The Strange Death of Europe
 Cover of the first edition | |
| Author | Douglas Murray |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subjects | Politics, immigration, Islam |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Publication date | 4 May 2017 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 352 |
| ISBN | 978-1-4729-4224-1 |
| OCLC | 1027567742 |
The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam is a 2017 book by the British journalist and political commentator Douglas Murray. It was published in the United Kingdom in May 2017, and in June 2017 in the United States.
The book's title was inspired by George Dangerfield's classic of political history The Strange Death of Liberal England, published in 1935.[1]
Thesis[edit]
Murray thinks that European civilisation as we have known it will not survive and he explores two factors that he thinks explain this. The first is the combination of mass migration of new peoples into Europe together with its low birth rates. The second is what Murray describes as "the fact that… at the same time Europe lost faith in its beliefs, traditions, and legitimacy".[2]
Reception[edit]
The Strange Death of Europe received a polarized reception among critics and commentators. Sam Harris was among those who gave the book a very positive reception, lauding Murray's book as "wonderful".[3] Writing in the National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty praised it as "informed by actual reporting across the Continent, and a quality of writing that manages to be spritely and elegiac at the same time. Murray's is also a truly liberal intellect, in that he is free from the power that taboo exerts over the European problem, but he doesn't betray the slightest hint of atavism or meanspiritedness".[4] Rod Liddle of The Sunday Times called the book "a brilliant, important and profoundly depressing book".[5] In The Daily Telegraph, Juliet Samuel summarised Murray's book by saying, "His overall thesis, that a guilt-driven and exhausted Europe is playing fast and loose with its precious modern values by embracing migration on such a scale, is hard to refute".[6] Other commentators and writers who spoke positively of the book included Roger Scruton and Nick Cohen.[7][failed verification]
Conversely, other reviews were highly negative. Writing in The Guardian, the political journalist Gaby Hinsliff described Strange Death as "gentrified xenophobia" and "Chapter after chapter circles around the same repetitive themes: migrants raping and murdering and terrorising; paeans to Christianity; long polemics about how Europe is too 'exhausted by history' and colonial guilt to face another battle, and is thus letting itself be rolled over by invaders fiercely confident in their own beliefs", while also pointing out that Murray offers little definition of the European culture he claims is under threat.[8] Pankaj Mishra's review in The New York Times described the book as "a handy digest of far-right clichés".[9] In The Intercept, Murtaza Hussain criticized the "relentlessly paranoid tenor" of Murray's work and said that its claims of mass crime perpetuated by immigrants were "blinkered to the point of being propaganda", while noting the book's appeal to the far right.[10] In Middle East Eye, Georgetown professor Ian Almond called the book "a staggeringly one-sided flow of statistics, interviews and examples, reflecting a clear decision to make the book a rhetorical claim that Europe is doomed to self-destruction".[11]
A more mixed review of the book in The Economist claimed it "hit on some unfortunate truths", but "shows an incomplete picture of Europe today." Furthermore, it said that "the book would benefit, however, from far more reporting" and claimed Murray often "lets fear trump analysis" and was "prone to exaggeration."[12]
Bibliography[edit]
- Murray, Douglas (2017-05-04), The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (Hardcover ed.), London: Bloomsbury Continuum, ISBN 978-1-4729-4224-1
- Murray, Douglas (2018-06-14), The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (Paperback ed.), London: Bloomsbury Continuum, ISBN 978-1-4729-5800-6 - added Murray's Afterword on pp. 321–337 at April 2018.
- Murray, Douglas (2018-03-12), Der Selbstmord Europas: Immigration, Identität, Islam (in German), translated by Krisztina Koenen (EDITION TICHYS EINBLICK ed.), München: FinanzBuch Verlag, ISBN 978-3-95972-105-9
- Murray, Douglas (2018-04-25), L'étrange suicide de l'Europe: Immigration, identité, Islam, TOUC.ESSAIS (in French), translated by Julien Funnaro, Paris: L'artilleur, ISBN 978-2-81000-825-4
- Murray, Douglas (2018-11-15), La strana morte dell'Europa. Immigrazione, identità, Islam (in Italian), translated by Annamaria Biavasco e Valentina Guani, Vieenza: Neri Pozza Editore, ISBN 978-88-545-1701-1
- Murray, Douglas (2018-12-14), Seiyō no jishi: Imin, Aidentitī, Isuramu (in Japanese), translated by Atsuo Machida, Takeshi Nakano (foreword), Tokyo: Toyo Keizai Inc., ISBN 978-4-492-44450-4
References[edit]
- ^ Azize, Joseph. "The Strange Death of Europe". Retrieved 2021-12-08.
- ^ Abrams, Elliott (12 July 2017). "The Strange Death of Europe". Council on Foreign Relations. Retrieved 13 July 2017.
- ^ "#85 — Is this the End of Europe?" – via open.spotify.com.
- ^ Dougherty, Michael Brendan (30 May 2017). "The Manchester Attack and the Death of Europe". National Review. Retrieved 26 June 2017.
- ^ Liddle, Rod (7 May 2017). "Books: The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray". The Sunday Times. ISSN 0140-0460. Retrieved 3 September 2019.
- ^ Samuel, Juliet (6 May 2017). "Yanis Varoufakis and Douglas Murray: why Europe is weary". The Telegraph. Retrieved 18 July 2017.
- ^ "The Strange Death of Europe".
- ^ Hinsliff, Gaby (6 May 2017). "The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray review – gentrified xenophobia". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 June 2017.
- ^ Mishra, Pankaj (14 September 2017). "How the New Immigration Is Shaking Old Europe to Its Core". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 23 May 2019.
- ^ Hussain, Murtaza (25 December 2018). "THE FAR RIGHT IS OBSESSED WITH A BOOK ABOUT MUSLIMS DESTROYING EUROPE. HERE'S WHAT IT GETS WRONG". The Intercept. Archived from the original on 16 November 2020. Retrieved 20 December 2020.
- ^ Almond, Ian (11 August 2017). "Misrecognising the problem: Douglas Murray's The Strange Death of Europe". Middle East Eye. Archived from the original on 12 November 2020. Retrieved 4 January 2021.
- ^ "Fearing the "suicide" of Europe". The Economist. 17 June 2017.
THE FAR RIGHT IS OBSESSED WITH A BOOK ABOUT MUSLIMS DESTROYING EUROPE. HERE’S WHAT IT GETS WRONG.
Rather than declaring the continent “dead,” it might be worth considering that every generation faces unique challenges.
Murtaza Hussain
December 25 2018, 11:00 p.m.
THIS MARCH, HUNGARY’S authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán posted a photo of himself to his official Facebook page holding up a book, titled “The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam.” Orbán’s photo was of the book’s Hungarian translation, but author Douglas Murray, a British political commentator and journalist, wrote the volume in English. Since its release, the book has made considerable waves. Last summer, Murray was among a group of pop intellectuals collectively deemed to be members of the “Intellectual Dark Web” by the New York Times. Despite being a year old, his book continues to be cited by anti-immigrant hard-liners in the United States, as well as right-wing European politicians like Orbán.
The entire argument is helpfully summed up in the title: Europe is dying — being murdered, in fact — by hordes of Muslim immigrants.
If you’re curious what the book is about, the entire argument is helpfully summed up in the title. Europe is dying — being murdered, in fact — by hordes of Muslim immigrants, aided in their task by craven liberal politicians. As Murray describes it, insufficiently harsh border policies have opened the gates to migrants bent on committing no lesser crimes than mass rape and indiscriminate murder. Meanwhile, white Europeans, exhausted by their own history and driven into moral relativism by the decline of the Christian faith, are slowly being replaced by an implacably hostile and alien population of foreigners.
The “mass movement of peoples in Europe,” Murray writes, has led to “streets in the cold and rainy northern towns of Europe filled with people dressed for the foothills of Pakistan or the sandstorms of Arabia.” This is an early clue to the relentlessly paranoid tenor of the book: In South Asia or the Middle East — just as among the Western immigrant populations who hail from those places — many, if not most, people today dress in Western clothing, regardless of how appropriate it is for the climate.
Murray, though, is gravely alarmed by whatever foreign dress he does see. In his own hometown of London, according to a 2012 census he cites in the book, “only 44.9 percent of London residents now identified themselves as ‘white British.’” The fact that more than 80 percent of Britain is nonetheless white-skinned like him is apparently little comfort: Murray raises the specter of supporters of immigration purposely reducing the population of “white Britons” to 25 percent, 10 percent, or even zero percent in the city of London or, even more luridly, Britain as a whole.
THE PICTURE OF Europe that Murray paints is nothing less than apocalyptic. Over 300 pages, he recounts a litany of crimes committed by immigrants, asylum-seekers, refugees, or people with European citizenship who happen to be minorities. Like far-right American publications that maintain running lists of crimes specifically committed by black people and Latino immigrants, Murray collapses all these cases together to give the impression of one gigantic, rolling crisis. Echoing President Donald Trump’s warnings about Latin American rapists flooding the United States from Mexico, Murray depicts a wave of migrants from Muslim-majority countries who are not simply fleeing violence in their homelands, but are on a mission to conquer, violate, and insult the people of Europe.
Photo: Courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing
In case it needs to be said, some migrants, particularly young people, do commit crimes. There have been violent crimes involving migrants, including some who were refugees. But Murray’s narrative of lawlessness is blinkered to the point of being propaganda. While European Union-wide statistics are not readily available, it’s worth noting that Germany, the country that took the most refugees during the peak of the crisis, reported its lowest national crime rate this year since 1992. Similar decreases have been recorded in Italy, one of the front-line states for those arriving from across the Mediterranean. Across the continent, the wave of refugees has already crested, without the breakdown of law and order claimed by far-right polemicists.
It’s not even clear that there are so many migrants. According to United Nations data, between January 2014 and March 2018, roughly 1.8 million people crossed the Mediterranean Sea to try and enter the EU. This number — which has driven Murray to such angst that he has pronounced the “death of Europe” — amounts to less than one-third of 1 percent of the EU’s population. In the meantime, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Pakistan continue to quietly host millions of refugees, many of whom were driven from their homes as a result of wars of aggression supported by Murray, whose past books include forthright tomes like “Neoconservatism: Why We Need It.”
Even if no immigrant in Europe ever committed a crime, it seems like Murray would keep moving the goal posts against them anyway. In some of the most eye-opening portions of “The Strange Death of Europe,” he waxes nostalgic about medieval European warriors like Charles Martel who battled Muslim armies in the eighth century, drawing insidious connections between this ancient episode, among others, and the people he sees on the streets of Europe today. In other words, it’s not ultimately even about what immigrants and minorities do, it’s about who they are. On a trip to Paris, Murray laments that some of the subway lines are like “taking an underground train in an African city,” asserting contemptuously that most of the people are “going to low-paid service jobs or appear to be heading nowhere.”
I RECENTLY FINISHED reading Murray’s book while I myself was on a subway in Paris. This was a strange experience in some respects, particularly since I’m technically one of the invaders from the “foothills of Pakistan” that the book raises the alarm about. It was also strange because Murray actually begins his argument by citing my own favorite book: “The World of Yesterday” by Stefan Zweig.
Zweig was an Austrian-Jewish writer who was driven from Europe by the rise of fascism during the mid-20th century. While Murray cites him to reinforce his case about the continent’s looming mortality, the actual threat that Zweig warned about in his writings was from the xenophobic parties of the European far right. Those people eventually did destroy Zweig’s world, forcing him into a life of forlorn exile. He killed himself in Brazil in 1942.
Rather than declaring the continent “dead,” it might be worth considering that every generation faces unique challenges for which they must find new solutions.
Europe faces real challenges today, with economic austerity, political dysfunction, and, yes, migration. Rather than declaring the continent “dead” — an extremist proclamation that can only generate extremist responses — it might be worth considering that every generation faces unique challenges for which they must find new solutions. The question is whether those solutions will be ones that they can feel at ease about later, or whether they will be a source of shame that plagues the consciences of their descendants.
In retrospect, it’s not so surprising that Orbán decided to promote Murray’s book on his Facebook page this spring. Not only does the book reinforce the Hungarian demagogue’s own ethnonationalist worldview, but Murray also actually writes about Orbán favorably while criticizing his nemesis, the liberal financier and supporter of migrants, George Soros.
A few weeks ago, a Soros-linked university was driven out of Hungary, despite protests by thousands of liberal Hungarians against its closure. As the far right rears its head on the continent once again, leaders like Orbán are once again gaining strength, buttressed by the writings of ideologues like Murray. As the storm clouds gather, the rest of us can only fight to ensure that such people don’t succeed in dragging Europe down the same road of regret that it traveled just a few short generations ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment