An article in in Les 4 Vérités, dated April 12:

Europe is in complete moral collapse

By dint of practicing a relativism that no longer distinguishes between the executioner and the victim, democracy and dictatorship, or liberty and slavery, today’s Europe presents a pathetic spectacle.

We are heading toward an unprecedented demographic collapse. But what’s on everyone’s lips? The greenhouse effect and the prospects of a slowdown in or cessation of already wheezy economic growth. We are engaged in a world war. But what do people say about it? Given that this war doesn’t resemble previous wars, in that it is carried on in networks, relying on terrorism and intimidation, one denies its existence, one engages in preventive defeatism, one adopts the enemy’s language, one repeats his propaganda and tries to get chummy with him, while hoping for a little leniency.

The attacks in Madrid showed the manner in which Europe reacts when faced with Moslem violence: one lies down and one begs to the end to be saved while mumbling “peace, peace.” When some French journalists were taken hostage in Iraq, it took months, entering into a process of negotiation accompanied by gestures of appeasement to the kidnappers, and of the payment of a large ransom. Seeing that this was a lucrative activity, other kidnappers in the Near East, in Afghanistan, and in the Sahara have taken some Italians, Germans, and others and have obtained the expected sums.

The Prodi government even put pressure on Hamid Karzaï to free some Taliban murderers, because that was, in addition to money, what was required by those who had seized a man that Prodi wanted to liberate. The abduction of fifteen British sailors in the south of Iraq by a group of Iranian Khomeinites was the logical continuation of this. One doesn’t see why the régime of the mullahs would feel embarrassed.

It’s easy to capture Europeans, even if they’re members of the miliary (service personnel from a continent on the way to being euthanized are rarely dangerous), as it pays very well, it constitutes a means of exchange if one wants to get something or someone, and it can also pay for the luxury of humiliating those seized and using them as puppets for propaganda purposes. What am I saying? One can, pressing onward, go as far as to get European TV channels to submissively distribute the propaganda images.

I don’t know what concessions and base actions were necessary for the liberation of the fifteen sailors. What seems obvious is that there was a price to pay, and that this price went along with concessions whose full extent will be measured in the next few days. What seems again more obvious is that all European media acted as accomplices in broadcasting propaganda videos originating from Iranian television, and placed the declarations of Tony Blair, a political leader of a democratic country, on the same plane as those of the totalitarian thugs in Tehran.

What was vividly apparent was that the captured English sailors exhibited no shred of any dignity, since they agreed to tell lies they were asked to tell and to play the comedy they were asked to play. What was also more vividly apparent was that all of this will leave some traces that will result in devastating consequences to those who do not respect force and despise weakness.

European leaders protest that Europe is “civilized.” After having been the womb of 20th century totalitarianism, Europe now expresses its repentance by encumbering itself with masochism and self-destruction. Europe is today slowly becoming a doormat on which the barbarians of the 21st century are wiping their feet. The demographic collapse we find ourselves in is presumably irreversible because it is accompanied with a moral downfall. This is revolting. This is lamentable. I feel only pain for all those that watch what is happening with lucidity, and that wait, impotently, for the ruin of that which Europe could have supported as the noblest and that, soon, very likely won’t exist any more on this continent. The idea of liberty and human dignity was born in Europe. It died there once, between Nazism and Leninism. It is dying a second time and this time, it will probably be the last.