Look what those "brilliant" neo-cons are writing about Europeans in the National Review. Where do these people come from??? Have I missed something by being abroad?? I just don't get it.

Reported by Adam Nicolson of the Telegraph on 4.11.2003: the opening salvos in a column published within the past couple of weeks in the American political journal National Review. The author is a freelance journalist, Denis Boyles, and he is discussing the recent history and present condition of Europe: "Let's say you take a chunk of real estate the size of a small continent, devastate it with two of the biggest wars in the history of human conflict, then add a couple of massive genocides, a near-total collapse of most social structures, a megadose of intolerant secularism, a decline in educational standards, a flat-line birthrate and a truly impressive brain drain. Now try to imagine what kind of ideas would survive to emerge from the wreckage. Right. You get nihilism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism, the three knee-jerk, irrational sentiments - they fail to rise to the level of actual `ideas' that inform the modern intellectual life of Europe. In other words, you get cockroaches." That is a degree of loathing and contempt, of wilful misinterpretation of foreigners, which you would normally associate with propaganda about an enemy in wartime. Stupid, uneducated, infertile, morally incompetent, socially dead, more animal than human: Boyles's Europe is a continent of Calibans. At no time since the American War of Independence have Americans, or at least some of them, including the hardline Republican Americans of the sort now in government in Washington, viewed Europe and the Europeans with such visceral hatred.