All posts by Steve Stern

Europe has a Muslim problem (and I mean that in the best possible way)

Psychological Musings

The peoples of Europe, in creating an ever closer union among them, are resolved to share a peaceful future based on common values. Conscious of its spiritual and moral heritage, the Union is founded on the indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality …Human dignity is inviolable. It must be respected and protected. From the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

Europe has a Muslim problem, is something I’ve been thinking of ever since we got back from Europe, and have been afraid to say out loud. Europe is caught between its founding values and being drastically changed. The European Union may have started for economic reasons but common social values have become as important and those values were spelled out with the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997 and then put in concrete with the Charter of Fundamental Rights in 2000. Those values include a respect for human rights and the dignity of the human being. Those values demand that Europe accept the huge number of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa (refugees that were created, in good part, by previous European actions as well as the first world lifestyle that is polluting the atmosphere which has resulted in an increased desertification of these areas). 

The history of Europe is, in many ways, the history of Christianity.  As an aside, sort of, I originally wrote the first sentence the other way around. They are that intertwined. End aside. Every village, no matter how small, has a church and driving through the countryside, the first sight of a village is always the church steeple. Every city, no matter how sophisticated, has a cathedral. These churches and cathedrals are so important to the culture of Europe – France and Germany, at least – that there is even a special tax to maintain them. When we were in Schifferstadt – everywhere, well, in both Germany and France, at least – we were really aware of the church bells.  They start about seven in the morning, go on a morning frenzied binge shortly afterward, and ring every fifteen minutes throughout the day. They are marginally annoying. 

Now, in Schifferstadt, the new Muslim immigrants say that all that bell ringing is too much. I agree with them but the natives grew up with the bells and they like them, they are part of their national culture and heritage. If that weren’t enough, the Muslims want to be able to broadcast The Call to Prayer five times a day including dawn and at night, which is not what the natives want. 

Muslims made up about 5% of the population of Europe in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center and that is supposed to grow to about 10% by 2050 even if immigration stops; because the Europeans are older and the immigrants are having more babies per capita. The pressure to leave the Middle East and North Africa is only going to increase so the immigrant population will probably be much higher. These immigrants also want to be treated as humans, with dignity, freedom, and equality, after all, that is the core value of Europe, that is what makes Europe, Europe. But they are from wildly different cultures. Different religions, yes, but of more importance, different cultures. Their coming to Europe in big numbers will change Europe but keeping them out will change Europe even more. 

 

Un sacrilège*

Uncategorized

I made my first impression of France – or, more accurately, the French – in 1963. In Texas. It was not accurate.

I had been stationed at Ft. Bliss training in the HAWK (Homing All the Way Killer) missile system. In 1963, Ft. Bliss was the training center for HAWK and they trained all the NATO troops – including the French – plus the Japanese and Israelis.

As an aside, when I came back from Korea, I was assigned to a unit teaching the HAWK system to Germans. As an aside to the aside, I had a friend – probably not really a friend, a fellow E-5 sergeant that lived in a room near me – who was from North Dakota and spoke rudimentary German; he taught Israelis. End aside to the aside. We taught outside, in the desert at the Orogrande [Missile] Range, in southern New Mexico. I started in late April and it got hot, really hot by mid-afternoon. To get around the heat, we started classes at five in the morning and ended at one in the early afternoon, before the heat (then the Germans went back to Ft. Bliss and we hung around Orogrande pretty much doing nothing). We were already there, every morning when the Germans marched into the training area. I was in the Army duh – and HAWK was an Army system in the US military, but the Germans assigned it to the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force. The Luftwaffe wore grey fatigues with jackboots which had just been relegalized for the military (the Allies had banned them for the German military after the war because the jackboot was identified with the Nazis). I still remember the creepy feeling watching the Germans march into the park – that’s what we called it – in the darkness of the early morning twilight. They marched much closer together then we did – about 15″ apart while we marched at 30″ apart – dressed in field grey, wearing jackboots, singing Deutschland über alles as they marched. End aside.

But that was later, in 1965, and I formed my French impression in the spring of 1963. The French, while still in NATO, had just started distancing themselves by building their own nuclear deterrent, and developing a separate command structure under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle. For reasons that seem incomprehensible now, we – we being the commanders and troops I saw every day in 1963 – thought this was treasonous and that the French people and troops were cowards at best and probably traitors to the cause of saving the world against communism. The funny thing is that, even then, I knew our constant war was mostly bogus but I signed on to the belief that the French were cowards for not slavishly following us (I do take comfort, however, in that I never even thought of calling French fries something else).

France, it turns out, left NATO in the 60s for the same reason they didn’t support the invasion of Iraq, they did not consider it in their self-interest. And there is an additional factor, France considers itself a world power and does not want to be in anyone’s shadow (and, with the US, everyone else is in the shadow). All one has to do is spend a couple hours walking through the Louvre to see why. Look at the sculpture, the paintings, the opulence: money flows towards power and art follows. For most of the last 1500 years, France, or proto-France, has been the center of Europe and that is hard to give up.

That is why I was shocked when I turned a corner in the Louvre and saw this: 

 

*with credit to Gail Cousins