[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
“A Small European Nation Has a Big Explosions Problem,” a New York Times story recently reported. The story clarified that the small nation was the Netherlands, it never did clarify who was behind the over 700 bombings so far this year. Saying it out loud would have been impolite.
European nations, small and great, have all sorts of mysterious unexplained problems that they never used to before. The Netherlands has a rash of bombings. In the UK, acid attacks are up 75%. Much like the bombings in the Netherlands, none of the news stories clarify why a phenomenon associated with a whole other part of the world had migrated to the UK.
“Sweden’s new normal: Bombs in the suburbs on a weeknight,” Politico reported in 2023. This January, there were 30 bombings. An Economist story blamed the attacks on “teens”. Sweden’s National Police Commissioner Petra Lundh warned that 14-year-olds are being recruited for “murder assignments” by gangs and foreign countries. Which teens? Which countries?
The UK’s latest report on sex grooming gangs revealed the authorities had refused to collect information about the ‘ethnicities’ of the gangs to avoid appearing racist. English girls in huge numbers were allowed to be raped by the same group throwing acid, setting off bombs and recruiting children to kill, to avoid being rude to the rapists. Stories quoted the report’s assertion that it was “not racist to examine the ethnicity of the offenders” and then refused to examine it.
Americans who struggle to understand this might consider a recent European horror movie whose premise will likely be incomprehensible to them. The movie, ‘Speak No Evil’, has no monsters, no zombies or vampires, only an upper middle class couple who, in the words of the movie’s press release, “find themselves increasingly caught in a web of their own politeness”.
“The Europeans in the movie fear being impolite more than they fear anything else, including physical harm. This fear overrides their instincts telling them that obviously something is wrong,” a review describes. What kind of people would rather let themselves be killed than be rude?
What starts as an assault on the values of an upper middle class liberal couple climaxes in the mutilation of their child and their murder. “Why are you doing this to us?” the man pleads.
“Because you let me,” comes the reply.
Why do the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany have a big explosion problem? Why were thousands of girls assaulted in the UK? Why were over 1,000 women and girls assaulted in Germany on New Year’s Eve? Why are cartoonists murdered in France? Why are churches turning into mosques all across the continent? Because Europeans are letting it happen.
Unlike the zombies and vampires, this horror story is real. Europe is letting itself be colonized, assaulted and killed because the alternative is the stigma of violating perceived social norms.
There is a species of politeness that requires not seeing what is going on around us until it’s too late. In the twentieth century, clearly spelling out the evils of Nazism and Communism was seen as rude. The gentlemanly thing to do was to believe that war was unnecessary and unneeded. By the time the wake-up calls arrived, courtesy of Hitler and Stalin, it was almost too late.
The emerging European ideal of Europe had almost eliminated the future of the continent.
“What if the social contract we all live by — the imperative to be polite and gracious and no matter how uncomfortable things get, go along — was actually (and literally) a fatal flaw?” Entertainment Weekly asked in its review. Books like The Gift of Fear had already long explored the ways in which women are prone to go along with predators to avoid being rude, but with the exception of Jamie Glazov’s Jihadist Psychopath, few apply those same lessons nationally.
Mass indoctrination transformed the social contract from a set of mutual obligations to a one-way street in which one party gives everything and the other takes everything. What was an ideological necessity for the socialist politics of the last century has been hijacked by foreign invaders who are not part of the society and are there to destroy it from within. What will they do to us? Whatever we allow them to. Until we finally find the courage to speak out against them.
Do Europeans really want to be invaded? The average apolitical European does not. Few really appreciate their heritage cities turning into third world wastelands, being confronted by foreign young men on the local equivalent of welfare shaking them down is not a delightful experience, and the disappearance of their languages, cultures and religions isn’t met with inner cheer.
But it has been explained to them by experts, clerics and senior government officials that this sort of thing needs to happen, that it is a very good thing that it is happening and that the ultimate outcome will be happy even if there are some ‘teething pains’ along the way. Mass indoctrination has taught them that everyone else feels the same way. And they stay quiet.
“I think perhaps it would be impolite to decline,” the movie’s protagonist suggests.
That fear of impoliteness, of moving against the lemming current of societal suicide, silencing Europe in the face of the Islamic invasion may be harder for Americans to understand.
Where the Europeans allow themselves to be rounded up and murdered, in the inevitable Hollywood remake, the Americans fight back and win. And in real life Americans pushed back against national suicide and elected Trump no matter how much the Europeans disapproved.
Americans wouldn’t rather be dead than rude. And they’re not the only ones.
There are a few peoples who are rude enough to push back, the Hungarians, the Poles and the Israelis, and they are the subjects of unrelieved opprobrium for refusing to just give up and die. The Hungarians and Poles police their borders while the Israelis bomb those trying to kill them.
That only makes the European establishment hate them all the more. Even as the rest of the so-called civilized world has made enormous sacrifices to avoid confronting Islam, the Americans, the Israelis and a few Eastern Europeans act as if their lives are worth more than the mores of politeness that require looking away from the atrocities of their new neighbors.
If there is to be any hope for the future, it may lie in that brashness, common sense and chutzpah, the willingness to say the things that must not be said, when confronting the Islamic clash of civilizations, rather than to perish because politeness mattered more than life itself.