Is Europe slumping towards the Middle Ages?

How might the town square of a random Western European city look a few decades from now?

| Updated: 27 October, 2023 2:47 pm IST
Europe’s descent is a consequence of a new phase of neo-colonialism.

How might the town square of a random Western European city look a few decades from now? With the eclectic mix of architectural delights, those fountains, statues, and gargoyles at building tops collecting cracks and moss while acting as a backdrop to non-licensed vendors with their carts selling anything from raw to cooked meat, and buyers in desert overalls shouting hard to drive a good bargain?

With the maintenance and cleaning crew gone, those fancy cobbled roads would, by then, accumulate enough muck to look like from the pages of the Dark Ages or from the sets of Game of Thrones. If imagination runs some more, one could throw in religious soldiers and morality inspectors, uncollected garbage, and execution grounds.

To round it up, we can also remind ourselves that Russian gas is a thing of the past, so there could be a fair chance of the people there looking up to the sun and chopped wood, as the guarantors of decent light and heat.

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There is an even chance of Europe experiencing – a few decades from now – a historic rerun of Rome after the pagan Romans; only this time, the rest of the world would witness it through social media and smartphones.

Of course, I am hopeful about an intervention – divine or otherwise – to arrest this descent. However, if the overall graph of European civilisation keeps plummeting in the current fashion, then it looks like a touch-and-go between Germany, Greece, Spain, or Italy.

To include Germany in that list would normally have called for stretching it, but with Merkel’s dream of absorbing the maximum number of Middle Eastern refugees coming true, all that was needed to initiate them to stumble towards the Dark Ages was a little pin-prick.

The USA blew up the Nord Stream, began pressurising the industries to shift across to the other shore of the Atlantic, and Merkel’s home, with its young Middle Eastern ‘workforce’ now looks like it is about to slump into a recession.

Those of us who are not sufficiently woke (do not include the German politicians in this category) know what happens when a pre-industrial, non-integrated / non-assimilated, and unemployed youth population is let loose in an ultra-soft, guilt ridden, post-industrial society.

And then again, that is not the point. The Arabization of Germany, or even of entire Europe – Eurabia is the pop term these days – apparently doesn’t matter. That the USA is probably orchestrating this, with EU leaders standing by – hands in their trouser pockets, is also not a point anymore.

The point is that this very descent of Europe into an anarcho-communist’s dream of a post-civilisational, protracted civil chaos could serve two advantages: it could help stabilise the Middle East, and it could help destabilise Russia.

Europe’s descent is a consequence of a new phase of neo-colonialism. Multiple essays – some by very good analysts – point out that in this game of access and control, there needs to be a dumping ground; this time it is Europe’s turn.

Access and control of what? Resources of course. When you see through the green energy and ESG bluster, you would realise that hydrocarbons are still fundamental for a huge chunk of the emergent economies. Oil and gas may or may not be a Western civilisational necessity anymore, but it sure is an important one for the emergent multipolar world. Maintaining a chokehold on that becomes crucial for the West. That would explain the renewed US interest in Sahel, the Middle East, and West Asia.

How does that impact European towns and cities? Why flood them with illegal immigrants? These Iraqis, Syrians, Afghans, Libyans, or Palestinians in Europe hide within them a large number of radicals who are a touch away from organised terrorism. Europe lacks the capability to integrate them. What explains this indifference?

Here, I borrow from the thinkers again. Some of them think that this could be America’s effort to clean out the Middle East. Push as many youths into faraway Europe as possible, in an effort to deplete the recruitment pool of Fatemiyoun, Hamas, AnsarAllah, Islamic Jihad, Badr Organization, Hezbollah – the many Islamist outfits that the West has no control over. This might be doubly advantageous in the long run. As these radicals spill all over, they would also move eastwards towards Russian borders.

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Though the ‘depleting the recruitment pool’ argument seems a little far-fetched personally, the idea of pumping radicals into Europe with the hope that they create border troubles for Russia does not. Russia has had historic issues in the Caucasus region; some of them still persist now, even after centuries.

With radical Chechens thriving in neighbouring Georgia, and with Ukraine reduced into a wasteland, these new arrivals would get the right physical and ideological setup required to mount a jihad against Russia. Flooding east Europe with Islamists in the medium-run could accomplish the semi-encirclement of Russia through a low-intensity and complex border conflict extending from Finland to Japan along the Black Sea region. A series of active border conflicts that stretch thousands of kilometres has the potential to drain even the mightiest of powers fairly effortlessly.

It appears that by the globalist neocon logic, a Europe that has been reduced to a zero-value, resource-depleted zone, housing peoples living off states’ largesse would at least have some utility while going down by serving as an irritant to Russia. All along, there would be serious efforts made to get the Middle East back into the American folds, with an expanded Israel, a moderate Saudi, and a weakened Iran. That seems to be the idea: expand Israel, moderate Saudi, and weaken Iran at the cost of Islamizing Europe – argue those good analysts.

The current Israel-Hamas war is a churner. Thousands of Muslim refugees, who never seek asylum in an Islamic nation by practice, would move to Europe in the near future. So would the Kurds when Turkey tightens the screws, as would potential refugees from Sahel, Bosnia, or Pakistan.

A very European love-affair with a strain of Abrahamic culture back in antiquity had destroyed a polytheistic, vibrant Greco-Roman civilisation; a civilisation now considered as one of the two pillars of modern Europe. And I find myself wondering “is this history repeating, or just rhyming?” as Europe looks primed for a fresh round of destruction armed with another monoculture.

Arindam Mukherjee is a geopolitical analyst and the author of JourneyDog Tales, The Puppeteer, and A Matter of Greed. 

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