- Bawer, Bruce.
While Europe Slept.
New York: Doubleday, 2006.
ISBN 0-385-51472-7.
-
In 1997, the author visited the Netherlands for the first time and
“thought I'd found the closest thing to heaven on earth”.
Not long thereafter, he left his native New York for Europe, where he
has lived ever since, most recently in Oslo, Norway. As an American
in Europe, he has identified and pointed out many of the things which
Europeans, whether out of politeness, deference to their ruling
elites, or a “what-me-worry?” willingness to defer the
apocalypse to their dwindling cohort of descendants, rarely speak of,
at least in the public arena.
As the author sees it, Europe is going down, the victim of
multiculturalism, disdain and guilt for their own Western
civilisation, and “tolerance for [the] intolerance” of a
fundamentalist Muslim immigrant population which, by its greater
fertility, “fetching marriages”, and family
reunification, may result in Muslim majorities in one or more European
countries by mid-century.
This is a book which may open the eyes of U.S. readers who haven't
spent much time in Europe to just how societally-suicidal many of
the mainstream doctrines of Europe's ruling elites are, and how
wide the gap is between this establishment (which is a genuine
cultural phenomenon in Europe, encompassing academia, media, and
the ruling class, far more so than in the U.S.) and the population,
who are increasingly disenfranchised by the profoundly anti-democratic
commissars of the odious
European Union.
But this is, however, an unsatisfying book. The author,
who has won several awards and been published in prestigious
venues, seems more at home with essays than the long form.
The book reads like a feature article from The New Yorker
which grew to book length without revision or editorial input.
The 237 page text is split into just three chapters, putatively
chronologically arranged but, in fact, rambling all over the place,
each mixing the author's anecdotal observations with stories from
secondary sources, none of which are cited, neither in foot- or
end-notes, nor in a bibliography.
If you're interested in these issues (and in the survival
of Western civilisation and Enlightenment values), you'll get a
better picture of the situation in Europe from Claire Berlinski's
Menace
in Europe (July 2006).
As a narrative of the experience of a contemporary
American in Europe, or as an assessment of the cultural gap between
Western (and particularly Northern) Europe and the U.S., this book may
be useful for those who haven't experienced these cultures for
themselves, but readers should not over-generalise the author's
largely anecdotal reporting in a limited number of countries to
Europe as a whole.
June 2007 