You and What Army?

The writer Ralph Peters opined recently in an interview with FrontPage that the worries in some circles of a “Eurabia” rising up as Islamists and their fellow travelers take over the continent are not based in historical reality (HT: Brussels Journal):

FP: “Eurabia” is a true nightmare scenario, correct?

Peters: No. Malthusian linear projections never fulfill themselves (and hysteria is never productive). But, beyond that, the notion that Europe, the continent that’s exported more death and destruction than any other, is going to just shuffle wimpily to its doom is crazy. The Europeans have been playing pacifist dress-up while we protected them, but, sufficiently threatened, they’ll revert to their historical pattern–which is to over-react. Europe’s Muslims may prove to be the real endangered species; after all, Europe’s history of dealing with rejected minorities veers between genocide and, for the lucky, ethnic cleansing. For me, the question isn’t whether Muslims will take over Europe, but whether Europe will simply expel them or kill any number of them first. Sound far-fetched? How would the Holocaust have sounded to an educated German (or Brit, or American) in 1932? Europe is a killer continent. When the chips are down, it will kill again.

Well, the duel between Ralph Peters and Mark Steyn is as fascinating as it is important. But the interview above shows that Peters really doesn’t have an answer for Steyn’s trenchant response on Powerline:

Had [Peters] read America Alone, for example, he would know that I do, indeed, foresee a revival of Fascism in Europe. He concludes: “All predictions of Europe going gently into that good night are surreal.” Which of us predicted anything about “going gently”? As I write on page 105 of my book: “It’s true that there are many European populations reluctant to go happily into the long Eurabian night.” What I point out, though, is that, even if you’re hot for a new Holocaust, demography tells. There are no Hitlers to hand. When Mr Peters cites the success of Jean Marie Le Pen’s National Front, he overlooks not only Le Pen’s recent overtures to Muslims but also the fact that M Le Pen is pushing 80. As a general rule, when 600 octogenarians are up against 200 teenagers, bet on the teens. In five or ten years’ time, who precisely is going to organize mass deportations from French cities in which the native/Muslim youth-population ratio is already – right now – 55/45?

As I’ve said innumerable times, the native European population is split three ways: some will leave, as the Dutch (and certain French) are already doing; some will shrug and go along with the Islamization of the continent, as the ever-accelerating number of conversions suggests; and so the ones left to embrace Fascism will be a minority of an aging population. It will be bloody and messy, as I write in America Alone, but it will not alter the final outcome. If you don’t breed, you can’t influence the future. And furthermore a disinclination to breed is a good sign you don’t care much about the future. That’s why the Spaniards, who fought a brutal bloody civil war for their country in the 1930s, folded instantly after those Madrid bombings. When you’ve demographically checked out of the future, why fight for it?

Two possibly salient notes here.

1. The Brussels Journal reports that 15% of the French army is made up of Muslim immigrants. This is unsourced, except for a link to a 2005 report by the Institut Français des Relations Internationales. If anyone has some good statistical sources, I’d love a link — I’ve been searching without success.

2. The blogger Baron Boddissey from Gates of Vienna has a long excerpt of a Paul Weston article (read the whole thing) wherein Weston makes some predictions about male combatant ratios and such. In it, Weston actually touches on the cultural aspect that I think Ralph Peters needs to address:

Now, 18:1 appears to be a number that we can cope with, albeit with a certain amount of low-level violence, but what happens when that ratio becomes 10:1 or 5:1? What would be the likely result, for example, if twenty-five European chartered accountants were confronted by five machete wielding Jihadists? The answer is fairly predictable; they would run away, to file tax returns another day.

According to Wikipedia, France’s military is 359,000 active-duty, with 100,000 of that going to the Gendarmerie (militarized police). So assuming 259,000 active duty personnel in the French military, and if Brussels Journal is correct, some 39,000 of them are Muslims, you’ve got 220,000 men with guns who can mount an organized military offensive with an additional 85,000 Gendarmerie.

Since France is home to 4-5 million Muslims (source)… I’m left to wonder, what army is it that’s going to carry out this genocide of French Muslims?

Peters may very well be right that Europe will descend into a fascist nightmare and we’ll see a repeat of Nazi Germany and the Final Solution, just applied to Muslims, Arabs, and North Africans. But it appears to me that there’s already a sizable portion of the existing military infrastructure that won’t go quietly into the ovens, and that the European people may not be willing to do what is required in a genocide. Could middle-aged French bakers and factory workers and so forth pick up guns (although where you’d do this in France with its gun control laws makes me wonder) and try to kill as many Muslims as possible? Sure. Is it likely given the Continent’s current culture? I doubt it.

They might vote in people like Jean Marie Le Pen or some similar fascist into power, and hope that the military and the police will “take care of the problem” for them. But now you’ve got to deal with the idea of 300,000 men trying to fight a civil war with its own Muslim soldiers (and their sympathetic allies, because not every non-Muslim is going to be gung-ho about racist genocide) lined up against them and deal with the 4-5 million in the population going ballistic.

So… who will actually do all this fighting and all this killing? And, will this fascist Europe come into being in the next 10-15 years? Because given the relative birthrates, there’s a pretty good likelihood of there being far more young Muslim men willing to kill and to die for Allah then there being young Frenchmen willing to kill and die for Liberte, Egalite, et Fraternite.

-TS