I'm sitting in a Vienna café, the air thick with the ghost of Mozart's symphonies and the clink of porcelain cups. This city, once the bulwark that stopped the Ottoman siege in 1683, feels different now—not conquered by swords, but transformed by a quieter invasion. The news hit like a dirge: 41.2% of Vienna's schoolchildren are Muslim, edging out Christians at 34.5%, per a 2025 Austrian government report. The Freedom Party (FPÖ) sounds the alarm—violence, anti-Semitism, contempt for women rising in classrooms—but it's too late. The gates of Vienna have fallen, not to a battering ram, but to open borders and a West too guilty to defend itself. Where's Charles Martel, the hammer who saved Europe? Nowhere. The West's elites have traded his shield for a whip, flogging their own culture into submission.
Andrea Widburg, in her April 2025 American Thinker piece, calls it suicide. She leans on Rod Dreher, a conservative exiled to Hungary—Europe's last holdout against "unlimited Islamic immigration," he says—to argue the continent's on the brink of civil war. Not the tidy battles of old, but chaotic, social-media-fuelled spasms, like post-Soviet Eastern Europe's ethnic purges. Dreher's talks with ordinary French folk, pre-Le Pen's jailing, reveal a chilling calm: they see war coming, a clash of European values against Leftism and Islam. In the UK, King's College professor David Betz warns of collapsing trust, two-tier justice, and radicalisation, per his podcast "The Coming British Civil War." Germany's AfD, polling at 26% faces bans for daring to question Muslim immigration. Elites, Widburg argues, define "democracy" as votes for their script—multiculturalism, open borders, socialism—or nothing.
Vienna's schools are the canary in the coal mine. The FPÖ's data, shows German fading as a first language, classrooms fracturing under "chaos." Widburg traces the roots: Europe's 1960s welcome to Saudis, Pakistanis, Algerians, Turks, capped by Merkel's 2015 open-door policy. Unlike Spain's baby boom that once repelled Islam, Europe's native birth rate is a death rattle—1.5 in Austria, per 2024 UN stats, below the 2.1 replacement level. Muslims, with higher fertility (2.8, per a 2023 Pew study), aren't assimilating. Widburg claims their "religious mandate for conquest" clashes with a West disarmed by gun bans, hooked on socialism's "opiate," and brainwashed into multiculturalism.
This ties to The New Criterion's "narcissistic self-flagellation." The West, alone in its guilt, attacks its triumphs—Magna Carta, Shakespeare, the American Revolution—as sins. Germany's post-Holocaust psyche, Widburg notes, sees Muslim immigration as penance for Nazi crimes, a twisted atonement. The New Criterion's Parekh Report branded "Britishness" racist; Vienna's elites, per a 2024 Die Presse op-ed, push "diversity" while ignoring school violence. Europe's immigration policies are doing what the Ottomans couldn't 500 years ago. The severity? It's dire when your cultural core—language, history, values—becomes a second-class citizen. Austria's trust in institutions is down to 28%, per a 2025 Eurobarometer, and 60% want stricter migration, per YouGov. Yet, the FPÖ's sidelined, like Germany's AfD.
But is Widburg's despair airtight? Her civil war dismissal—Europeans too weak, young too woke, guns gone—might miss sparks of resistance. Hungary's Orbán, defying EU migration quotas, polls at 50% domestically, per a 2025 Nézőpont poll. Italy's Meloni, tightening borders, has 40% approval, per La Repubblica."Populist waves" in Austria's FPÖ, up 10% since 2020. Widburg's right that socialism saps fight—70% of Austrians rely on state benefits, per OECD 2024—but history shows uprisings from less. The 1989 Velvet Revolution toppled regimes with typewriters, not rifles. And the young? Some reject multiculturalism—20% of Austrian youth back the FPÖ, per a 2025 Der Standard survey, despite "brainwashing."
Still, the mathematics are brutal. Vienna's Muslim population, 15% citywide in 2020, could hit 30% by 2040, per Statistics Austria projections, with schools already majority-Muslim in districts like Favoriten. Without assimilation—only 30% of Muslim immigrants identify as "Austrian," per a 2023 IFES study—cultural cohesion frays. Violence is up: school assaults rose 25% in Vienna from 2020-2024, per police data, often tied to ethnic tensions. Widburg's claim of no civil war assumes passivity, but X posts predict "low-grade conflict" as natives push back. France's 2024 riots, sparked by migrant crime, hint at what's brewing.
Where does this end? Critics warn of a "new Dark Age," and Widburg's Vienna points that way. A civilisation that can't reproduce (Europe's 1.5 fertility), defend its borders (1.2 million migrants in 2023, per Eurostat), or honour its past (The New Criterion's decolonised Shakespeare) is on borrowed time. Japan's stagnation—0.8% GDP growth, aging crisis—offers a glimpse: shuttered schools, empty towns. But Europe's added twist—cultural replacement—could mean fracture, not just decline. If Vienna's schools are Muslim-majority, what's the city in 2050? A caliphate or a hybrid, uneasy pluralism?
No Charles Martel rides today. The FPÖ's Herbert Kickl, Austria's closest, is blackballed, polling at 27% but coalitionless, per 2025 Kurier. Elites, as Widburg and The New Criterion argue, have rigged the game—socialism's bribes, disarmament, guilt as policy. Collapse isn't swords clashing; it's a slow eclipse, where churches become mosques (10% of Vienna's churches repurposed since 2000, per Wiener Zeitung) and waltzes fade. Yet, hope flickers. Pushback—AfD, FPÖ, Meloni—grows. A 2025 Telegraph poll shows 55% of Europeans want migration caps. If the West drops its whip, it might rally. But time's short, and Vienna's gates are wide open.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/04/the_gates_of_vienna_have_fallen.html
The Gates of Vienna have fallen
I've had sitting on my computer for a few days an essay by Rod Dreher, an American conservative who now lives in Hungary, the only country in Europe making a stand for traditional values and refusing to accept unlimited Islamic immigration. From his perch in Hungary, Dreher has written about his conversations with ordinary Europeans, who believe that civil war is imminent, a war that will see those who share European values arrayed against those who have embraced leftism and Islam.
Dreher's essay opens by telling readers about a hugely popular podcast entitled "The Coming British Civil War." On it, David Betz, a King's College, London, professor who is an expert on civil wars, opines that the UK is on the verge of a civil war. Writes Dreher:
Betz argues that the United Kingdom now has all the traditional hallmarks of a society on the verge of violent civil conflict. He mentions the collapse of faith in British institutions, the two-tier justice system, Islamic radicalization, and the polarization wrought by official multiculturalism, among other factors.
The UK is not the only European nation that is being driven to the breaking point by the stresses that the ruling elites have placed upon their ancient cultures. The same is true in France, where the ruling class has conveniently decided to lock away Marine Le Pen, the one person who is currently standing athwart the French political system yelling "Stop."
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Meanwhile, in Germany, the AfD party, which opposes unlimited Muslim immigration, is being blackballed, blacklisted, and sidelined. European elites, just like America's Democrats, believe that "democracy" applies only to votes for their people and policies.
Dreher says that his private conversations reveal that ordinary people agree with Betz:
In a number of private conversations with ordinary French people—this was before the Le Pen verdict—I brought up the Betz interview (none had heard about it), and asked them if they foresaw civil war coming to France. Nearly all of them said yes. They said so with an unnerving sense of calm, as if they accepted it as a matter of course.
Looking at the European landscape, Dreher analogizes the situation to what happened in Eastern Europe after the Soviet Union's collapse. These were not, he says, formal armed civil wars, with armies facing off against each other. (In other words, not like the American Civil War.) Instead,
These were often spontaneous, undirected spasms of orgiastic violence—exactly what Prof. Betz says civil war in the UK and in Europe would be like. He also says that given mass media, especially social media, a civil war sparking off in one country would likely trigger them almost instantly in others.
Dreher has a lot more to say on the subject (all wise, informed, and depressing), so you might want to check it out.
As for me, I don't think there'll even be a scrambling guerrilla war in Europe. I say that for a few reasons:
1. The European masses have been enervated by socialism, which, unlike religion, is the true opiate of the people. They are so utterly dependent on the government that they cannot rebel against it. Indeed, if you look at the utter passivity / helplessness of ordinary Brits in the face of the mass Muslim rape of their children, you have a microcosm of what the once warlike Europeans have become.
2. What's going on in Europe has lasted long enough that it is the young people's normal. They have been brainwashed from the cradle to accept multiculturalism, sexual abnormalities, and open borders as good and inevitable things. While their parents may rebel, the last couple of generations, like good Nazi youth who turned their parents in to the Gestapo, think their parents are wrong and even dangerous. And keep in mind that, thanks to the war on families, the old European lineage is dying out anyway, as native-born women have stopped having children.
3. The Europeans are disarmed. Their government took their weapons away a long time ago. They're barely allowed to have sporks. And while immigrants haven't felt constrained by those laws and have maintained access to weapons, the native Europeans smugly handed over their weapons of self-defense, secure in their moral superiority.
4. The civil war, such as it might have been, is already over, and the enemy is already in country. The civil war was fought at the ballot box when leftists became more and more extreme, and the population, hooked on that good socialist opium, kept voting for them. Their numbers are declining, and their values are already broken.
The last gasp was when Angela Merkel opened Europe's doors to Islam. The ordinary people, cowed and bullied, acquiesced.
5. The Barbarians are already in the gate. (Not at the gate, but inside the gate.) Nothing more clearly illustrates this than what's happened in Vienna. As European history buffs know, in 1683, forces from the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth beat back the seemingly unbeatable Ottoman Empire, which was besieging Vienna from the East. Europe was saved from becoming one more of the Muslim conquests that began when Mohamed's forces burst out of the Arabian desert a thousand years before.
But beginning in the 1960s, Europeans started inviting in their former enemies. The British took in the Saudis and Pakistanis, the French invited in the Algerians and Moroccans, and the Germans opened their doors to the Turks. The same was true across Europe.
And of course, in 2015, Angela Merkel invited in everyone. Assimilation has not gone well because Muslims don't believe in assimilation; they have a religious mandate for conquest and, unlike Europeans, they have babies. Lots and lots of babies. By contrast, look at Spain, a one-time defender of Europe against Islam and a nation that had lots of babies, which has effectively stopped reproducing.
These factors led to an inevitable outcome in Vienna, once the stopping point for Islam:
For the first time, Muslim students are the largest religious group in Vienna's schools, underlining the incredible demographic transformation taking place in the Austrian city. The Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) is now raising the alarm.
Muslim students now account for 41.2 percent of all students, while Christian students fell to 34.5 percent. The trend is only growing, and is accompanied by rising problems, including violence in schools, anti-Semitism, and contempt for women.
Europe, the cradle of Western civilization, is gone. Worse, it didn't even die from apathy. It actively committed suicide. And no, there won't be a civil war that can save it. Enoch Powell may not have been politically correct when he gave his Rivers of Blood speech, but he was prescient."