The cultural enrichment of Paris (h/t David Vance)

How was this ever allowed to happen? You can, of course, cite colonialism...

...and Western democracies' penchant for getting themselves entangled in foreign wars. The EU and its obsession with open borders played a major role in this lunacy. Angela Merkel gleefully poured petrol on the bonfire. Then there's the willingness of our bleeding heart, virtue-signalling elites to impose hardships and dangers on the people of their own countries, just in order to demonstrate how infinitely more compassionate and morally superior they are compared to the rest of us. But I suspect the real answer is to be found (as it often is) in the writings of Sir Roger Scruton. Our Greatest Living Philosopher points to "oikophobia" as the cause of many of our current ills: 

"... a peculiar frame of mind ... has arisen throughout the Western world since the second world war, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political élites. No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognised: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. Being the opposite of xenophobia I propose to call this state of mind oikophobia, by which I mean (stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which some people—intellectuals especially—tend to become arrested. As George Orwell pointed out, intellectuals on the Left are especially prone to it...

Nor is oikophobia a specifically English, still less specifically British tendency... When Sartre and Foucault draw their picture of the ‘bourgeois’ mentality, the mentality of the Other in his Otherness, they are describing the ordinary decent Frenchman, and expressing their contempt for his national culture. 

For many politicians, artists, entertainers, journalists and academics, the sort of scene captured in the picture above (it's the Avenue de Flandre) represents nothing so much as a massive "fuck you" to their own people for their insufficient enthusiasm in embracing what has in effect been an invasion of Europe by young Muslim men - the majority of whom are economic migrants. The compassion of our enlightened elites has become malign: perhaps unconsciously (who knows?), they want to punish the masses for loving their own countries pretty much the way they are, and for their perfectly natural inclination to prefer the sights, sounds, laws, languages, customs, traditions and people they've grown up with - and a desire to preserve them for future generations.

I'm not sure how this bloody horrible, needless mess ends for Europe. Given how it has started, not well, one suspects.