Stephen Holmes eviscerates reviews Christopher Caldwell‘s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:
What will be the consequences for Europe of decades of immigration, much of it from the Muslim world? In the eyes of Christopher Caldwell, a culturally conservative columnist at the Financial Times and an editor at the Weekly Standard, Europe is being remade, or rather unmade, from the ground up. As a result of the growing “nation of Islam” in Europe — including 5 million Muslims in France, 4 million in Germany, and 2 million in Great Britain — societies that used to be homogeneous and therefore coherent have become multicultural and internally divided.
But multiculturalism may be merely a halfway house. Echoing Edmund Burke in his title, Caldwell suggests that Europe is undergoing a “revolution” vaguely analogous to what happened in France in 1789. In his first letters on those events, Burke claimed to see a human society being dissolved and replaced by a world of monsters. This isn’t far from how Caldwell portrays Europe today. The monstrosities he parades before us include honor killings, “menacing North African slums,” anti-Semitic outrages, European police who “are petrified of Muslim men,” vandals rampaging through the banlieues, and young zealots marching through European streets with signs reading “Death to anyone who insults Islam!”
