Will Europe Fight?

A friend e-mailed, asking if I agreed with Victor Davis Hanson's assessment that Europeans will eventually recover their fighting spirit. Hanson's column of last week, What Will Europe Really Do?, actually leaves it up to the reader to make a prediction:

Once threatened, it will either react with a newly acquired Churchillian maturity to protect its civilization, or cave, in hopes that even more Chamberlain-type appeasement will satisfy the Islamists.

He writes this as though Europe is a cohesive whole, which, on many levels, is not exactly true. The most important division in Europe is between ordinary people, and the utopian elites who govern them. Because of the this yawning gap, both weakness and strength can be expected -- in that order. For what it's worth, here's my prediction.

News out of Europe consists almost exclusively of what the legions of delusional bureaucrats are saying and doing. But when you go around and talk to ordinary Germans, Dutch, Danes, and so on, they are wonderfully unencumbered with all the multicultural, politically correct baggage their rulers -- and Americans -- carry around. Most know damn well what the problem is, and don't feel any shame in clearly stating it: Islam. However, Europeans also seem conditioned to just accept their fate, so most are worried or angry, but passive. Unfortunately, the only people who are worried and angry, and ready to take action, are all the neo-Nazi National Fronts.

If I had to guess at how it would go down, I'd say that some huge riot or bombing will be followed by demands the Eurocrats can't refuse (Tony Blankley touches on a similar scenario in the first chapter of The West's Last Chance). But once Islamist demands get enacted and start interfering with people's lives, I don't think ordinary Europeans will stand for it. That's when the tide of rebellion is likely to wash in.

Guns useful for anything beyond hunting quail are universally illegal in Europe. So if the nationalists aren't already plugging into the black market and setting up arms smuggling networks (from eastern Europe), they will. And then the Eurocrats will have a perpetual low-intensity conflict on their hands. Jos Schmo & pals shoot some Muslims or burn down a mosque, then Mo Schmo & pals retaliate, until parts of Europe look more like Iraq.

Modern Europeans fight every war the same way: they appease and back down and wait too damn long, so by the time they realize that action must be taken, they're forced to employ repulsively extreme measures. So if Islamists are dumb enough to start suicide-bombing cafes and shopping centers as in Israel, I think there's a good chance they'd start being massacred in large numbers. Men, women, and children alike -- all because the utopian elites are too "tolerant" and "enlightened" to adopt restrictive, but non-military, measures now.

One way it could spiral into all-out civil war is if the Eurocrats brought in the military to crush all violence equally, which they probably would. European forces are small and composed almost entirely of conscripts, so it's likely they would experience numerous desertions. Many of the soldiers who stay would be likely to look the other way rather than fire on their own countrymen, and some could be expected to actively assist a native resistance. By that time, nationalists would start winning elections like crazy, and eventually, Europeans would take back the continent.

Europe will remain European, I'm quite sure, but not without another bloodbath. It's too soon to predict whether US forces would wind up assisting, but one thing is certain: Islamists and nationalists both hate Jews, who need to get out now.

Hanson's column ends: "It should be a fascinating spring ahead." Agreed.