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Reflections On The Revolution In Europe Immigration, Islam, And The West (2009)

by Christopher Caldwell(Favorite Author)

3.42 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0713999365 (ISBN13: 9780713999365)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Allen Lane

review 1: Excellent book. The author makes a very strong argument in that Europe is a too-open, un-unified, declining civilization, facing immigration from what is essentially a strong, unified, motivated, closed culture (Islam). He seems to prove through various examples that Muslims immigrating to Europe rarely assimilate properly past the first generation, and that they turn more to their country of origin, and, more importantly, to their unifying religion than their new country. He argues Europe has confused its politics in an attempt to run from claims of fascism and imperialism, and is now far too tolerant and wishy-washy for its own good. He also includes interesting points and quotes, such as those by Enoch Powell, and the idea that, in order to combat internal Islamic domin... moreance, Europe may have to become much more like the United States. Caldwell clearly, intelligently and explicitly, and while it is no secret which side of the pro/con Islam debate he is on, he manages to maintain a relatively non-biased narrator/commentator role.
review 2: Cladwell’s ideas and detailed research on the effects that late twentieth-century Muslim immigration has had on Europe is a well-conceived and, for any Westerner who reads it with an open mind, uncomfortable read about the inherent cultural schism which festers in this twenty-first century. He points out quite early that what has attracted and fostered belligerent Muslim identities in Europe are exactly those Western values which postwar Europe established – which the founders of modern Europe certainly did not, and perhaps could not, foresee. "The 'European project' was not dreamt up with immigrants in mind, but it wound up setting the rules under which they were welcomed. Postwar Europe was built on an intolerance of intolerance – a mind-set that has been praised as anti-racism and anti-fascism, and ridiculed as political correctness." Caldwell also doesn’t shy away from attacking head-on the inherent difficulty – or is that incompatibility – of Islam with a secular Western mindset. More specifically, he argues that while modern Christianity was historically tempered in modern political life, Islam has not gone through this. And even shows minimal, if any, desire to do so. "A main weapon in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment’s attacks on Christianity was ridicule. But while hoping that Muslims will learn the lessons of Voltaire, Europeans have gone to great lengths to insulate Islam from Voltaire’s methods. Ridiculing Islam has been confused with xenophobia and racism. Those questions about Islam are expected to content themselves with kicking the dead horse of Christianity in hopes that Muslims will, by inductive reasoning, come to see that the general laws so established apply to their religion, too." Sad to say, but Islam has been protected from confronting its own inherent sexism and homophobia – at the very least. As Caldwell looks to the United States as a possible alternative model of a multiethnic society that Europe should emulate – whether or not is realistic of possible for it to do so. "Europe is thus in a funny predicament. It is an increasingly anti-American continent facing dire problems to which the only proven solution is to become more like America. Because the United States shows, at least, that one can receive great masses of immigrants from all over the world and retain a culture that is still open, free, and Western…American may be open in theory, but in practice is exerts Procrustean pressures on its immigrants to conform, and it is its pressures, not its openness, that have bound America’s diverse citizens together as one people. Yes, you can have a “hyphenated identity” if you insist on it – but you had better know which side of the hyphen your bread is buttered on."The decline of the American Empire, if not America’s influence, have been bandied about for decades now – perhaps increasingly since end of the Vietnam War and the Arab Oil Crisis in the 70s -- but never has America’s purpose been made more clear than in Caldwell’s eye-widening analysis of the very real problem of Islam being drug kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. less

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