November 26, 2008
With all due respect to Derek Turner and the authors of A Bridge Too Far, Philip Claeys and Koen Dillen, and the Vlaams Belang, the organization to which these excellent young men belong, I must dissent from their brief against Turkish entry into the European Union. The last reason I could imagine for keeping Turkey out of that cesspool of political correctness headquartered in Brussels is that the Turks are not sufficiently “democratic.” Supposedly, according to Derek Turner, Europeans would upset their model progressive civilization by letting in Turks. Indeed they would be welcoming a nation whose social views are so “ultraconservative” “that they have not been common in Europe since the early nineteenth century.” To make matters even worse, tourists in Istanbul now encounter “crocodiles of uniformed children marching with Turkish flags beneath Atatürk banners.”
For most of the reasons Derek mentions in his review of A Bridge Too Far, I would beg the Turks to join the EU as quickly as they can. That is, if this patriotic doughty nation, which is imagined to resemble Europe in the early nineteenth century, would want to break bread with multicultural lunatics who are turning Europe into a politically correct graveyard. To hold up today’s Western and Central Europe as a model of communal living, one to which the Turks couldn”t begin to aspire, is absurd. The nation built by Kemal Mustafa, even with its threat of Muslim Fundamentalist takeover, looks a lot less contemptible than the Europe that Claeys, Dillen, and Turner intend to keep Turkey from joining politically if not economically. Moreover, I doubt my friends in the Vlaams Belang (May their numbers increase!) actually believe that Western European states are more “democratic” than the current Turkish government. If so, why do VB leaders complain constantly (and with justification), that the Flemish nation and its spokesmen are being oppressed by the Belgian regime? Note the object of their criticism is generally considered by the US media to be an admirable practitioner of democracy (it goes without saying, of the multicultural, reaching-out kind). Do the Turks wish to bring criminal charges against those who accuse their ancestors of carrying out “genocide” against the Armenians? Then Claeys and Dillen should look at France, where it is a criminal offense even to suggest the opposite. I would also urge them to read my books on multiculturalism and the European Left for a picture of how far the suppression of “fascist” opinions and authors has gone in Europe. Again I couldn”t imagine that the stifling suppression of dissenting views could be any worse in Turkey than in France, Germany, England, Belgium, Holland, Sweden or Spain, all authorized EU democracies.
There is only one reason that I would hesitate to let Turkey into the EU. It would further open the floodgates to Third World, Islamic immigration from Southeastern Anatolia and from the slums of Istanbul. The results would be enhanced social problems for the Europeans”and even something far worse. A self-confident, anti-Western and fecund population would supplant a decayed, demoralized, and sterile European one, and gradually Europe would sink into the kind of society from whence the immigrants came, a situation that already exists in postcolonial Africa. The Vlaams Belang and Derek Turner know this but somehow believe that by tickling the vanity of disgusting European “democrats” they may succeed in getting them to keep this from happening for “democratic” reasons. In my view, this can”t work. It is too clever by half. European democracy is in fact culturally and socially suicidal. One can only bring change (if that is still possible) by telling the ugly truth. Europe is too sick (and perhaps fatally so) to deal with more diversity.
