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  GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM

  SASHA POLAKOW-SURANSKY

  GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM

  THE BACKLASH AGAINST IMMIGRATION AND THE FATE OF WESTERN DEMOCRACY

  HURST & COMPANY, LONDON

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by

  C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.,

  41 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3PL

  This edition published by arrangement with Nation Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, New York, New York, USA.

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United Kingdom

  Copyright © 2017 by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

  The right of Sasha Polakow-Suranksy to be identified as the author of this publication is asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 9781787380417

  www.hurstpublishers.com

  In memory of Ton Beekman, who showed me the splendor and squalor of Europe.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: The Threat Within

  PART I

  FROM STRANGERS TO OUTCASTS

  1.The Guests Who Overstayed

  2.When Integration Fails

  3.The Nativist Nanny State

  PART II

  FROM OUTCASTS TO TERRORISTS

  4.The Danish Cartoon Crisis and the Limits of Free Speech

  5.Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Europe’s Fantasy of Offshoring

  6.Terror and Backlash

  7.Nostalgia, Fear, and the Front National’s Resurrection

  PART III

  FROM TERRORISTS TO USURPERS

  8.The Great Replacement

  9.Freedom of Religion—for Some

  10.Barbarians at the Gates

  11.They’re Stealing Our Jobs

  12.The Rise of White Identity Politics

  PART IV

  THE NEW NORMAL

  13.When the Right Turns Left—and the Left’s Voters Go Right

  14.Xenophobia Beyond Black and White

  15.Willkommenskultur vs. Guantánamo

  16.Camp of the Saints at the White House

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  THE THREAT WITHIN

  Patrice Evra had just threaded a pass through midfield when a loud blast shook the Stade de France, a few miles north of Paris, on the evening of November 13, 2015. It was the seventeenth minute of a football match between France and Germany. After a moment of confusion, the crowd cheered, thinking they were hearing fireworks, and the referee allowed the game to continue.

  A short while later, just before half past nine, a team of gunmen mowed down a group of diners at a small Cambodian restaurant in Paris’s trendy 10th arrondissement and in a bar across the street. On the half hour, a second explosion shook the Stade de France. President François Hollande, who was among the spectators, took an urgent phone call. The blasts were not fireworks, it turned out, but suicide bombs. Hollande’s aides realized a major assault on Paris was underway and he was whisked away to safety.

  For the next ten minutes, the attackers left a trail of carnage and dozens of dead as they moved toward the Place de la République, attacking another bar and a restaurant, before one bomber detonated his suicide vest at the Comptoir Voltaire restaurant.

  At 9:40, the deadliest of the attacks hit the Bataclan, a popular concert hall where the Eagles of Death Metal were playing to a sold-out crowd of 1,500. For two hours before the shooting began, a group of men sat in a small VW Polo a few hundred meters from the venue. One man recalls seeing them trying to park and went to tell them they’d get a ticket. The men gave him a cold look and didn’t roll down the window. “They were wearing jackets,” he told journalists, and seemed to be overweight and having trouble turning the steering wheel. “They had a lost look to them, as if they were drugged.”1 Only later did the man realize they looked bundled up because they had been wearing suicide vests.

  When the gunmen in the car entered the concert hall, they fired indiscriminately. Most of the crowd fled for the exits, but dozens were shot. A pregnant woman dangled from a window ledge; some played dead for hours on the floor. It was not until after midnight that police stormed the building and killed the attackers. By then, eighty-nine people were dead. Hollande declared the attacks “a horror” on national television and imposed France’s first nationwide state of emergency since the height of the Algerian war in 1961.

  The shedding of blood in cosmopolitan Paris was met with shock and anger, coming just a few months after terrorists massacred twelve people at the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. In France, a new intellectual undercurrent had already begun to paint Muslims as a fundamental threat to the republic, and the arguments only became more strident after the November 2015 attacks.

  Michel Houellebecq’s satirical novel Submission, which was featured on the cover of Charlie Hebdo the week of the massacre, became a best seller.2 It depicts a France governed by the Muslim Brotherhood after the Socialist Party and centre right choose to back it in the 2022 election rather than allow the Front National’s leader, Marine Le Pen, to come to power. In Houellebecq’s darkly comic dystopia, Parisian women are veiled and the Sorbonne is run by Saudi sheikhs.

  The novel appeared in 2015, at a moment when the French intellectual firmament was already saturated with paeans to tradition and warnings of cultural decline. It was released soon after Alain Finkielkraut, one of France’s most prominent philosophers, published L’Identité Malheureuse (The Unhappy Identity), which laments a country where those of solid French stock no longer feel at home among halal butchers and Arabic-speaking neighbours.3 Once a man of the left, Finkielkraut now argues that a fundamental clash of civilizations is destroying French culture. The television journalist Éric Zemmour published Le Suicide Français (The French Suicide), a common man’s companion to Finkielkraut, with fewer philosophical references and more diatribes against the French national soccer team. It argues that the political correctness of the 1968 generation, on issues ranging from immigration to the European Union, has destroyed France.4 He sold five hundred thousand copies. Both men who so vehemently defend the purity of French national identity happen to be the Jewish sons of parents from abroad (one born to Polish Holocaust survivors, the other to Algerian Jews).5

  Elsewhere, authors with roots on the left have shaken up national debates: the German banker and Social Democratic Party member Thilo Sarrazin became a best-selling author with Deutschland schafft sich ab (“Germany Abolishes Itself”), a book that foresees the dumbing down of Germany and a loss of competitiveness as Muslim immigrants become a greater share of the population.6

  All these writers presented the idea of a relentless Islamic tsunami engulfing Europe culturally and demographically, an idea popularized during the 1990s by Bat Ye’or, whose books conjured visions of a dark era of Muslim tyranny.7 Her fear of “Eurabia” was so acute that she happily championed the arguments of Serbian nationalists during the Bosnian war, warning of the “gradual Muslim penetration of Europe” and attending conferences organized by the inner circle of Radovan Karadžić, who was later convicted of war crimes.8 Her views spread to a mainstream audience through the best-selling polemics of Bruce Bawer, an American literary critic and gay rights advocate living in Europe who became a leading voice on the anti-Muslim right.

  The idea of Islam conquering Europe has become a trope on both sides of the Atlantic, gaining traction wit
h a new generation of politicians like Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, and directly inspiring violent killers like Anders Behring Breivik in Norway. In July 2011, Breivik bombed a government building in Oslo, then disguised himself as a policeman and shot down seventy-seven people, mostly children, at a Social Democratic Party summer camp. Bawer responded to that bloodbath by lamenting the fact that Breivik had dealt “a heavy blow to an urgent cause.”9 He later went on to brand Europeans who welcomed Muslim immigration as “Quislings”, after the Norwegian Nazi collaborator, effectively likening liberals to traitors who let Hitler conquer their homelands.10

  For many of those denouncing the presence of Islam in Europe, there is an intellectual forefather. Jean Raspail is ninety-two. His phone number is blocked, and he rarely receives visitors at his small flat decorated with books and memorabilia from his travels. These days, the new right hails him as a prophet.

  Raspail’s apocalyptic 1973 novel, The Camp of the Saints, envisioned boats full of “scraggy branches, brown and black” and “fleshless Gandhi-arms” descending on France’s shores. Raspail writes of “an anthill slashed open” and an “endless cascade of human flesh. Every one of the boats, teeming, gushing with bodies, like a tub brimming over. Yes, the Third World had started to overflow its banks, and the West was its sewer.”11 Raspail’s imagined invaders were not Muslims, they were poor Hindus, but the image of the brown masses descending upon the West has been conveniently appropriated by the anti-Muslim right to satisfy current political tastes. As hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees arrived in Europe from the Middle East and Africa in September 2015, French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen warned that Europe was being flooded with foreigners and urged her Twitter followers to read Raspail.12

  The Camp of the Saints is a slow-burning account of a disaster foretold. Countries around the world look the other way as a massive fleet carrying hundreds of thousands of refugees approaches Europe. In the novel, the arrival of eight hundred thousand boat people causes a clash between the supposed true defenders of French civilization and the radicals, intellectuals, and hippies who naively welcome the newcomers.

  “Already they saw it their mission to guide the flock’s first steps on Western soil,” Raspail writes contemptuously of the welcoming left. “One would empty out all our hospital beds so that cholera-ridden and leprous wretches could sprawl between their clean white sheets. Another would cram our brightest, cheeriest nurseries full of monster children.” He was particularly afraid of miscegenation: “Another would preach unlimited sex, in the name of the one, single race of the future.”13

  His hero, an aging white professor, kills a dreadlocked hippie who tries to commandeer his hillside home to welcome the refugees. The book’s chief villain is the smart, suave, mixed-race editor of a prominent left-wing Paris newspaper (“North African by blood, with an elegant crop of kinky hair and swarthy skin—doubtless passed down from a certain black harem slavegirl”). He celebrates the refugees in his columns and earns Raspail’s ire as the “concoctor in chief of the poisonous slops poured piping hot each Monday into the feeble, comatose brains of the six hundred thousand readers of his weekly rag, served up in its fancy sauces.”14

  When the boats finally reach France, Raspail describes the landing as a “peaceful assault on the Western World.”15 His hatred barely disguised, he warns his readers, “The monster is here. He’s aground off our shores, but he’s still full of life. And everywhere, the same plea to throw your doors open, to take him in. Even from the Pope,” he wrote in 1973, imagining a Francis-like pontiff, and deriding him as “that feeble voice of the sick Christian world.” The book’s heroes are those that shoot down refugees or fire on the boats at sea. “Listen to me. For Heaven’s sake,” Raspail’s narrator pleads with his readers: “Shut your doors! Shut them tight, if it’s not too late!”16

  As the question of immigration has come to dominate political debate in wealthy democracies, the arrival of large numbers of asylum-seekers has generally been cast in one of two ways: far-right nationalists denounce each new wave of immigration as an alien invasion that must be stopped, while many on the progressive left insist that there’s no problem. Both views are wrong.

  In most societies, rapid immigration is bound to provoke a xenophobic reaction, especially when newcomers compete with locals for jobs, housing, and welfare benefits. Likewise, terrorist attacks tend to pit security concerns against basic liberties and test the resilience of democratic institutions.

  When the two occur at the same time—and the terrorists belong to the same ethnic or religious group as the new immigrants—the combination of fear and xenophobia can be a dangerous and destructive force. Fear of fundamentalist Islam (which poses a genuine security threat) and animosity toward refugees (who generally do not) have been conflated in a way that allows populist far-right leaders across the world to seize upon Islamic State attacks as a pretext to shut their doors to desperate refugees who are themselves fleeing ISIS.

  As these fears have spread, anti-immigrant parties are no longer confined to the political margins. From France and Holland to Germany and Denmark, they are growing quickly, and their rhetoric has seeped into mainstream discourse. In all these countries, the trajectory has been similar. At first, immigrants were strangers and largely ignored. As unemployment rose and it became clear that guest workers planned to stay rather than return home, they came to be seen as competitors for work and welfare. But then came the 9/11 attacks, which put fear of Islamist violence at the centre of the immigration debate in Europe and beyond. Suddenly, immigrants were not merely strangers or outcasts competing for jobs and benefits; they were potential terrorists who threatened the social order. In the wake of terrorist attacks in Europe, the debate over immigration and integration has morphed into a full-fledged culture war against what is perceived to be an immutable civilizational enemy that is fundamentally incompatible with Western democratic values. That view has led to a moral panic, and a series of voices have emerged to spread it. Anti-immigration rhetoric and nativist policies are increasingly becoming the new normal in liberal democracies in Europe and beyond—from the United States to Australia—where foreigners, especially Muslims, are seen as usurpers and blamed for society’s ills.

  Far-right leaders are correct that immigration creates problems; what they miss is that they themselves are the primary problem.

  The greatest threat to liberal democracies comes not from immigrants and refugees but from the backlash against them by those on the inside, who exploit fear of outsiders to chip away at the values and institutions that make our societies liberal. By attempting to deal with the challenges of immigration by publicly denouncing judges, casting aside constitutional protections of minority groups, and stripping some citizens of their nationality, many of the world’s most advanced democracies are effectively hitting the self-destruct button rather than take on new passengers.

  When I began writing this book in 2015, I thought that none of this would happen tomorrow, and perhaps not even in the next decade, but that the political culture of many tolerant and progressive countries was already moving gradually in a dangerous direction—often with Russian encouragement. I was far too sanguine. Since that time, the Netherlands has passed a law authorizing the government to strip dual nationals of their Dutch citizenship if they are deemed a security threat.17 A slew of French cities rushed to ban modest swimsuits known as burkinis on the grounds that they were an expression of Islamist radicalism. And in the United States, President Donald Trump attempted to bar the entry of immigrants and legal residents with green cards from entering the country and openly attacked the federal judges who halted his order, arguing in his daily Twitter storms that “bad people” are streaming in and that the courts will be to blame if terrorists attack America. Trump’s comments are an explicit assault on the separation of powers at the core of American democracy.18

  Modern liberal democracies have two crucial characteristics: they seek to reflect the wil
l of the majority through elections and to protect the rights of minorities by enshrining them in constitutions and establishing independent judiciaries to check the power of popularly elected leaders.19 As anti-immigrant parties become more prominent, they are privileging the former and trying to argue that the latter is irrelevant or, worse, antidemocratic. They are democrats only insofar as they believe in majoritarianism. They have no time for constitutional niceties that contradict the supposed will of the people.20 It does not matter that some of the institutions they deride are foundational pillars of the American or French republics; courts and constitutions are dismissed as undemocratic for not reflecting the political zeitgeist and the current whims of the masses. According to their crudely democratic and profoundly illiberal logic, a passing wave of anti-Islamic sentiment, strongly felt by the majority, should take precedence over more than two hundred years of history.21

  Rather than accept the easy mantra that liberal democracy is the world’s greatest form of government and will therefore inevitably prevail, this book seeks to ask difficult questions about what happens if it does not. Just as authoritarian state capitalism is today seen as a viable, and even desirable, alternative model of governance from Russia to China to the Persian Gulf, an eroded form of democracy—one that is less liberal and less inclusive—could one day supplant the constitutional order that currently prevails in Western countries that are viewed by the outside world as progressive and tolerant but are now struggling to cope with an influx of migrants and refugees.

  Indeed, if nativist populist parties continue to rise in popularity while terrorism remains an ever-present threat, they will eventually seek to curtail and trample the rights of immigrants and minorities. When that happens, constitutional democracies that are presumed to be stable and secure will be at risk of decay as populist demands for tough border policies and security trump commitments to protect civil liberties and minority rights, transforming countries that we once thought of as icons of liberalism into democracies only in name.