Roberta Flack, years earlier, sang what has become the Europeans theme song “Killing Me Softly.” Despite the reported wilding spree of at least a thousand North African refugees who groped women at the New Year celebration in Cologne, Germany, despite allegations of two rapes, despite condemnation by Prime Minister Merkel, the mayor of the city has requested that women monitor their “code of conduct.” Apparently German authorities will contest to their last breath that tolerance dedication will not yield. This is the tolerance that kills, softly at first and violently in time.
What Germany represents is a continental death knell in which tolerance trumps personal safety and even survival. Compassion is the sentiment of the day. Yet it is hard to imagine inviting one million citizens into the country who are not assimilable with many on the public dole. This is one of those rare moments in history when people are paid for bad behavior.
Much of the chaos Germany now endures was predictable. After all, many Muslim men treat woman as inferior, mere objects for their sexual delectation. The Koran endorses the proposition that a woman has half the rights of a man in any legal proceeding. Nonetheless, the compassion crusade goes on.
Common sense would suggest that those who cannot assimilate should never be allowed in and those whose behavior violates German law should be thrown out. But that isn’t the conversation in political councils; it is the conversation on the street. The pols generally stand with Merkel.
Some in Europe realize this migration increase could be a cancer that metastasizes throughout the continent. Poland and Hungary have raised their red flags. However, the cells of radical Islam are already well ensconced throughout Europe. As I see it, unless governments engage in a coordinated surge to eliminate separate Islamic communities in Western Europe, the murders in Paris, the wilding in Cologne, the bombing in Madrid will increase and spread.
Security measures after an incident occurs are reinforced, but that is temporary. The new normal is to adopt a hands off policy. Separatism is the de facto status and may soon be the de jure option when places like Marseille resemble Tehran more than a French city. It is not merely the demographics that influence this outcome, but the complacency of governments and the naïve belief that in time conditions will revert to what once existed. In a real sense, the governments are complicit in their own demise. They fund the barbarians to act like barbarians, all the while congratulating themselves on their compassionate behavior. One wonders if Roman leaders conducted themselves the same way.
Suicide is difficult to watch. The U.S. is hardly a model of migrant resistance as events in San Bernardino suggest. Of course, there are nations that have insulated themselves from the threat, with Japan immediately coming to mind. But they are few. The compassion impulse is irresistible.
Western philosophy is now in thrall to tolerance. Heaven forfend if you maintain that some people and some cultures are superior. Even if a truth explodes before your very eyes, it must be denied. Lost in the morass of non-discrimination is a common sensical observation made by George Santayana among others. As he noted, the first obligation of the tolerant man is to be intolerant to intolerance. Samuel Taylor Coleridge made the same point when he argued “I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.”
Part of the western tradition from Voltaire to William James is a belief that ideas are not dogmatic. There may be a right and wrong, but the search for truth is never ending. Ms. Merkel has allowed herself to be captured by the Zeitgeist. Her good intentions are yet another pathway to hell. As Evelyn Waugh wrote “…barbarism is never finally defeated… Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of energy left over for experiments, however beneficent. Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on…”. Ms. Merkel has opened the prisons of the mind and Germany is experiencing the results.
Herbert London is President of the London Center for Policy Research, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of the book The Transformational Decade (University Press of America). You can read all of Herb London’s commentaries at www.londoncenter.org
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