Interesting stuff going on over at Martini Boy's joint. I really enjoy that there are two bartenders nowdays: we get more good stuff as a result.
First, after reading this article , part of which touches upon the "white flight" that might or might not be occurring as a result of the rise of minorities in the Netherlands, Will Collier wonders where this new diaspora will flee to:
{...}What if a considerable fraction--even a large minority--of that 13,000 really are fleeing from Islamic radicalism? What happens 20 or 30 years from now, when demographic trends could well result in "minority-majority" (or even outright majority) status for the Islamic cohort in western Europe? If they're faced with the options of dhimmitude or flight, where will the native Europeans flee to?Why, here, of course.{...}
Martini Boy replies thoughtfully that instead of simply fleeing or adjusting, Europeans might actually be forced into fighting in such an instance.
{...}What Will left out is the third option. If somewhere down the road the worst should come to worst, Europeans could always stay home and fight. And don't think they couldn't.Problem is, the fight wouldn't be the pretty kind where you see a few bold arrows drawn on the map, confidently slicing through history and the enemy lines. We're not talking Desert Storm here, which you could draw with five arrows and lasted only 96 hours. We're not even talking about the Liberation of France in 1944, which took slightly more arrows and just six weeks. Oh, no.
We'd be talking about city fighting. But not the kind of city fighting you saw in Saving Private Ryan, where the likeable, well-trained and battle-hardened soldiers could call in an air strike just when all seemed lost. Thanks to modern Europe finally putting "ain't gonna study war no more" into nearly full effect, they hardly have any battle-hardened soldiers. They hardly have any soldiers left at all.
The city fighting we'd see in Europe would look like what we saw in Sarajevo ten years ago. You know, ragtag bands of men with no uniforms, stolen weapons, and a desire to kill anybody who looked Muslim (or on the Muslim side, European). Holland and Denmark would fare worst. They're both tiny, both have very high (and increasing) Muslim populations, and neither country has much of a modern military tradition. In this worst-case scenario, the likelihood of ethnic mob rule ala Bosnia seems high.{...}
Go read the whole thing.
While I think Will's got a point and that an awful lot of Hollanders will simply pull up stakes and in a fit of "I can't believe it's gotten this bad" whining, and will move elsewhere, I also think Stephen's scenario is likely to occur. If the worse case scenario comes to pass---meaning the Europeans doing nothing to stem this tide now---it will also be as ugly as he claims. Replete with mass murders, mass rapes and the like.
I agree that the Europeans do know a thing or two about warfare and can be made to fight. They're just reticent to do so. WWII may have hit them just as hard, if not harder than The Great War, but, in my humble estimation, it is still the memories of just how flamingly idiotic WWI was fought that has made them gun-shy. That war may have started ninety-years-ago, but its legacy has been long lasting. Europeans don't focus so much on WWII in their movies and books, but rather on WWI. ( Why, there's even a movie out right now that uses it as a backdrop. ) They leave WWII to the Americans. WWI has more resonance for them. It's the ulitmate cautionary tale for these deep thinkers with long memories. An Archduke is assassinated in Sarajevo, as a result war breaks out because of the ruling elite's misguided perceptions of some Serbian nationalist nutjob's intentions, and teams are picked. Worldwide chaos unfolds, millions die, and when no one can take it any longer, this chaos ultimately leads to unwieldy, harsh peace deals, economic depression, starvation, the rise of mass murdering dictators, and ultimately to more chaos caused by yet another war. I can't blame them for going to the beginning and focusing on the start: the twentieth century was their bloodiest ever. Given Europe's war-torn history from Caesar to Attila the Hun to Charlemagne to the Bourbons, well, that's saying something.
Its also the history of the Great War that kept Great Britain and France from checking Hitler early on. While we today equate Chamberlain with the appeasement, his "Peace in Our Time" approach to dealing with Hitler's Germany was incredibly popular in Britain. While I don't know the exact numbers, it's generally known that Britain lost half her young men in WWI. That's a lot of men. These men are referred to as "The Lost Generation," because a generation was, for all intents and purposes, lost somewhere in the death and maiming that occurred. France suffered just as much. (As did Germany, but that really didn't stop them, did it?) Is it any wonder, given this fact, that neither France or Britain wanted anything to do with WWII and did everything they could to avoid it? While the French wildly underestimated Germany's intentions and let them walk all over them during the occupation, they nonetheless saved the lives of countless young men who would have been slaughtered if they had fought a blitzkrieg that would have smashed them regardless of their efforts. Was this the honorable thing to do? Was it right? Given what we know to have actually happened during the German occupation, no, it was not. But what we conveniently forget when we denouce the French as a bunch of lily-livered wine snots, is that this judgment of their appeasement is also hindsight. WWI was fresh in their minds: they remembered. They had lost many. Who---and be honest about this---can blame them for trying to minimize the cost they might have to pay when the next time occurred?
Britain's fate was different. They picked up the charge when it was presented to them, but they did so with full knowledge of what might happen and how badly they might suffer. In my humble opinion, I believe this knowledge is what saved them from a much worse fate in WWII than what they did suffer. They knew. They knew what needed to be done and they did it. It was their chance to avenge their losses and to put an end to Germany's madness once and for all.
With a little (heh) help from their friends, they succeeeded.
Europeans do know how to fight. The question remains, though, how long will it take for them to wake up and realize if they don't do something now they will have no other option than to fight? They may have gained a reticence to fight as the result of WWI and WWII, but that reticence is also willfully blinding them from the fact at hand: their societies are just as much at risk now from Islamic fascism as they were from Hitler's aggression.
Posted by Kathy at January 19, 2005 02:29 PM