Douglas Murray - 'The Strange Death of Europe': Immigration, Identity, Islam

Douglas Murray is a highly intelligent man. His skills of argumentation are developed and sophisticated, and he has a very large following of people who follow his various interviews on various right-wing YouTube channels. His arguments are often convincing, extraordinarily well phrased and he is an urbane commentator who possesses enviable charisma and, much like Gove, elegant manners. In 2022, he became a contributor to Fox News as well as a director of Toby Young’s Free Speech Union. He was and is anti the EU for the same reason as Gove: he holds the same belief that the integrity of the idea of the nation state has been eroded and that nation states are the safest way of organising the world.

Murray, like Johnson, like Cameron, like many others that have governed us, was schooled at Eton. He has been trained for the role he inhabits in the world of argumentation at the most famous school in the ruling class firmament, and he’s been trained well. His argument, like Gove’s, is for the maintenance of British and European culture which he argues, not without reason, is the most ‘civilised’ in the history of the world. The threats he sees to this culture are located in the rise of ‘identity politics’ and, specifically, in the import of Muslim immigrants, the beliefs of whose religion, he, like Gove before him, believes, makes them unsuited to peaceful co-existence with the tenets of a modern Western democracy. 

It is a technique of totalitarianism to identify an enemy whose culture is irreconcilable with the wider culture that hosts it. The enemy is attributed near mystical power; the enemy seeks our demise and that of our culture; and it is best not to have any tangible, corporeal contact with the enemy because it is easier to demonise someone if you don’t share a cup of tea with them on occasion. Totalitarian views of the world continually state that the enemy is planning our downfall and cannot wait to impose their backward customs and their religion and their cooking and their weird ways of viewing the world[1] upon us.

Murray’s message is apocalyptic. On the first page of one the book has asserts with certainty that European natives will, by the end of the lifespan of his readers, have lost Europe as a place to live.[2] This viewpoint conveniently either ignores or does not know about Roger Scruton’s perhaps more historically accurate point that Muslim, Christian and Jewish cultures have always cross-fertilised and that Western culture has a significant ability[3] to assimilate other cultures.

He is inordinately careful to avoid any statement that might be considered racist. However, he seems to believe some immigrant cultures are “unworthy” [4] of the culture they now live in. This is subtly stated but seems suggestive; it is also the kind of observation from someone who seems to subscribe, albeit subtly so, to the Great Replacement theory of imminent ethnic substitution. He makes reference to replacement of the European people by others.[5]

His arguments with the alleged financial benefits of immigration are compelling, however, and his books, at the very least, are exhaustively researched. As a conservative, he describes the radical organ the Daily Telegraph as being a centre-right publication[6] and, in another book equates the Guardian with “bias” while the Telegraph has a “direction.”[7]

Murray makes a combination of economic and cultural arguments against immigration. (One wonders which of the two is the more important and whether the latter is merely a means of stirring up his readership to act on the former): one of the chapters is called ‘They Are Here’, and this depersonalisation of the ‘alien’ is not-altogether-subtly suggestive. What he appears a little blinkered to is that it is the financial set-up of those from his own social class that requires the constant import of cheap labour to chase growth and profit: also, while he is entirely aware of the pull factors of immigration, which he wishes were diminished, he makes no mention of the push factors.

He has the good grace to criticise Enoch Powell, but only for the immoderate and biblical tone of his language.[8] He also accidentally reveals several veiled assumptions that filter through the strange magnetism of his charisma. Murray makes a lot of mention of the views of a majority[9],[10],[11] seemingly unaware that someone from such rarefied climes is perhaps unable to locate these with any real nuance as he’s never had any real contact with the people for whom he claims to speak. He seems to locate a racialised element in the white working class which, while it certainly exists, does so in an arguably subtler form and in more varieties than just disagreeing with immigration, and he seems to intend to speak for this community. His attempts to do so are a little undermined by being voiced in entirely the wrong accent.

The narrative voice of ‘The Strange Death of Europe’ is, to an extent, that of a sophisticated Farageist, a Stephen Yaxley with a command of semantics and syntax, a public-school Canute: same message, bigger words, better sentence structure, but the effect remains much like being barked at incessantly by a neighbour’s very posh, linguistically stylish, covertly xenophobic dog.

He seeks to appeal to those who have accommodated the immigrant cultures’ presence in communities they previously felt that they owned by seeming to want to stir up a residual resentment that, and he may be unaware of this, may no longer exist in the form that he seems to think it does. (It was communities with few immigrants that voted for Brexit; London rejected it out of hand). He argues that parents might want less diverse schools.[12] He regards white Australia’s attempts to come to terms with its past crimes as making the country a less “optimistic”[13] place that is now “mawkish.”[14]

Much of the book is a list of the crimes of Islamists and he is certain, as every conservative who broaches the subject of Islam seemingly is, to mention grooming rings of Asian men controlling white girls. This ‘appeal to fear’ is too much of an open goal for Murray to miss, and he is careful not to pass up on the cheapest of arguments while failing to note that white males rape people too. Murgia notes of this hideous practice that any white man guilty of rape represents only himself whereas a Black person guilty of the same may come to represent all immigrants.[15]

There is antinomy in his argumentation. He argues for the maintenance of a system that keeps the dominant in their position by claiming it is immigration rather than ignorance that causes fascism. This is chilling victim blaming of the first order. What creates fascism? A belief that certain people, often from other races or creeds are less than, are somehow animalistic. What creates fascism? The belief that one set of people are superior to another. Murray is arguing against something, fascism, from a deeply uncomfortable position, and one would have thought such a profoundly intelligent man might have noticed the paradox. 

 

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[1] Michela Murgia, How to be a Fascist: A Manual (Pushkin Press: London, 2018) p45.

[2] Murray, Douglas, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam p1.

[3] Scruton, Roger, Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (Encounter, New York, 2007) p4.

[4] Murray, Douglas, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam p3.

[5] Murray, Douglas, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam p3.

[6] Murray, Douglas, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam p153.

[7] Murray, Douglas, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity p119.

[8] The arguments contained in the book appear to have been an influence on the barbaric policies of Patel and Braverman in the Home Office and a contribution to people who are prone to unpleasantness such as Katie Hopkins thinking it acceptable to don her Dunning-Kruger contrarian hat and refer to migrants as “cockroaches”. ‘They Are Here’.

[9] Murray, Douglas, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam p27.

[10] Murray, Douglas, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam p27.

[11] Murray, Douglas, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam p28.

[12] Murray, Douglas, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam p47.

[13] Murray, Douglas, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam p164.

[14] Murray, Douglas, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam p164.

[15] Michela Murgia, How to be a Fascist: A Manual (Pushkin Press: London, 2018) p38.