Immigration: Europe regains its pride
Il Giornale, October 18, 2010
by Fiamma Nirenstein
The speech by German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the failure of the multi-cultural model, is not a defeat. It is a challenge. A momentous challenge, not in the form of a trumpet fanfare, but a quiet call to common sense. As the Chancellor is known to be a liberal and moderate, she certainly did not intend through her intervention to attempt to close the doors of Germany or Europe. Nor would it be possible to suddenly halt immigration and, more generally, the processes of globalization that are part of today's world, our world. But it was precisely her round, yet stern face and her common courtesy that pose the question to us in such a civilized way: her expressing the worry of young people to be trained for a decent job; our children who don't know what to do with themselves; speaking of the unease of a biblical Babel in a world in which your neighbors have no concept of your language; the creation of ghettos, all alien and totally diverse from each other, each nationality unto itself, where the question of integration does not even arise, only the survival and closed preservation of one’s self identified by one’s own culture… all this brings the problem into focus better than sheaves of sociological analyses.
The point is that certain cultures very often have no intention of mixing in with ours, despite our actions and best intentions. Paris has become a city in which more than 200,000 people live in families where polygamy is common practice. In Italy 30,000 women have been subjected to genital mutilation and Islamic courts—ninety-odd in London alone—inflict sentences that are inconceivable.
And it is, in fact, Angela, who has some hope of posing the problem because she doesn’t use the same tone as Geert Wilders who, despite his equally-good reasons, is rejected by politically-correct public opinion. The Chancellor could pose the problem as Alexis de Tocqueville would have. In 1830, as is well-known, he offered our world a sharp and amazed description of someone seeing for the first time in America a rapidly and crazily spinning world made up of a multi-colored mosaic around which gyrated all the individual tiles used to create a liberal and democratic society. Greed, competence and motivation, but also a common spirit. Herds of people who came from far away to the shores of New England, Tocqueville says, who would soon forge a unified language around a common English tongue, all interested in promoting education, the fact of belonging to well-off classes in their homelands despite their economic straits: in that vast wilderness they faced everything that was new with the conviction of making it work in the name of an ideal based on that of the Pilgrim Fathers.
“Their restless, burning passion” and “greed for the immense prey” did not fail nevertheless to create flourishing civil associations, newspapers and a postal system. All these circumstances taken together pointed in just one direction: the forging of democracy. It is here, and not so much because of the language factor that is easier to take on today with computers and the mass media, that our way of looking at immigration has failed completely. We have fallen in love with the colors and costumes. We have thought that the intrinsic beauty of seeing a black child and a white child, both perhaps smiling in front of the illusory United Colors of Benetton camera, somehow reflected a common aspiration, that of living together—not somewhere in general, but here, in our own backyard—in a democracy. It is this latter term that is often missing and perceived with hostility by the cultures we host.
We are strong. For example, our democratic culture devoured the rural culture of the 1960s through the “cultural genocide” spoken of by Pier Paolo Pasolini. But it was the same white culture, the same "mamma", the same food and the same sexual habits, with slight obvious changes. But in the globalization of today's democratic society, there are bodies whose smells, tastes and colors are completely different and distant and, above all, they don't like us one bit. They are absolutely not interested in democracy, they never had it at home and they don't understand why they should conform to its rules of which the primary one is personal freedom. Exactly the opposite of what Islam teaches as the supreme good.
They have other rules, not the ones of democracy. In Germany, Chancellor Merkel’s homeland, a Berlin lawyer was beaten along with her Muslim client who wanted a divorce; she was also attacked in the subway and was forced to close her practice. Again in Germany, Mozart’s opera, Idomeneo, was cancelled following Islamic threats. By pure luck, the editor-in-chief of Die Welt, Roger Köppel, blocked the hand of a young Muslim who was about to stab him in his office. In Germany, England and France, it is no longer possible to trace the “missing girls” who become slaves following arranged marriages. Giulio Meotti writes that, in Stockholm, the latest fashion is a T-shirt worn by young Muslim on which is written: "In 2030 we will take over". Just some incidents.
It’s the democracy, stupid. When we are faced by a culture like that of Islam, there are forms of irreducibility that run up against legal and moral issues with a whole range of subtleties. For us, “immigration” is a sacred term, filled of a sense of guilt, of generosity, of religion and liberal or left-wing overtones. But democracy is also a sacred term, our most important conquest: the masses of immigrants that do not share our democratic values put it in danger. And while we think that allowing immigration is a duty of democracy, we don’t understand that we are putting it at stake. Perhaps Chancellor Merkel—democratic German, pro-Europe, middle-class, complex-ridden and shy as every cultured German is—has succeeded in posing the question.