Zia Sardar reviews Christopher Caldwell’s Eurabian fantasies.
Latest Updates: christopher caldwell RSS
-
thabet
-
johnpi
Stephen Colbert interviews Christopher Caldwell about what Thabet has called his ‘Eurabian fantasy.’
Caldwell calls for French imams to be ‘Frenchifried.’ Colbert hears ‘french fried.’
-
johnpi
Like the great Colbert himself, Caldwell can drone through an extended passage of what sounds like serious analysis as he explores his thesis that godless Europeans basically have no shot against the invading hordes of Islam who are going to take over their continent sooner or later, because, well, they’re foreign. Then he can turn on a dime and let loose with a real howler.
My own favorite came on Page 342, when Caldwell, an American – in fact, an American born in New Jersey, of all places – lamented in a tone of high dudgeon the “generalized fading of the sense that what goes on in someone else’s country is none of your business.” This from a guy who has for hundreds of pages been engaging in all sorts of raw speculation about the essence of contemporary European life, such as when, five pages later, he describes Europe as “a civilization in decline,” based on his sense, well, he’s not even quite sure. “It is missing some hard-to-define factor,” he writes.
The reviewer ends by offering to take Caldwell on a tour of some “Turkish dive bars” in Germany to introduce him to some real Europeans.
-
yahya
This is easily the best review so far of Chris Caldwell’s Eurabian tome written in patrician tones. It summarises Caldwell’s argument or points out its contradictions to its detriment:
Why, after arguing persuasively that Europe opened its doors to mass immigration without thinking through the consequences, does he go on to argue, inconsistently and implausibly, that Europe invited mass immigration because of its guilt-stricken conscience?
His thinking, to the extent that I can reconstruct it, goes something like this: When rich nations subscribe to universal human rights, they lose all moral grounds for keeping out poor immigrants.
How can Caldwell apotheosize Christianity for its contribution to European culture and then go on to unmask the moral decay and self-loathing that motivates the universalism that is said, in his own book, to be Christianity’s most inspiring legacy?
Unlike the post-nationalist Europeans, Americans remain willing to write history in the letters of blood. Not Christ-like concern for the weak and the marginalized but readiness for organized violence is presumably why America’s culture strikes the editors of the Weekly Standard as less drab than Europe’s. America shares nationalist bellicosity with some parts of the Muslim world, and this is a good thing.
But what can they do “to stem the implantation of Muslim culture” in Europe? Caldwell holds out three possibilities. One is deportation, an option that he broaches when he asks about rioters in the French banlieues who shout “Fuck France!”: “Ought these people, assuming they are noncitizens, be put on the next plane out of the country?” A second possibility is conversion: “It no longer seems unreasonable to demand that immigrants who want to stay in Europe give up the ways of their parents.” About the third possibility, Caldwell does not speak so directly, but he raises it in a parable about the fate awaiting guests who overstay their welcome: “The most spectacular illustration history offers of the kinship of hospitality and mistrust is that of Captain Cook, who was feted, flattered, and worshipped for a month by the Hawaiian islanders in Kealakekua Bay in 1779. When he and his crew returned on an emergency visit to repair a broken mast, they were massacred.”
I do not suppose Caldwell is seriously encouraging Europeans to return to their venerable tradition of mass murder. But readers may be forgiven for wondering what he really thinks about writing history in letters of blood.
-
thabet
