Europe Is Dying

Richard Salbato 12-05-2007

I just returned from a week in Florence and Rome. Trying to keep up with my daughter and grandchildren was a chore for this old man but it was great to take them to the tomb of Peter and teach them the history of the tomb and the Basilica. The reason for the trip was to register my granddaughter into an art school in Florence and to show them the great art of Europe. In this we probably saw all the originals of Michelangelo, who she wants to be like: the pieta and dome at St. Peter’s, the Sistine Chapel, and in Florence, his first painting, his David, the tomb sculptures, and other un-finished works.

Although going to the art museums of Rome and Florence was important for art education, we also managed to have some good religious education by seeing the tomb of Peter and the other popes including John Paul II. I taught the history of St. Peter’s tomb and the history of Saint Peter’s Basilica. We had Mass inside by the main altar. Although I have been twice to Rome and lived there for over four months, there are a lot of changes today. If you have not been to the Vatican you will be surprised at how many check points you will find where you have to go through metal detectors and searches. Unlike before you cannot even get close to the high altar now.

The Euro

Another thing I noted as different was the cost of things. This is not just because of the dollar exchange but in the 20 years since I was in Italy, the costs of everyday things are unbelievable. To understand this you need to compare apples to apples. For the average Italian, one hour worth work will buy only 25% of what one hour worth of work will buy in the United States. It takes three hours of work to buy a cheap meal in a restaurant without a drink of any kind. An hour of work will by a half gallon of gas for your car.

Of course you will notice the small cars. I think one out of three cars in Rome is the Smart car, and these are no bigger than a motorbike. The other cars are all very small also, but there are two reasons, the price of gas and there simply are no parking spaces. In Florence you cannot even go to the city unless you have a parking permit that you have to pay monthly for and that does not guarantee you can find parking. Same is true in Rome. If you do not get 40 miles to the gallon, you had better not drive because 40 miles will cost you 7 Euros.

All this has happened since Italy switched to the Euro and opened is borders to Eastern European Immigrants. The plan was to equalize wages throughout Europe by having the richer countries poor money into the poorer ones and open up free trade. But this did not happen. Massive amounts of products are pouring into Western Europe from Eastern Europe, China and even America, which has caused Western European companies a huge problem competing for the business. Italian companies have two choices, lay off people or lower wages and they are doing both.

Unlike Supply Side Economics (make a bigger pie), Italy taxes people so high by promising everyone everything; that these same people have nothing left to live on. What Italy should do is create an atmosphere that creates jobs, because until someone does something, nothing happens. Most Socialist Governments of Europe are now trying to get away from it before they go broke.

Italy needs to create jobs. One of the best ways to do this is to cut taxes on companies, cut red tape for business, and build the infrastructure that makes jobs easy: roads, railroads, parking, utility systems, water projects, ports and airports. But Italy (and the other European Countries) has not done this. Instead they have overlooked their own people and instead relied on massive immigration of cheap labor to increase the tax base as it declines from the skilled work force. This massive immigration has greatly harmed the cost of living for the native Italian.

One family I talked with (husband and wife with one child) spends 1000 Euros a month for a one bedroom low class apartment. Both the husband and wife work in good jobs and yet both together do not make 1700 Euros per month. I talked with a waitress about wages in Europe and we used a ditch-digger as an example. She said it would take one hour’s wages to by a MacDonald hamburger in Italy.

Now, I understand that this is common all over Europe because I lived in Portugal from the time before the Euro until after when the cost of living was just too high for me to stay there. I’m not sure about Italy because they don’t keep these stats, but in France, Germany, Portugal and Spain, more natives are leaving for Australia, New Zealand, Canada and America, then immigrants are entering into these countries, making the populations go down hill at a drastic rate. Today you will find no new housing construction anywhere in main land Europe because of the decline in population.

Immigration

The biggest complaint of Italians is the immigration from the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The do not complain about the legal immigrants, but about the illegal immigrants. You do not need an ID to cross the border anymore but you do need a Work Card or Visa to get a job in Western Europe. So Romanians and Albanians come to Italy and simply do not work. They enter into crime or illegal occupations like peddling or selling smuggled goods.

Every day in the papers of Italy you can read things like the following: “A girl verbally insulted and then killed by a Slavic-speaking person who used the tip of an umbrella as a murder weapon.”, “Dozens of villas assaulted by a mix of Morroccans, Romanians and Albanians in northern Italy.”, “Shop owners murdered at random.”

This is but a part of the very long list of criminal events Italians learn about on an almost daily basis when they turn over the pages of newspapers or watch the morning and evening news. The common thread linking these crimes is the fact that all of the perpetrators were in Italy illegally.

In some ways, Italians were used to all this, apparently even resigned to living with illegal aliens’ crimes. Those unfamiliar with this country's complex mentality wonder why it is that no Italian government has ever taken serious steps against the illegal aliens.

The main answer lies in the political parties' thirst for votes from them. A secondary answer is the permissiveness generated by the fear of being accused of intolerance or, even worse, racism.

No one dares to suggest that at least 40% of prison inmates are not Italians.

”Open borders for everyone” has been the official policy followed by all kinds of governments, from left to center to right for more than a decade. While the previous government somehow attempted to put an end to the massive flow of undocumented people into the nation through the "Bossi-Fini law" (named after two ministers of the then Berlusconi cabinet), the Left's electoral program stated that one of its priorities (yes, priorities) was to eliminate that only partially successful legislation.

About 200 illegals are flooding the south-western coasts of the island of Sardinia almost every week, coming mainly from Algeria and Morocco. All claim to be fleeing poverty and persecution, but nobody explains how come they can afford paying up to $6000 to smugglers in order to come to here. I don't know of any poor of this world who can afford to pay such sums.

Authorities are now complaining about the lack of adequate means to host these people in over-crowded temporary migrant holding centers and alerted about radical Islamic infiltration.

For years, Italians have been always told the old lie according to which “our economy owes foreigners so much.” Really? Ignoring public opinion at home, Prodi was the only European chief of government to allow Romanian citizens to enter Italy without visas.

With State authorities failing to defend scared Italian citizens, local governors started taking matters into their own hands. The center-left wing mayor of Florence risked losing communist support for imposing fines on unlicensed car window cleaners, after drivers complained about harassment and veiled threats.

Padua's leftist municipality built a fence to isolate groups of drug traffickers from a residential area.

"Those who have no work and housing permit aren't welcome and are urged to leave our town." You need to have guts to say these things in Italy.

But he has good reason to say these things. There are Indian, Chinese and Romanian restaurants in Italy with prices that Italians cannot compete with. On the side walks you find Chinese selling imitation Italian shoes for 75% less than real Italian shoes. On every corner illegal immigrants are selling illegal products at drastically reduced prices, making it impossible for the local Italians to compete.

One paper said: “Italy's likely to become a Third World, Muslim country in the not so distant future.”

The Euro Will Not Last

To understand the Euro you have to understand that it is a non-government currency backed by nothing, not even a constitution. Although the European Union has tried for 15 years to create a Central European Government, it has failed to ratify the constitution. Just recently it has agreed to a “Treaty System” instead of a Constitutional Central Government System”. This means the Euro is backed by a Treaty that anyone can opt out of. They have kept the Euro high by keeping the interest rates high, limiting debt and forcing free trade. Looking for high interest rates, foreigners invest in Euros, but this also makes it even harder for European companies to sell goods or to borrow money to expand. Many are moving out of Europe and building plants in other countries.

If any of these countries backs off the Euro, the entire system will fail. The political parties of several countries are now threatening to dump the Euro: Poland, Holland, Portugal and Italy. Since England never accepted the Euro and it is harming the less developed countries, I do not see the Euro lasting. Even the falling dollar is harming Europe more than America. The dollar is based on true economics of the market place and the Euro is not.

Europe Is Dying

The German author Henryk M. Broder recently told the Dutch Newspaper "DeVolkskrant" that young Europeans who love Freedom, better emigrate out of Europe. “Europe as we know it will not exist twenty years from now.”

While sitting on a terrace in Berlin , Broder pointed to the other customers and the passers-by and said, "We are watching the world of yesterday."

Europe is turning Muslim. Broder is sixty years old and so he is not going to emigrate. "I am too old," he said. However, he urged young people to get out and "move to Australia or New Zealand. That is the only option they have if they want to avoid the plagues that will turn the old continent uninhabitable."

Many Germans and Dutch, apparently, did not wait for Broder's advice. The number of emigrants leaving the Netherlands and Germany has already surpassed the number of immigrants moving in. One does not have to be prophetic to predict, like Henryk Broder, that Europe is becoming Islamic.

Just consider the demographics.

- The number of Muslims in Contemporary Europe is estimated to be 50 million.
- It is expected to double in twenty years. By 2025, 1/3ed of All European children will be born to Muslim families.
- Today Mohammed is already the most popular name for newborn boys in Brussels , Amsterdam, Rotterdam , and other major European cities.

Broder is convinced that the Europeans are not willing to oppose Islamization. "The dominant ethos," he told De Volkskrant, "is perfectly voiced by the stupid blonde woman author with whom I recently debated.

She said that it is sometimes better to let yourself be raped than to risk serious injuries while resisting. She said it is sometimes better to avoid fighting than run the risk of death."

In a recent Op-Ed piece in the Brussels newspaper De Standaard, the Dutch(gay and self-declared "humanist") author Oscar Van Den Boogaard refers to Broder's interview. Van den Boogaard says that to him coping with the islamization of Europe is like "a process of mourning." He is overwhelmed by a "feeling of sadness."

"I am not a Warrior," he says, "but who is? I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it."

“Consider that in all of Europe no one under the age of 65 has picked up arms in defense of their country. That task has been borne by the United States since Hitler surrendered in 1945.”

As Tom Bethell wrote in this month's American Spectator: "Just at the most basic level of demography, the secular-humanist option is not working." But there is more to it than the fact that non-religious people tend not to have as many children as religious people, because many of them prefer to "enjoy" freedom rather than renounce it for the sake of children.

“Secularists, it seems to me, are also less keen on fighting. Since they do not believe in an afterlife, this life is the only thing they have to lose. Hence they will rather accept submission than fight. Like the German feminist Broder referred to, they prefer to be raped than to resist.”

"If faith collapses, civilization goes with it," says Bethell. That is the real cause of the closing of civilization in Europe. Islamization is simply the consequence. The very word Islam means "submission" and the secularists have submitted already. Many Europeans have already become Muslims, though they do not realize it or do not want to admit it.

Some of the people I meet in the U. S. are particularly worried about the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. They are correct when they fear that anti-Semitism is also on the rise among non-immigrant Europeans. The latter hate people with a fighting spirit, Jews and Americans. Contemporary Anti-Semitism in Europe (at least when coming from native Europeans) is related to anti-Americanism, the fear they might have to fight to protect themselves.

People (who are not prepared to resist and are eager to submit) hate others who do not want to submit and are prepared to fight. They hate them because they are afraid that the latter will endanger their lives as well. In their view everyone must submit.

This is why they have come to hate Israel and America so much, and the small band of European "Islamophobes" who dare to talk about what they see happening around them. West Europeans have to choose between submission (Islam) or death. I fear, like Broder, that they have chosen submission - just like in former days when they preferred to be Red rather than dead.

Europeans apparently never read John Stuart Mill:

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing is worth a war, is worse."

"A man who has nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance at being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

America Will Go It Alone

America is facing this life-and-death challenge, says Steyn, (author of America Alone ), because of the Western world's demographic decline; the unsustainability of the welfare state in Europe (as well as in the United States, Canada, and Australia); and the apparent exhaustion of Western civilization.

Steyn's Book, “America Alone” calls on us to summon the will to fight this great struggle for Western civilization. In America Alone, Mark Steyn provides an enlightening primer to just how bad things are likely to get, and what we must do now to ensure that our children and grandchildren live in the bright light of freedom.

Read in this book why Islamic jihad has exploded across the world since 1970, why the threats that the world faces today should be taken much more seriously than the environmental scare-mongering that has been going on since the 60s (and, thanks to Al Gore, continues), the fact that Islam is a religion, not a race or nationality (as it is commonly portrayed in the West) -- and an explicitly political religion at that, why the liberal talk of finding the "root causes" of terrorism in the errors and excesses of Western foreign policy is so wrongheaded, correlation between the structural weaknesses of the social-democratic state and the rise of a globalized Islam, why Libya's Colonel Qaddafi is probably correct when he says that "there are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe -- without swords, without guns, without conquests", How the willingness to subordinate individual liberty to the primacy of society -- as expressed by Nazism, Communism, and more -- has blighted Europe for over a century, how the terrorist attacks in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 -- along with other events such as the murder of Theo van Gogh -- were the opening shots of a European civil war, the little-noticed reason why America's European "allies" failed to grasp the significance of September 11, how mosques in the West serve as recruiters for the jihad and play an important role in ideological subordination and cell discipline, why the Spanish government was so eager to appease the jihad terrorists after the Madrid bombings of March 2004.

The principal Saudi export is Islamic jihad ideology and our oil money bankrolls its spread.

We promote democracies throughout the world, and that is good but it often fails because without a good constitution that guarantees individual rights and the common good, democracy can be just an immoral or religious majority rule. I would rather have a king like in Jordan with freedom of religion and human rights, than a Theocratic Democracy.

Americans and others who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society need to understand that the life we've led since 1945 in the Western world is very rare in human history and will not last. As Our Lady of America said, we will save the world because the rest of the world is sleeping and failing. So face it, we are going alone because Europe is dying.