[Bret L]

Christopher Caldwell's Reflection On The Revolution In Europe: Now He
Tells Us?

By Steve Sailer

"Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West is an important and surprising book.

Granted, VDARE.com readers won't see much that's new. In essence,
Caldwell's Reflections is a Brimelovian vindication of Enoch Powell,
the brilliant Tory who warned against immigration in a prescient (and
thus notorious) 1968 speech that began "The supreme function of
statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils".

Caldwell points out in his opening pages (which you can read here):

"Although at the time Powell's demographic projections were much
snickered at, they have turned out not just roughly accurate but as
close to perfectly accurate as it is possible for any such projections
to be: In his Rotary Club speech, [November 16 1968] Powell shocked
his audience by stating that the nonwhite population of Britain,
barely over a million at the time, would rise to 4.5 million by 2002.
(According to the national census, the actual "ethnic minority"
population of Britain in 2001 was 4,635,296.)"

Readers who get their views from the MainStream Media, though, will be
startled by how gracefully—yet bluntly—Caldwell delivers an
intellectually cohesive assault on the conventional wisdom of the
diversity dogma.

Reflections is also a model for how a working journalist can transform
years of old articles researched on scores of trips to Europe into a
stylish book. Caldwell's solution is to enhance his prose style with
aphorisms worthy of G.K. Chesterton.

For example, in Caldwell's original February 27, 2006 Weekly Standard
article on Nicolas Sarkozy, The Man Who Would Be le Président, he
discussed Sarkozy's call for affirmative action in France to appease
riotous Muslims:

"It can be argued that France needs such measures desperately, … but,
… Sarkozy shows a bit of the naiveté of, say, Hubert Humphrey in 1964
when he implies the program would be only temporary. … How long would
the program last, then? Twenty years? 'No, twenty years is too long.'"

In his book, however, Caldwell adds this memorable dictum in reply to
Sarkozy's Continental innocence about America's experience:

"One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative
action can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a
world in which it can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too
strong."

(I suspect that when Sen. Lindsey Graham decided to vote for Sonia
Sotomayor, he was saying something like this to himself, just less
elegantly.)

Caldwell adds:

"This logic is not lost on white people in the United States, and it
will likely not be lost on European natives."

The courage that Caldwell displays in Reflections is unexpected. Among
conservative literary intellectuals, Caldwell has pursued mainstream
approval with perhaps the most success. For example, in a June 1998
Atlantic article, The Southern Captivity of the GOP, this Harvard
English Lit major argued that the Republican Party appealed too much
to white Southerners (whom he described as "U-Haul-renting denizens of
two-year-old churches".)

His dust jacket biography reads:

"Christopher Caldwell is a columnist for the Financial Times, a
contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and a senior
editor at The Weekly Standard."

(You can't blame him; he and his wife, who is Robert Novak's daughter,
have five kids.)

Unexpectedly, Caldwell takes the arrogant bluster of European
intellectuals and patiently and quietly extracts the simple silly-
mindedness at its heart:

"Bizarrely, as immigration began to change Europe at its economic and
cultural core, the political vocabulary remained the same as when
immigration had been a fringe phenomenon. People kept talking about
restaurants."

He points out the endless contradictions of the cult of tolerance:

"The policing of tolerance had no inbuilt limits and no obvious logic.
Why was 'ethnic pride' a virtue and 'nationalism' a sickness? Why was
an identity like 'Sinti/Roma' legitimate but an identity like 'white'
out of bounds? Why had it suddenly become criminal to ask questions
today that it was considered a citizen's duty to ask ten years ago?"

And yet, as the Danish Cartoon Riots of 2006 showed, the absurdity of
Europe's ever-growing restrictions on freedom of speech about
immigration—both legalistic (what Caldwell calls "the criminalization
of opinion") and vigilante (enforced by young Muslim thugs)—aren't
funny. As Caldwell explains, "Immigration exacts a steep price in
freedom":

"A new, uncompromising ideology was advancing under cover of its own
ridiculousness—not as the Big Lie of legend, perhaps, but as something
similarly ominous that might be called the Big Joke."

Caldwell is extremely good at disentangling the ideological evolutions—
the "He who says A, must say B" thought processes—that got Europe into
its Muslim mess.

"The Holocaust has in recent decades been the cornerstone of the
European moral order. … Under the pressure of mass immigration,
however, post-Holocaust repentance became a template for regulating
the affairs of any minority that could plausibly present itself as
seriously aggrieved. … Once on the continent, Muslims took up a
privileged position in any public debate on minority rights: they,
too, were 'victims.'"

This, of course, is an unmistakable echo of VDARE.COM Editor Peter
Brimelow's opening to his much-denounced book Alien Nation: Common
Sense About America's Immigration Disaster back in 1995:

"There is a sense in which current immigration policy is Adolf
Hitler's posthumous revenge on America. The U.S. political elite
emerged from the war passionately concerned to cleanse itself from all
taints of racism or xenophobia. Eventually, it enacted the epochal
Immigration Act (technically, the Immigration and Nationality Act
Amendments) of 1965.

"And this, quite accidentally, triggered a renewed mass immigration,
so huge and so systematically different from anything that had gone
before as to transform—and ultimately, perhaps, even to destroy—the
one unquestioned victor of World War II: the American nation, as it
had evolved by the middle of the 20th century.

"Today, U.S. government policy is literally dissolving the people and
electing a new one. You can be for this or you can be against it. But
the fact is undeniable."

Brimelow, needless to say, goes prudently uncited in Caldwell's book.

Europe's elites needed a new minority in order to feel morally
superior to European commoners. And the Muslims agreed.

"[M]any Muslims felt their community offered native Europeans a more
appropriate object than the Jews themselves for moral self-examination
and moral self-flagellation. An increasing number of Muslims saw
themselves, in fact, as the 'new Jews.'…"

Ironically, Europe's obsession with the Holocaust has stimulated the
outbreak of anti-Semitic violence by European Muslims in this decade:

"As the Jews accumulated 'rivals' with an interest in dislodging them
from their position as Europe's top victims, the system was suddenly
turned inside out. The ideology of diversity and racial harmony … now
became the means through which anti-Jewish fury was reinjected into
European life. … If the Muslims were the new Jews, apparently, then
the Jews were the new Nazis."

Caldwell sums up with a quote from French philosopher Alain
Finkielkraut:

"I think that the lofty idea of 'the war on racism' is gradually
turning into a hideously false ideology. … And this anti-racism will
be for the twenty-first century what communism was for the twentieth
century: a source of violence."

It would be interesting to know whether Caldwell was always a secret
VDAREite regarding European immigration, but had his logic emasculated
by his periodical editors.

Or did he not come to these logical conclusions until he tried to make
sense of his research while writing this book?

In either case—welcome aboard!"


http://www.vdare.com/sailer/090809_caldwell.htm