Europe thinks ‘that to achieve peace no price is too high: not appeasement, not massacres on its own soil, not even surrender to terrorists… Europe is impotent. A foul wind is blowing through [it]… the idea that we can afford to be lenient even with people who threaten us… This same wind blew through Munich in 1938… It could turn out to be the death rattle of a continent that no longer understands what principles to believe.’
This is not Michael Gove but Marcello Pera, President of the Italian Senate. But in fact the views of the three authors fit remarkably well. Celsius 7/7 is centrally about the political response to Islamist terrorism. Pera discusses the relativism that undergirds so much of the thinking that responds to terrorist Islam. Ratzinger’s contribution is a thoughtful history lesson about what European/American civilisation consists of, with some striking comments on the Spengler-Toynbee debate.
All three are pretty gloomy, and with good reason.
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