On Civilizational Erasure
Civilizational erasure, as it relates to Europe, has been in the news lately, with the renewed and scaled up predations of Islam once again commanding center stage.
Islam’s resurgence has been a full century in the making, enabled in large part by Western ignorance and enforced taboos against discussing Islam’s highly relevant 1,400-year history of mass bloodshed and conquest.
Indeed, that history is whitewashed by Western academics, whether pseudo-historians like the late Edward Said or execrable and ahistorical oikophobes like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. Wikipedia, Google, and artificial intelligence also play outsized roles in the academic and historical whitewash.
The true history of Islam and what it has wrought through the centuries is not taught to Western schoolchildren. Modern Westerners have zero historical memory of Islam extending back more than a few decades, nor would they be the least bit curious if they were taught this hugely important but ignored and forgotten topic.
Armed instead with the fake morality of luxury beliefs about alleged Western racism or Islamophobia, and fetishizing whatever seems exotic, today’s decadent Westerner lacks the moral and physical courage that enabled his distant forebears to beat back the centuries-long Muslim onslaught, which finally ignited Europe’s Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment.
Regionally, and over the centuries, Muslims were known to Europeans by many names.
The Muslim Moors of North Africa (Berbers and Arabs) invaded, conquered, and occupied a vast swath of Western Europe, including present-day Portugal and Spain (for nearly 800 years), along with significant territory in France.
Al Andalusia is romanticized by fawning, servile Western scholars as a great flowering, with Muslims, Jews, and Christians all living side by side in multicultural harmony, singing Kumbaya together for almost a full millennium. To this day, many Spaniards and Hispanics bear Arabic names like Omar and Medina.
The reality behind this sanitized gossamer of ahistoricism was the opposite. Before they were finally evicted from Spain in 1492, the Moors brutally subjugated and pacified their European victims, murdering, taxing, and enslaving millions, with countless women and children taken as unwilling concubines and war booty.
It certainly was a Golden Age for Islam as Muslims appropriated European culture and knowledge for their own ends, but it was no Golden Age for its millions of dhimmified European victims.
In medieval Europe, the Muslims were also known as Saracens. The swarthy Saracens did not invade Europe in order to liberate or enlighten the supposedly backward, pale-skinned European Christians, but rather to rape, plunder, and appropriate Europe’s treasures and human capital. Europe’s so-called Dark and Middle Ages, its relative stagnation, had far more to do with unwanted and uninvited Islamic occupiers than with the fall of Rome or the Catholic Church and the Spanish Inquisition.
Muslim pirates (largely of the Barbary coast — modern Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Morocco) were also known as Corsairs. Well over one million Europeans were kidnapped and killed by the African Barbary Muslim pirates, with many surviving captives enslaved and sold at market. Their stories are untold today. Indeed, most Westerners have a benign mental image of the fun-loving Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, and their eyes glaze over if you try to explain the truth of the African Muslim pirates.
In Southeastern and Central Europe, Muslim Turkic invaders were known as Ottomans. The Ottoman Empire largely eviscerated present-day Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, and other Balkan nations, along with Hungary and parts of Poland and Austria in Central Europe.
The story in the Balkans is the same as elsewhere: conquest, displacement, wholesale slaughter, rape, widespread concubinage of women and children, little Christian boys kidnapped and converted into janissaries, and attempted genocide as Muslims annexed territory by the sword. Indeed, Christian Armenia endured a genocide at the hands of the Muslim Turks early in the 20th century, before Ataturk abolished the Caliphate.
Since the end of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, Islam has terrorized, murdered, and enslaved millions of Christians throughout Africa and the Middle East. It was too weak and divided to attack and terrorize the modern West — that is, until fairly recently, when Western governments began loudly encouraging and facilitating large-scale Muslim migration into Western countries. The exhaustively long list of terror attacks against the West in recent years needs no recounting; for both a historical and updated list, see here.
If you are a reader of European descent, it is almost certain you had a distant genetic ancestor who was killed, raped, or enslaved by Muslims somewhere in Europe. Muslim depredations against a nascent America’s merchant ships in the 1790s became the raison d’être for America’s navy.
Beyond Europe, in what historian Will Durant labeled the bloodiest chapter in human history, the Mughal empire (Mongolian-Turkic Muslims of Central Asia) conquered and subdued the Indian subcontinent, slaughtering tens of millions of polytheistic Hindus.
With unmistakable relish, Western educators attack the British empire for its (comparatively tame) subsequent exploitation of the Indian subcontinent (while also bringing education and infrastructure and eliminating cultural barbarities like suttee), while completely ignoring the exponentially more destructive and deadly Muslim Mughal conquest and occupation of India. Muslim invaders were hardly known for their accurate record-keeping, so a full tally of the astronomical death toll in India and Europe wrought by the Mughals, Moors, Arabs, Ottomans, and others is beyond reach.
By contrast, the British colonizers who arrived later in India kept reasonably accurate records, recording censuses, including deaths by starvation, disease, rebellion, droughts, cyclones, and the like, all of which gives us a better guesstimate of the suffering in India under British rule.
Returning to the theme of civilizational erasure, sadly, that horse left the barn in Western Europe. Nations in Central and Eastern Europe such as Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Czechia (the Visegrád Four) still have a fighting chance to resist the crescent tide that has swept away Western Europe — but only if they keep their borders completely closed to Muslims and eventually extricate themselves from the clutches of the European Union.
Many Christmas markets in Europe are now closed due to “uncontrolled vehicles” and related Islamist threats while church bells and caroling fall silent in order to avoid offending Muslims. Meanwhile, the Muslim muezzin sounds triumphantly throughout Western Europe and even in American cities of the Upper Midwest. Islamic supremacism is on the march, its triumphalism augmented by its alliance with Western progressives who denounce any reminders of Christianity, including celebrations of Christmas.
Burn a Koran or post a meme mocking Islam, and go to prison for a hate crime. Burn a Bible, and hey, you’re bravely speaking truth to power. Citizens of the West all know the drill by now.
Will the governments of the Anglosphere learn their lesson from the Western European canary that dropped dead in the coal mine? Events in locales as varied as Minnesota and the United Kingdom (it appears as if all of Albion is bent over and grabbing its ankles, undergoing a government cavity search) suggest that the answer is probably no.
To paraphrase the otherwise cartoonish James Carville, it’s the demography, stupid.
The brothers Todd and Erik Gregory are previous contributors to American Thinker.
