EUROPEAN CULTURE APOCALYPSE

Neglecting Cultural Assimilation.

What’s up! I’m back from my brief hiatus. I have been in Ghana for the past 6 weeks and I am enjoying my time here. I celebrated Eid, my mom’s 60th birthday, and got to see my sister after almost 7 years. It’s been absolutely wonderful to be very honest. Took me some time to re-settle but it’s been good. In the meantime, a lot has been happening! And I’m most excited about this post!

Every year, conservatives and secular people all around the world make pilgrimages to Europe to explore its beauty and culture. That’s self-evident. Partly because there are things in Europe that take your breath away. They give you goosebumps, make your hair stand. They fill you with a sense of awe. Our hearts beckon, and our souls long for beauty.

Beauty calls people to their higher being. And to make friends with beauty is to introduce yourself to one of the mysteries of life that make it worth living. A complex continental stretch of rich architecture, history, arts, and culture. Absolute breathtaking.

However, any trip to thousands of locations across Europe can spark a grievous fear.

For there to be a more cohesive societal identity, cultural assimilation is extremely important, especially for people coming from different backgrounds.

Assimilation is a very complex topic. In practice, assimilation often happens naturally as people adjust to a new place and their children grow up surrounded by a different culture, language, dress, food, etc. However, assimilation also has a very complicated insidious history.

Take the suburb of Saint-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris for example. Apparently, it is one of the central locations of French history and culture. To wander any part of Saint-Denis today is to see a district more resembling a typical Sub-Saharan ghetto. The market square resembles a ‘souk’ more than a traditional French square.

It has one of the highest criminal populations in Paris, France in general. If you visit any part of Saint-Denis, no part of it resembles France or French culture.

With a growing Muslim population as well, there are a number of mosques littered all around the perimeter. On Jummah, worshippers spill out onto the streets as a number of mosques are struggling to create larger facilities to meet the teeming demand.

Of course, if you mention Saint-Denis to anyone in the center of Paris, they grimace. They know it is there and try never to go to it. With the exception of the Stade de France, there is little reason to go anywhere near the area.

All efforts to social engineer this district in Paris have proved futile. Millions of Euros have already been invested in this particular district however it still counts for nothing. The government went as far as to build municipal offices in the area for state employees to work in however the employees who work in the area almost never live there. This is France’s immigration challenge summed up in one district.

The same phenomenon can be witnessed in many parts of France, all over. Traveling on the deep underground train, stopping infrequently and with long distances between stops, often feels like taking an underground train in a sub-Sahara African city; except there is none.

Most of the people there are black and they are making their way out of the suburbs. The same feeling will strike anybody traveling through certain towns in the north of England, or neighborhoods of Rotterdam, Amsterdam, or Brussels, where there are mostly Arabs and Pakistanis.

The places where the immigrants live look nothing like where the locals live.

Everyday awareness of this problem as well as an awareness of it going largely unsaid means that many Europeans view it as another dark concern. Which is that seeing these very large numbers of people and seeing them going about their very different lives, it might be the case that in the future there would be social friction if there aren’t any measures put in place to assimilate them.

Last month, we witnessed just the tip of the iceberg as some factions of the ‘French public’ decided to seize the law into their own hands. In their quest to voice out their concerns over the death of Nahel Merzouk, there was a 2-week rampage; looting and wreaking havoc on public and private properties. It was an absolute specter of violence disguised as a weaponized virtue.

The Nanterre shooting is definitely one of those symbolic moments that define the troubled relations between the French police and disaffected populations in the suburban estates.

The long nights of suburban rioting in 2005 have not been forgotten.

Hot weather, long evenings, and the end of the school term easily combined with a sense of righteous indignation to push more youth onto the street. However, most of these people probably do not fully understand the societal dynamics in the country they have probably been living in for the past 10 years. Neither do they want justice for the murdered teenager. It’s just weaponized virtue.

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.

(Joseph Stalin)

In many places all around the world, indigenous people and immigrants have been subjected to forced assimilation. Assimilation is also often inseparable from ideas about race, gender, religion, and economic status.

TURKEY’S EFFORTS

Over the past couple of years, the growing concern in continental Europe is catching up with Turkiye on both the European and Anatolian sides.

With Türkiye currently facing a massive immigration crisis as it took in about 5 million refugees from both Syria and Afghanistan, it certainly comes with some consequences. The hostile friction between the nationalist Turks and the ‘invaders’ heightened during the just-ended election in May where the opposition leader, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu weaponized this sentiment to rally his supporters behind him. He went on to lose the elections after the run-off regardless.

Take Taksim, a suburb of Istanbul, which is notoriously plagued with illegal settlers and immigrants. It is undisputedly one of the places with the highest illegal/crime rates in Turkiye. Ask any local about Taksim and watch them immediately have a grimy look on their face; a look as though they have just tasted something really distasteful.

Earlier this year, a good friend of mine, Malik passed by Istanbul for some business meetings with prospective clients. A few days before he departed, we booked an Airbnb in Taksim, just so he has a feel of the ‘other side’ of Istanbul- the side beyond the glam and rich cultural-historical city.

To put a little context to this, Malik is a very tough guy. 6 foot 4, highly conscientious, intelligent, well built, and muscular. There aren’t any physical masculine male characteristics he doesn’t tick.

On our way back to the apartment the second night, there was this crackhead who wanted to forcefully put small pellets of hard crack in his palms. For a brief moment, he stood aloof and utterly shocked. We both talked about it and laughed it off the same night.

The following day after we had prayed Jummah on the streets due to the overflow of people who couldn’t fit in the grand mosques, I watched him have a bleak look on his face.

Walking in the streets, he couldn’t believe the kind of things and sort of people he was seeing. He was having an epiphany; it was as though he was consciously coming to terms with reality about the gravity of the problem.

It is slowly altering the dynamics of a city, even as conservative as Istanbul.

Unlike Saint-Denis, Istanbul Municipality has somewhat been successful in socially re-engineering the place. Scores of hotels, government agencies, offices, work areas, recreational areas, restaurants, etc have sprung up around that side to reinvent its facade.

EUROCENTRIC BEAUTY

Probably you might have watched a 30-sec video from your favorite Tiktoker or travel guide telling how Paris or any other European city is mid or not worth the hype or travel.

I honestly think these claims are very misleading. Fact is, regardless of these problems arising in Europe and the developed world, they ever fall short of giving us breathtaking spectacles of beauty. Paris for instance, is terrifyingly beautiful. A city so beautiful even the greatest villain of the 20th Century admired it during the Nazi-Paris occupation in the early 1940’s.

I believe one of the greatest pleasures of this world is having the free will to tour Europe. Experiencing the arts, culture, architecture, cathedrals, market squares, music, and food is so satisfying. Some are terrifyingly beautiful. The kind of beauty that takes you through a series of complex emotions.

Personally, I don’t think any person can experience true beauty in its pure, undiluted form till they travel to Europe. Some cities like Florence, Paris, Milan, Rome, Budapest, Prague, Vienna, and Istanbul are the only places on earth you would visit, and can reliably see one of the most beautiful man-made things you have ever seen, every single day.

‘Beauty will save the world’

(Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

CONCLUSION

There will come a day when there will be far more radical extremists and terrorists from Europe due to a lack of proper decision-making, trying to be politically correct, or just assuming they know a particular demographic far better than others.

In my conclusion, at a point in the coming decades, France, England, Italy, Spain, Germany, and many other Western European countries will be swamped by mass immigration from the third world. The general catalyst for the migration is the growing disparity between the numbers of poverty-stricken people in the third world. What can be done about it?

In trying to honor their humanitarian sides by taking in this many migrants, many developed countries especially Europe would have to learn to assimilate people seeking refuge from all walks of life into these societies. Otherwise, it would be a recipe for chaos, mayhem and bedlam.

Because why would you want to build your castle on shifting sand?

---

If you enjoyed this piece, please SUBSCRIBE to my newsletter, and do not forget to share it with your friends and loved ones. Gracias!

---