Europa, Europa...

The Cafeteria is Closed links an article by George Weigel on the impending demise of Europe, demographically and culturally.

In a previous post here I linked Bruce Thornton's essay on western civilization's increasing passivity towards aggressors like Islam.

Somehow these two syndromes seem related. Weigel calles it a decrease in "civilizational morale" - especially in light of Europe's alarming decline in its birthrate. He also attributes this drop in morale as an "acid" which is eating away at America too. I agree.

Thornton's article compares the West's softness to the Eloi of HG Well's The Time Machine. They are beautiful, healthy, passive and peaceful people. They are provided for by an unseen "benefactor" without question. They are also preyed upon by the sinister Morlocks and they do not resist. When one of their own accidentally falls into a rushing river none of them attempt to save her - they just passively watch her drown.

Parallel to this submissiveness is Europe's inability to face aggressors. When Saddam Hussein repeatedly violated UN Resolutions Europe failed to administer any consequence or punishment for his obdurance. Europe is facing increasing violence by its Muslim population, whose numbers will surpass the Europeans in less than 50 years.

Europe is not having babies. They are not replacing themselves. They choose death in euthanasia and abortion and birth control. Why this form of suicide?

Is it exhaustion from two World Wars and the Cold War? I think of some prose by a novelist I like, Ian McEwan, who wrote of post WWII Europe in his novel, Black Dogs:

"...he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose totality showed more sadness than any one could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions, like the woman in black for a husband and two brothers, each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise... For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling - all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories... [This came] not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silence and, later, a question: what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?"

Is Europe trying to forget her past, which is inhuman and dangerous?