One feature of this daily barrage of anti-Americanism is the tireless reference to “American conditions”. The term crops up again and again in reports on undesirable trends in European society. (Its connotations are always negative.) Is traffic getting worse? Are children getting fatter? Oh, no – we’re being overtaken by “American conditions”. The versatility with which the term has been used is impressive. When I recently googled its Norwegian version – “amerikanske tilstander” – I got 1,600 hits. I looked through the first hundred or so; most were newspaper articles about a wide variety of topics. Was money playing more of a part in Norwegian politics? American conditions! Was personal wealth increasingly determining the level of health care one received? American conditions! [..]

I found the term equated with macho behavior, the prescribing of antidepressants to children, Internet spam, overpaid executives, long working hours, animal abuse, lack of sensitivity to needs of convicts, the use of terrain bikes in heavy traffic, ponds being stoked with fish for “sports fishermen”, interest-free financing on cars, schools advertising for students, and the “chaos” of having many commercial radio and TV stations instead of one nice, tidy government-owned station. Perhaps the most outrageous examples I found were an article equating “American conditions” with “long hospital queues” (sorry, that comes under the category of “European conditions”), and another article claiming that “Ruper Murdoch controls the American presidential election through Republican propaganda on Fox News” and asking whether Norway’s wonderfully objective media might someday fall victim to such dastardly ideological control.

– Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept

There are two books in Bruce Bawer‘s While Europe Slept: One looks at the anti-Americanism and multicultural delusions of the Netherlands and Norway in the years around the 9/11 attacks.  It’s based on Bawer’s personal experiences as a resident of both countries.  It’s hard-hitting, subjective – and worth reading every word of it.

The other retells the Bat Ye’or conspiracy theory about Eurabia, about how the European establishment made an agreement with the Arab countries decades ago to turn Europe into a Muslim continent, and now all the angry Muslims are turning the rest of us into dhimmis.  It’s a retarded theory, and Bawer presents it uncritically.

And even at its best, the book is marred by that tone of angry sarcasm that is so common in anti-p.c. rants.  I got enough of that in the warblog years.

But read it anyway, especially if you’re Norwegian.  Bawer is the grumpy outsider who impolitely exposes the assumptions and delusions of our society, who observes things native Norwegians don’t, and comes at issues from unexpected angles. We need that perspective.

There’s a lot here that matches my own views exactly, for instance his criticism of the Norwegian media coverage of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. I believe the Iraq war was wrong, but most Norwegians commentators didn’t even understand why it was fought.  They assumed they already knew, and didn’t bother to find out.

It’s such perspectives that make this a valuable book, major flaws aside – far more valuable than yet another boring insider’s view.

The pillars of U.S. immigration policy are integration and emplyment; officials in Western Europe, by contrast, thought they were doing immigrants a favor by not requiring – or even encouraging – either. One might wonder why European authorities didn’t try to learn from the spectacularly successful history of U.S. immigration. I’ve lived in Europe long enough to know why: they didn’t see it as a success story. In the eyes of the Western European establishment, America is a fundamentally racist and materialistic nation that cruelly compels immigrants to shake off their identities and fend for themselves under a heartless, dog-eat-dog economic system. [..]

While immigrants to America are encouraged to become full members of society – and are rewarded for doing so – in Europe (where the native-born children and grandchildren of immigrants are actually called “second- and third-generation immigrants”) the establishment prefers its minorities unintegrated. Why? The supposed reason is that it respects differences; the real reason, as I gradually came to understand, was a profound discomfort with the idea of “them” becoming “us”. Immigrants to Europe are allowed to perpetuate even the most atrocious aspects of their cultures, but the price for this is that no one, including themselves, will ever think of them as Dutch or German or Swedish.

– Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept

Though immigration and integration have become major points of contention in Europe, they weren’t even open for discussion when I was first living in Oslo.  On these topics, the “one idea” of the “one-idea state” was clear: Muslims in Europe were a colorful and enriching asset – period.  In Norway, the expression on everyone’s lips was “fargerik felleskap” – “colorful community”. On the rare occasions when immigrants were mentioned on TV or in the press, you could be sure these words would figure prominently. Norwegian journalists, professors, and politicians loved to use the term. But from the beginning, I found it offensive. Its fixation on the skin color mocked Martin Luther King’s dream of a color-blind society, and its reduction of immigrants to their most superficial aspect turned them into mere window-dressing – an outward sign of ethnic Norwegians’ inner virtue. Often, hearing and reading comments on immigration by Norwegian establishment types, I nearly gasped at their grotesque condescension, their inability to see immigrants as individuals, and their view of the whole business as a morality play; with Muslims in the role of needy victims and Norwegians as heroic benefactors.

– Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept