SPENGLER
When you forget why you hanged
yourself
By Spengler
Frits Bolkestein reminds me of the fellow with
Alzheimer's who decides to commit suicide. As he kicks
away the chair, he forgets why he has hanged himself,
and muses, "This is appalling! What am I doing hanging
here?"
Bolkestein, of course, is the newly
notorious member of the European Commission who warned
that Europe would implode like the Austro-Hungarian
Empire if Turkey were admitted into the European Union.
He discerns that he is dangling at the end of a noose;
as Professor Bernard Lewis told Die Welt on July 28,
Europe will be Islamic no later than the end of the
present century. But he cannot remember why, and
Europe's absorption into the Maghreb will continue no
matter what he does or says.
Long before
Professor Lewis's interview, this writer among others
(eg Alain Besancon and Baat Ye'or) pointed to Europe's
demographic implosion as the source of its policy in the
Middle East (Why Europe chooses
extinction, July 8, 2003;
Spain, and why radical Islam can
win, March 16, 2004).
Bolkestein, however, made Lewis's Die Welt interview the
subject of scandal in his September 6 speech before the
University of Leiden. I translate from his German
text:
Increasing numbers of
European countries are becoming multi-ethnic as a
consequence of continually growing Islamic
communities. In some major cities the majority of
residents will be of non-European origin. In addition,
the population of Europe is beginning to age, while
the population of North Africa and the Middle East is
growing rapidly ... Bernard Lewis maintains: "Europe
will become part of the Arab West, the Maghreb;
immigration and demographic point in this direction."
I do not know if this will happen, but if he turns out
to be correct, the relief of Vienna [from the Turkish
besiegers] will have been in vain ...The USA remains
young and dynamic ... the USA will remain the only
superpower. China will become an economic giant.
Europe will be Islamicized. Bolkestein referred to the Austro-Hungarian
monarchy before 1914, in which 8 million German-speakers
sought to maintain sway over 20 million Slavs. Eastern
immigration into the Hapsburg domains, he observed,
parallels Muslim immigration into the European Community
today. "Unfortunately, the development of this country
was interrupted by the catastrophe of the First World
War," he concluded.
The statement bespeaks a
kind of cultural Alzheimer's, for it was the
Austro-Hungarian Empire that bred World War I. Precisely
because its 8 million Germans could not cede power to
its 20 million Slavs, agitation among Slavs produced the
Serbian terrorists who murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand
in 1914. It stood ready for decades to tear itself
apart. Bolkestein cites Robert Musil, the great Austrian
author of The Man Without Qualities, for a
characterization of the Hapsburg monarchy. Musil
invariably referred to his country as "Kakania", as in
"kaka" (a pun on the German pronunciation of the term
"imperial-royal").
Austria's unease was a
"paradox", muses Bolkestein, "because the economic
situation was relatively good. Vienna also flourished
culturally with Franz Liszt, Richard Strauss, Johannes
Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Richard Wagner and so many
others." Why, oh why, am I here hanging?
The
trouble is that elements of this "flourishing" culture
were toadstools that poisoned the ground forever. As a
matter of fact, Richard Wagner spent little time in
Vienna, where Brahms' circle despised him. Vienna had a
Wagner Society, and Wagner was well received at its 1872
concert, but otherwise spent little time in the Hapsburg
capital. This may seem a small quibble, but Wagner was
just the fellow to explain to Bolkestein why all these
terrible things are happening (see The 'Ring' and the remnants of the
West, January 11, 2003).
Europe first heard a formal invitation to
suicide in 1870, at the premiere of Wagner's Die
Walkuere, the second part of the Ring
tetralogy. Its protagonist, the doomed god Wotan,
uttered the lines that might serve as Europe's epitaph:
"Let everything that I have built collapse! I still want
only one thing: The end! The end!" Wotan is the first
protagonist in European literature to pronounce a
collective death wish.
Wagner was the definitive
personality of senescent European culture. He was the
first artist to state without hesitation that the old
order of Church and empire had rotted past repair, and
urged in its stead absolute freedom of the will. By
merging Teutonic paganism with Arthur Schopenhauer's
mock-Oriental pessimism, Wagner touched the nerve of his
time more forcefully than any artist before or since.
In The Ring of the Nibelungs, the Norse
god Wotan rules by laws to which he himself is bound. He
needs the giants (the proletariat) to create the great
fortress of Valhalla, and to pay them, he must steals
the treasure of the Nibelungs (the capitalists, with
some anti-Semitic coloration). This ring, the power to
create wealth and rule the world, is the poisonous power
of capitalism, dissolving all the bonds of tradition. It
is cursed and eventually kills its master. Once Wotan
appreciates that even he, the god, is not free, he
simply wants the world to come to an end, as he explains
in the above-cited outburst.
All the little
Wotans of Europe - Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, Romano - met
their common end in World War I. Of all the elements of
the old order on which Wagner wished annihilation, the
Hapsburg monarchy stood first on the list. The
Austro-Hungarian Empire - Bolkestein's historical
parallel for the European Community - was the last
remnant of the Holy Roman Empire, and the living
exemplar of the old order Wagner despised. As I wrote
under the rubric Why Europe chooses
extinction:
Siegfried triumphed over
Christ during World War I. No shred of credibility was
left in the Christian idea of souls called out of the
nations for salvation beyond the grave. In 1914
Europe's soldiers still fought under the illusion of a
God that favored their nation. Germany fought World
War II under the banner of revived paganism. For
today's Europeans, there is no consolation, neither
the old pagan continuity of national culture, nor the
Christian continuity into the
hereafter. Europe has
sunk so profoundly into self-parody that an educated man
like Bolkestein can be forgiven for the historian's
equivalent of Alzheimer's. Even Richard Wagner, the
well-poisoner of European culture, would be aghast at
how modern Europe treats his legacy. Alone among
composers, Wagner enjoyed a summer festival dedicated
exclusively to the performance of his works in a theater
of his own design, still managed by his descendants in
the Bavarian town of Bayreuth. His widow Cosima, the
daughter of Franz Liszt, befriended Adolf Hitler at the
outset of his political career.
Some combination
of guilt and cupidity has led the Wagner family to hire
a series of manic nihilists from the alternative culture
milieu to direct his operas, eg the "performance artist"
Christoph Schlingensief, responsible for a new
production last summer at the Bayreuth festival. About
this The New Yorker magazine wrote on August 9:
"A ray of light: the Grail is
fully radiant. A dove floats down from the dome
above." These are Richard Wagner's stage directions
for the maximally transcendent final moments of
Parsifal, his last opera. Christoph
Schlingensief's production at the Bayreuth Festival
last week gave us instead two dead rabbits, their
rotting bodies intertwined, their images projected on
a screen above the stage. We then saw a sped-up film
of one rabbit decomposing, its body frothing as the
maggots did their work. I've seen a lot of stupid,
repulsive, irritating, befuddling, and boring things
on opera stages over the years, but Schlingensief's
dead-rabbit climax was something new: for the first
time, I left a theater feeling, like, ready to
hurl. A decomposing
rabbit in place of a dove is not a bad metaphor for
Europe's spiritual condition. Nations who despise
themselves to this extent will not inflict their
children on the world, and will bequeath their hills,
valleys, railway stations and pedestrian zones to
whoever might walk in to take possession of them.
One hopes that Wagner has to watch this sort of
thing from hell, as punishment for aiding and abetting
the suicide of Europe. Europe is too senile to remember
Wagner as he actually was. Those who seek exposure to
Wagner for clinical purposes should obtain the James
Levine production of the Ring cycle at the New
York Metropolitan Opera, available on digital video
disc. For the Americans, the monsters of the Old World
inspire no fear, for Americans have forgotten why there
were monsters in the first place. That is why Americans
watch Wagner's works with all their original creepiness,
like the old cinema version of Frankenstein.
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