Cry the beloved continent.

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January 06, 2006
A Letter to the Europeans
Cry the beloved continent.
by Victor Davis Hanson

Despite the bitter recrimination and growing rift between you and us,
most Americans have not forgotten that a strong, confident Europe is
still critical to the material and spiritual well being of the United
States.

It is not just that as Westerners you have withstood - often later at
our side - all prior challenges to the shared liberal civilization
you created, whether the specter of an Ottoman global suzerainty,
Bonapartism, Prussian militarism, Nazism, fascism, Japanese militarism,
or Soviet Communism.

Nor is our allegiance a mere matter of history. Europe is the
repository of the Western tradition, most manifestly in shrines like
the Acropolis, the Pantheon, the Uffizi, or the Vatican. We concede
that the Great Books - we as yet have not produced a Homer, Virgil,
Dante, Shakespeare, or Locke, much less a Da Vinci, Mozart, or Newton
- and the Great Ideas of the West from democracy to capitalism to
human rights originated on your continent alone. And if Americans
believe our Constitution and the visions of our Founding Fathers were
historic improvements on Europe of the 18th-century, then at least we
acknowledge in our humility that they were also inconceivable without
it.

No, there is a greater oneness between us, an unspoken familiarity even
now in the age of global sameness, that makes an American feel at home
in Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, or Athens in a way that is not true of
Istanbul, Cairo, or Bangkok.

In the multiracial society of the United States, an American black,
Asian, or Latino finds natural affinity in London and Brussels in a way
not true in Lagos, Ho Chi Min City, or Lima. For millions of Americans
"Eurocentric" is no slur - for it is an appellation of shared values
and ideas not of race.

Even in this debased era of multiculturalism that misleads our youth
into thinking no culture can be worse than the West, we all know in our
hearts the truth that we live by and the lie that we profess - that
the critic of the West would rather have his heart repaired in Berlin
than in Guatemala or be a Muslim in Paris rather than a Christian in
Riyadh, or a woman or homosexual in Amsterdam than in Iran, or run a
newspaper in Stockholm rather than in Havana, or drink the water in
Luxembourg rather than in Uganda, or object to his government in Italy
rather than in China or North Korea. Radical Muslims damn Europe and
praise Allah - but whenever possible from Europe rather than inside
Libya, Syria, or Iran.

Although we Americans think the European Union is a flawed notion and
will not survive to fulfill its present aspirations, we hope in some
strange way that it does - for both our sakes of having a proud
partner in a more dangerous world to come rather than an angry and
envious inferior, nursing past glories while blaming others for
self-inflicted wounds of the present.

Even in this era of crisis, we cling to the notion that in the eleventh
hour you, Europe, will yet reawake, rediscover your heritage, and join
with us in defending the idea of the West from this latest illiberal
scourge of Islamic fascism. For just once, if only for the purpose of
theatrics, we would like to urge calm and restraint to a Europe angry,
volatile, and threatening, in the face of blackmail and taunts from a
third-rate theocracy in Tehran - or a two-bit fascist thug fomenting
hate and violence from a state-subsidized mosque in a European suburb.

Alas, recently, Europeans have been taken hostage on the West Bank,
Yemen, and Iraq. All have been released. There are two constants in the
stories: Some sort of blackmail was no doubt involved (either cash
payments or the release of terrorist killers in European jails?), and
the captives often seem to praise the moderation of their captors. Is
this an aberration or indicative of a deeper continental malady? Few,
in either a private or public fashion, suggested that such bribery only
perpetuates the kidnapping of innocents and provides cash infusions to
terrorists to further their mayhem.

On the home front, a single, though bloody, attack in Madrid changed an
entire Spanish election, and prompted the withdrawal of troops from
Iraq - although the terrorists nevertheless continued, despite their
promises to the contrary, to plant bombs and plan assassinations of
Spanish judicial officials. Cry the beloved continent.

The entire legal system of the Netherlands is under review due to the
gruesome murder of Theo van Gogh and politicians there who speak out
about the fascistic tendencies of radical Islam often either face
threats or go into hiding. Cry the beloved continent.

Unemployment, postcolonial prejudice, and de facto apartheid may have
led to the fiery rioting in the French suburbs, but it was also
energized by a radical Islamic culture of hate. In response followed de
facto French martial law. All that remains certain is that the rioting
will return either to grow or to warp liberal French society. Indeed,
so far has global culture devolved in caving to Islamism that we fear
that only two places in the world are now safe for a Jew to live in
safety - and Europe, the graveyard of 20th-century Jewry, is
tragically not among them. Cry the beloved continent.

Your idealistic approach to health care, transportation, global
warming, and entitlements have won over much of coastal and blue
America, who, if given their way, would replicate here what you have
there. Yet the worry grows that none of this vision of your anointed is
sustainable - given an aging and shrinking population, growing and
unassimilated minority populations, flat growth rates, increasing
statism, and high unemployment.

If America, the former British commonwealth, India, and China, embraced
globalization, while the Arab Middle East rejected it, you sought a
third way of insulating yourselves from it - and now are beginning to
pay for trying to legislate and control what is well beyond your
ability to do either.

Abroad you face even worse challenges. In the post-Cold War you
dismantled your armed forces, and chose to enhance entitlements at the
expense of military readiness. I fear you counted only on a tried and
simple principle: that the United States would continue to subsidize
European defense while ignoring your growing secular religion of
anti-Americanism.

But in the last 15 years, and especially after 9/11, heaven did not
come to earth, that instead became a more dangerous place than ever
before. Worse, in the meantime you lost the goodwill of the United
States, which you demonized, I think, on the understanding that there
would never be real repercussions to your flamboyant venom.

Your courts indict American soldiers, often a few miles from the very
military garrisons that alone protect you. Your media and public
castigate the country whose fashion, music, entertainment, and popular
culture you so slavishly embrace.

The Balkan massacres proved that a mass murderer like Slobodan
Milosevic could operate with impunity in Europe until removed by the
intervention of the United States. And yet from that gruesome lesson,
in retrospect we over here have learned only two things: The Holocaust
would have gone on unabated hours from Paris and Berlin without the
leadership of United States, and in this era of the Chirac/Schroeder
ingratitude the American public would never sanction such help to you
again. If you believe that an American-led NATO should not serve larger
Western interests outside of Europe, we concede that it cannot even do
that inside it.

We wish you well in your faith that war has become obsolete and that
outlaw nations will comply with international jurisprudence that was
born and is nurtured in Europe. Yet your own intelligence suggests that
the Iran theocracy is both acquiring nuclear weaponry and seeking to
craft missile technology to put an Islamic bomb within reach of
European cities - oblivious to the reasoned appeals of European Union
diplomats, who themselves operate as Greek philosophers in the agora
only on the condition that Americans will once more play the role of
Roman legionaries in the shadows.

Russia may no longer be the mass-murdering Soviet Union, but it remains
a proud nationalist and increasingly autocratic power of the
19th-century stripe, nuclear and angry at the loss of its empire,
emboldened by the ease that it can starve energy supplies to Western
Europe, and tired of humanitarian lectures from Westerners who have no
real military to match their condescending sermons. Old Europe has
neither the will nor the power to protect the ascending democracies of
Eastern Europe, much less the republics of the former Soviet Union from
present Russian bullying - and perhaps worse to come.

The European strategy of selling weapons to Arab autocracies,
triangulating against the United States for oil and influence, and
providing cash to dubious terrorists like Hamas has backfired. Polls in
the West Bank suggest Palestinians hate you, the generous and
accommodating, as much as they do us, the staunch ally of Israel.

So, terrorists of the Middle East seem to have even less respect for
you than for the United States, given they harbor a certain contempt
for your weakness as relish to the generic hatred of our shared Western
traditions.

You will, of course, answer that in your postwar wisdom you have
transcended the internecine killing of the earlier 20th century when
nationalism and militarism ruined your continent - and that you have
lent your insight to the world at large that should follow your
therapeutic creed rather than the tragic vision of the United States.

But the choices are not so starkly bipolar between either chauvinistic
saber rattling or studied pacifism. There is a third way, the promise
of muscular democratic government that does not apologize for 2,500
years of civilization and is willing to defend it from the enemies of
liberalism, who would undo all that we wrought.

A European Union that facilitates trade, finance, and commerce can
enrich and ennoble your continent, but it need not suppress the unique
language, character, and customs of European nationhood itself, much
less abdicate a heritage that once not merely moralized about, but took
action to end, evil.

The world is becoming a more dangerous place, despite your new
protocols of childlessness, pacifism, socialism, and hedonism. Islamic
radicalism, an ascendant Communist China, a growing new collectivism in
Latin America, perhaps a neo-czarist Russia as well, in addition to the
famine and savagery in Africa, all that and more threaten the promise
of the West.

So criticize us for our sins; lend us your advice; impart to America
the wealth of your greater experience - but as a partner and an equal
in a war, not as an inferior or envious neutral on the sidelines.
History is unforgiving. None of us receives exemption simply by reason
of the fumes of past glory.

Either your economy will reform, your populace multiply, and your
citizenry defend itself, or not. And if not, then Europe as we have
known it will pass away - to the great joy of the Islamists but to
the terrible sorrow of America.

©2005 Victor Davis Hanson