One of the dumber arguments now currently raging in the aftermath of the Paris Muslim terror murders is whether the cell that attacked the City of Lights was “migrant” or “home-grown.” The answer, of course, is (to quote the Dowager Empress of Chappaqua) what difference, at this point, does it make?
“Of course it’s not accepted, but the factual point is that all the terrorists are basically migrants,” says Viktor Orbán. “The question is when they migrated to the European Union.”
In his office at the Hungarian parliament, the prime minister points toward the flowing Danube. In another era, an aide notes, the Turks followed this river into the heart of Europe. Behind Orbán hang two maps: One shows a short stretch of Hungary’s border with Croatia and another gives a panoramic view of the Balkans toward Turkey, from where hundreds of thousands of migrants have made their way north this year.
Thinking of Paris and its aftermath, the Hungarian leader posits an “overwhelming logical” connection between terrorism and the movement of Muslims into Europe — in the last few months as well as over recent decades — that to him and many Europeans is “an obvious fact,” whether “you like it or not.”“The majority of our leaders in the West deny the fact,” he adds. That denial of the “obvious” — which the Hungarian leader blames on political correctness run amok — destabilizes European politics by increasing “the gap between the leaders and the people.”
It’s difficult for Americans, who have been browbeaten for decades with the bromide that “we’re all immigrants,” to understand the difference between a European country and ours. European countries are not random collections of peoples united (until recently, anyway) by a common idea and fidelity to a constitution. Instead, they are historically evolved territories whose populations were (until recently) noteworthy for a distinct lack of “diversity.” This is the reason that, whenever the map of Europe has been redrawn, like are generally collected with like, to produce nations that are relatively homogeneous in ethnicity, language, culture, traditions, etc. Not all nation-states conformed to this model, of course, but enough did that we could (until recently) speak with confidence about the British, the French, the Germans and the Italians with a high degree of confidence that everybody knew what and whom we meant.
Linking terror to migration, Orbán says the “number one job” after Paris is “to defend the borders and to control who is coming in.” NATO and EU countries are “at war” with Islamists in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and, he says, “it’s quite logical” that “enemies” would seek to send fighters with migrants coming into Europe. “All of them present a security threat because we don’t know who they are. If you allow thousands or millions of unidentified persons into your house, the risk of … terrorism will significantly increase.”
Orbán says he doesn’t presume to tell Western European countries such as Belgium and France how to deal with the offspring of Muslim migrants who in his words belong to “parallel societies,” holding EU passports but rejecting Western values.But, as calls grow to rethink open borders — with five Western European countries holding preliminary talks about a more limited “mini-Schengen” zone (which wouldn’t include Hungary) — Orbán presents his hard line on frontiers as the best way to silence calls to suspend or bury Schengen.
Orban understands — as Hungarians are uniquely positioned to — the corruption that lies at the heart of modern liberalism, which has become the enemy of the democracies it pretends to serve:
“Liberalism in Europe now concentrates not on freedom but on political correctness. It became a sclerotic ideology. Dogmatic, may I say. The liberals are enemies of freedom” who, he says, want to limit Hungary’s freedom to make its choices as a nation-state.
“Liberalism became a mainstream politics. They fight against everybody who does not belong to the mainstream. But not to belong to the mainstream does not mean that you are not in favor of freedom. Just the opposite now.”
And that’s the key: the nation-state. As I’ve written before, the Unholy Left now wishes to remove the nation, and leave only the state. Because a goliath State is something they can understand, but not the soul of a country, which is their mortal enemy.
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