The Strange Death of Europe

The Strange Death of Europe Immigration, Identity, Islam

The Strange Death of Europe is a highly personal account of a continent and culture caught in the act of suicide. Declining birth rates, mass immigration, and cultivated self-distrust and self-hatred have come together to make Europeans unable to argue for themselves and incapable of resisting their own comprehensive alteration as a society and an eventual end. This is not just an analysis of demographic and political realities, it is also an eyewitness account of a continent in self-destruct mode. It includes accounts based on travels across the entire continent, from the places where migrants land to the places they end up, from the people who pretend they want them to the places which cannot accept them. Murray takes a step back at each stage and looks at the bigger and deeper issues which lie behind a continent's possible demise, from an atmosphere of mass terror attacks to the steady erosion of our freedoms. The book addresses the disappointing failure of multiculturalism, Angela Merkel's U-turn on migration, the lack of repatriation, and the Western fixation on guilt. Murray travels to Berlin, Paris, Scandinavia, Lampedusa, and Greece to uncover the malaise at the very heart of the European culture, and to hear the stories of those who have arrived in Europe from far away. This sharp and incisive book ends up with two visions for a new Europe--one hopeful, one pessimistic--which paint a picture of Europe in crisis and offer a choice as to what, if anything, we can do next. But perhaps Spengler was right: "civilizations like humans are born, briefly flourish, decay, and die."
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Reviews

Photo of Bad Girl Bex
Bad Girl Bex@bad_girl_bex
5 stars
Oct 26, 2021

This is one of those books that I simultaneously found myself loving and recoiling from in horror, with every passing chapter. To say that I enjoyed this book seems weird, because the subject matter is so vile and depressing, in any other hands it would have been nothing but a despondent account of political failings, corruption, lies and human depravity that a lesser writer would have struggled to make one want to finish reading. But Douglas Murray manages to do the impossible with 'The Strange Death Of Europe': he both horrifies and engages the reader in equal measure, allowing one to follow him on his apocalyptic journey through our migrant-invaded continent, layering miserable tale upon tale, incredulous statistic upon statistic and terrifying observation upon observation, with his trademark wit, charm, eloquence and a critical eye for detail. This book is NOT a polemic. Many people may be put off by the very fact that it dares to deign to speak out about the migrant crisis in Europe, in anything less than a positive or blindly optimistic light. That unfortunately is thanks to the collusion between politicians, NGOs, activists and the media, who have all worked together to feed the people of Europe, a steady intake of propaganda, massaged statistics, guilt manipulation and outright lies, in order to make anyone who considers arguing the case against mass migration, self-censor or be in receipt of vicious castigation from others who have been trained to regard dissenters as racists, xenophobes and that most ill-informed falsehood of all, 'Islamophobic'. Murray does an excellent job of cataloguing the numerous calamitous decisions made by those supposedly elected to run our countries and serve the citizenry, in an incredibly readable prose style that is easily accessible to anyone wanting to learn more about the crisis we Europeans now find ourselves in. He manages to convey both compassion for those truly escaping war-torn climbs and failed regimes, whilst at the same time pointing out the exact reasons why there are better ways to deal with these individuals than importing them en masse; ways that benefit both the refugees and the nations they are scrambling to reach. His compassion is also quite rightly extended to those who live in the front-line towns and villages who have been forced to receive the unending stream of migrants – not refugees – who have descended upon their homelands with an indiscriminate sense of entitlement, refusing to integrate and forever changing a landscape they have had no part in creating. This book will anger the reader, but that's kind of the point. We as citizens in the most liberated, advanced nations on the planet, have gotten apathetic when it comes to truly understanding how good we have it and how important it is to try and preserve it. Our decadence begat a laziness towards civic responsibility and our willingness to try and escape the mistakes of the past have led us to make even greater mistakes regarding the continuation and preservation of our cultural heritage. In part, we have let ourselves be taken advantage of by the worst kind of destructive and domineering ideology. We have grown fat on the land and lain sluggish, basking in the greatness of our forefathers, whilst another culture has staked its claim on our lands. Do not allow the rantings of others who decry any criticism of our current migrant crisis, by trying to insinuate that you are the problem, to discourage you from reading this book; you are not some close minded, xenophobic racist who is standing in the way of progress. Do not be put off from reading this book by those who wish to call you names for caring about your countries and the state of the societies you are living in. If you are worried – and you should be – that all is not well in the state of Denmark/Sweden/France/Spain/Italy/Great Britain/Belgium/Germany et al, then you should read this book to find out how it is that we really got to this crisis point, who it was who made the landmark decisions to change your homelands without so much as asking you how you felt about it, and what if anything can be done to try and change what seems like a foregone conclusion. Douglas Murray has written a hugely important, well thought out, compassionate, accessible and fascinating book in 'The Strange Death Of Europe'. If it were up to me, I'd issue everyone in Europe with a copy of it. But even then I suppose, you can lead a person to knowledge, but you sure as hell can't make them think. Read it. Then give it to someone else to read too. Yes, it's THAT important.

Photo of Rebecca McCombe
Rebecca McCombe@beckiscool
5 stars
Oct 1, 2021

Just read it.

Photo of Luca Conti
Luca Conti@lucaconti
4 stars
Sep 10, 2021

A must read book

Photo of Tyler Stober
Tyler Stober@tyler
4 stars
Sep 1, 2022
Photo of Özgür Özer
Özgür Özer@zgrzr
5 stars
Jan 12, 2024
Photo of Alexander Lobov
Alexander Lobov@alexlobov
2 stars
Jun 10, 2022
Photo of Ieva Bekmane
Ieva Bekmane@aveish
4 stars
Dec 7, 2021
Photo of Theodora Pantelich
Theodora Pantelich@theodora13
5 stars
Oct 19, 2021

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