growing welfare dependency, the decay of town centres and public services, and deepening social divisions, compounded by rapid demographic change and repeated failures to deliver effective immigration controls. Their own reports document segregation, declining trust and failures of integration, yet governments refuse to change the policies contributing to those problems. As opposition becomes more organised and disruptive, the state responds with surveillance and speech restrictions, as well as two-tier policing and justice. Grievance produces resistance, resistance produces stronger enforcement, and stronger enforcement fuels the grievance.
This is a society on a death spiral, and there's not much chance of changing course beyond a massive sweep by Reform UK and like-minded candidates in the next general election, in August of 2029.
But look at the policies that are bringing Europe, most notably Britain, to this pass. Unchecked Third World immigration. The decline of major cities, and I would refer you to my own The Downfall of America's Cities series for more on how that's already happening here. The increasing willingness to resort to violence. The rising crime rates, most troubling being the assaults on women. The ethnic enclaves of the "migrants' who show no inclination to assimilate to their new host nations. And, not least of all, the government crackdown on free speech.
If all of those sound familiar, it's because one Democrat candidate or another has proposed one or all of these policies here, in the United States.
We vote in less than three weeks. This is, as I have been saying and writing and will continue to do, the most consequential and the most hotly contended midterm election in recent history. Look at Europe, and we can see what we face if the Left wins. Let's get this done. Vote. At all cost, vote.
