This is a brilliant and disturbing book.  Its opening sentence is “Europe is doomed.”  If you think that this is simply colorful rhetoric, read on.  Hasta la Vista Europe is not alarmist; it is alarming, making its case in great detail ranging over many issues and countries.  The pseudonymous author represents a number of researchers who have read many news reports and viewed many videotapes, offering their own graphic and incontestable angles on reality.  “The big story is about a mega-crisis, and not about us.  In line with that, we wrote the final version with a one-author voice.”  Earlier chapters are broadly thematic, while the bulk of the book describes the experience of 51 countries, ranging from Albania to Vatican City, with migrants.  The authors’ approach is consistent throughout, their focus held directly on Islamic migration.

The book deals candidly and severely with issues pertaining to Muslim migrants, including child brides and polygamy, gay rights, sharia, the financial gains that patriarchy realizes through its control of women, no-go zones for the police and security problems for ambulance personnel, and the official hijacking of unemployment figures.  Behind these, “Col. Richmond” perceives a single, indigenous issue: the problem of “the old-fashioned-controlled-media,” the “one main fountain of spin [from which] all the major media players drink heavily,” and which presents a slanted and biased view of the migrant crisis now engulfing Europe.  The media’s most important distortion, “Richmond” believes, is their deliberate blurring of the terms migrant and refugee, the distinctions between which they deliberately ignore—unlike Tony Abbott, former prime minister of Australia and the only man to have achieved a clear victory over the migrant problem, who said in a recent speech in Westminster that, while Australia’s “moral obligation is to receive people fleeing for their lives,” she has no duty “to provide permanent residency to anyone and everyone who would rather live in a prosperous Western country than [in] their own.”

That is the crux of the general immigration debate.  You will not see it presented by the mainstream media.

Hence the dishonest reportage.  Take the Calais “jungle,” lately assessed as harboring 6,000 people before the French authorities tardily moved them on.  The BBC routinely referred to it inhabitants as “desperate.”  But how so?  They were perfectly safe in a great, civilized, and orderly country, facing no danger unless they went walking along train tracks or dodging under trucks in their illegal attempts to reach England.  However one views that ambition, it was owing to simple desire rather than to “desperation.”  Again, while the TV cameras never fail to spot women and children, the great bulk of the migrants—70 to 80 percent—are young, male, and in excellent physical condition.  Many are also in receipt of adequate funds.  If they can come ashore on the beaches of Europe and establish a bridgehead there, sooner or later they will be able to claim family rights and bring in their relatives who, according to reasonable estimates, range from four to eight per migrant.

Here are some particulars, country by country, of the authors’ findings.

Belgium, with the Netherlands, leads in a Taylor & Francis Group study of migrant-on-migrant crime: Instances of sexual violence, about 20 percent of which involved multiple rapes and even gang rapes, are said to be common in the migrant communities.  The authorities have been most reluctant to enforce the law: On January 10, three Syrian refugee boys (12 and 13 years of age) boarded a train from Brussels to Tournai and raped a young woman.  Other passengers heard the woman’s screams and intervened to save her.  When the police arrived, they let the criminal youngsters off: “[N]ot making a big deal of migrant violence is in vogue in Europe right now.”

Greece has become, since 2010, “the Mexico of Europe,” a major point of entry for illegal aliens.  The U.N. estimated that 50,000 of them showed up in August 2015 alone.  As a result, once-popular tourist destinations like Kos and Lesvos have become hellholes, their tourist trade ruined.  Since Greece cannot handle people in these numbers, she passed the migrants on to Macedonia—which is not in the E.U.—where the authorities erected razor-wire fences along the border.  (Hungary erected barbed-wire fencing in September 2015, after Prime Minister Orbán spoke in defense of his country’s Christian heritage.  The former Soviet satellites have uniformly rejected orders from Berlin on migrant quotas.  Naturally, Orbán was vilified in the Western media, but came up with this interesting thought: “Liberalism today no longer stands up for freedom, but for political correctness—which is the opposite of freedom.”)

Though Germany has long been keen to welcome immigrants, especially “qualified labour,” at the end of October 2015 the German Federal Employment Agency reported that 81 percent of the recently arrived refugees and migrants had no formal qualifications, and that a large number were uneducated and illiterate.  Migrant shelters and camps now see a great deal of violence, which the German Police Union chief describes as “proper power struggles between different groups who have different ethnic and religious backgrounds.”  The authorities report “only a fraction” of the violence happening, “in order not to unnecessarily terrify the public.”  The German healthcare system is now under grave pressure, partly as a result of rare diseases being imported into the country.  Rapes are on the rise.  Against this backdrop, Angela Merkel issued her notorious invitation of September 2015 to a million Syrians to come to Germany.  They did, with numberless legions to follow.  She thus drenched Europe’s funeral pyre with kerosene.  In respect of all this, two questions arise.  First, who is a Syrian?  Many asylum-seekers have no papers of any kind.  Might they rather come from Iraq, Eritrea, or Somalia?  And second, what is a child?  Can a well-setup lad really be considered such?  The sheer logistical challenges are daunting enough, even for Germany’s proved powers of organization.  And all of this was before New Year’s Eve, when Cologne witnessed a mass grope-in.

Sweden offers the most painful of all examples.  In high-mindedness she led the world, and thus descended into hubris.  Sweden imposed multiculturalism as state doctrine on her people.  And here, in 77 pages, “Col. Richmond” lays out the self-destruction of the country, which has taken in more migrants per capita than any other.  Sweden’s record is one of criminality, deceit, and betrayal of the native population.  Consequently, the country has the highest per-capita rape figures of any country except Lesotho.  Regarding the quintessential Swedish official attitude, I am content to quote Mona Sahlin, past leader of the Social Democrat Party:

[W]e should not look at the flaws of so-called foreign Swedes as a problem.  Instead it is we, the white majority, which is so numerous.  We have to understand that we are the problem, and that we must change our ways.

The U.K. and the U.S. come last in Col. Richmond’s accounting: “In 2013, more than 25% of UK prisoners were ethnic minorities.”  Muslims, who made up 4 percent of the U.K.’s general population aged 15 and over, accounted for over 13 percent of the prison population.  The penchant for child and teenage sexual molestation demonstrated by such minorities is now well documented, the authorities having been goaded into action against behavior rampant in Pakistani communities and schools.  Britain seems now to be retreating somewhat from its long-term policy of appeasement toward well-entrenched Islamic institutions in the British Isles.  And America is waking up: Over half of state governors have said that they would not accept Syrian refugees, and the House of Representatives is considering a tighter screening process.  But the book’s final chapter, “2016. New Year. Same Old Story,” offers little that is, on balance, reassuring.  The authors’ investigation of Chancellor Merkel’s communist past carries the clear implication that the habit of party-line thinking still determines her thought.  She has now slewed a great nation into channels of behavior that threaten its successful past.

It is otiose to write of “the ironies of history” when history is effortlessly ironic all the time, yet this irony is freighted with meaning.  In the latter 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was commonly known, in a catchphrase of the diplomatic class, as “the sick man of Europe.”  That empire still outlasted the Romanov empire, and folded only weeks before the end of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg empires.  Today, Europe is the sick man of Europe.  And Turkey, heir to the Ottomans, is exacting toll from the E.U.—three- to six-billion euros’ worth—to take back from Europe those who have illegally entered the Continent via Turkey.  Truly, the Ottoman Empire strikes back.

And the prospects for the E.U.?  The last page of this book is given over to a striking passage from one of Donald Trump’s speeches: “I used to think that Angela Merkel was some sort of strong leader.  What Merkel has done in Europe is insane.”

The German people have had it, says Trump.  The European people have had it.  Everyone has had it.  Europe has lost control over its borders, and is losing control of its own civilization.  I can only add to that the resemblance Merkel bears to another monarch of legend, King Canute.

 

[Hasta la Vista Europe! What You’re Not Being Told About the Refugee Crisis and How It’s Destroying Europe, by Col. Walter T. Richmond (London: Aster House Press) 536 pp., $23.75]