[review of The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017), by Douglas Murray]
Douglas Murray, a gifted chronicler, wrote this detailed and factual description of all the events and all the pro (and contra) intelligentsia engaged, since the end of Second World War up until 2017, in the creation of the present multicultural Western Europe, fragmented by nightmarish ethnic and religious divisions. As a Portuguese living in Lisbon, I can totally relate with it. It is a colloquial and easy reading, more like an insightful magazine article than an actual book. I enjoyed the philosophical and personal reflections of the author, almost a need for venting his despair at Europe's existential tiredness. Nevertheless, I didn't like his attempt to build an ethnic Pan-Europeanism across the globe, that doesn't exist, and his obsession with Christianity as the necessary back to basics, that it isn't. The sad conclusion is that the European settlement, drawn up from ancient Greece and Rome, catalysed by Christianity and refined by the Enlightenment, is an inheritance that Europeans in a matter of decades lost forever. In the end, Douglas Murray hits the bull's-eye: we, Indo-Europeans, are still here, all around us we have the wreckage, metaphorical and real, of all our dreams and aspirations, so what do we do next without a homeland?
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