by Giulio Meotti
“The train of the world overwhelms me. In the long run all continents (yellow, black…) will pass to the old Europe. There are hundreds and hundreds of millions. They are hungry and not afraid of dying. We should preach, but Europe does not believe in anything”. This is a letter Albert Camus wrote to Jean Grenier in 1957.
And who knows what the author of “The Plague” would have said if observing the municipal bulletins that in France keep track of who is born, who gets married and who goes to the Creator. This has just left the municipality of Arcueil, a town of 20,000 inhabitants in the Marne. The only French names are the 90-year-olds who go to the other world. “The demographics of white Catholics plummet while the demography of Muslims grows”, Michel Onfray replied to those who asked him for an opinion on this “Great Replacement”.
We are in a perfect storm, this after we had deluded ourselves that we had put religion away in the closet of old and unstitched clothes. Europe is dying and you can feel all the sadness of a world that has consumed itself, as if the birth of the “new man”, having rid himself of all his Western affiliations, requires the cultural and physical end of the old continent.
But progressives and secularists deny the importance of demographic and cultural issues.
In past centuries, migrants in Europe were all Europeans. Today migrants come from another civilization, from the Muslim world, and this poses insoluble problems. Because Islam is by nature conqueror and opposed to any integration into Christian societies. Islamists find active support among European intellectuals and in some political currents.
We are stunned. We are tired. We are indifferent. We are glamorous existentialists. We move forward on the automatic pilot of widespread wealth, of proliferating rights, of forced equality, of the new religion of the politically correct. We are threatened by a languor that comes from the feeling that life is a paradise of calm and voluptuousness. Ataraxia opened Europe’s doors to Islam, like the chick playing with the snake.
Graphs indicate, from 1968 to 2018, the progression of Muslim names between births. In Île-de-France, where one fifth of the entire French population lives, we are at 30 percent, with peaks of 53 percent in the Seine-Saint-Denis. In the second region, Rhône-Alpes, 20 per cent. In the third, the French Riviera, 23 percent …
Islam is conquering Europe by numbers. An abacus is enough. Or just see what is happening in Catholic schools. Le Figaro tells us that “in the Seine-Saint-Denis, Catholic institutions have a third of Muslim students and even more. The situation is similar on the outskirts of Lyon. And in the districts of Marseille, a Catholic school has 98 percent of them”. Le Monde: “In a Catholic school in Marseille, 80 percent of the students are Muslims”. From a report by the Courrier Internazional: “In the mixed districts of Marseille and in the industrial regions of the north of the country, the proportion exceeds 50 percent”.
Marguerite Yourcenar wrote in her beautiful “Memoirs of Hadrian”: “The world, tired of us, will seek new masters; what seemed wise to us will appear in vain, what seemed beautiful to us will appear horrible. I saw the ferocious codes return, the implacable gods, the uncontested despotism of the barbarian princes, the world shattered into enemy states, eternally in terror. Other sentries, threatened by other darts, will go up and down patrols in future cities…”. Yourcenar had seen in the splendor of Roman refinement the presentiment of the shadow, projecting it into her Europe.
Maybe we are simply at the end of a cycle again?