The Rape of Europa
When in Boston, do not forget to visit Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to view Titian’s The Rape of Europa. This world-famous painting was made in 1562, and it was purchased in 1896 for the Museum from its English owner for the then record price of £20,000.
The painting is about the mythological story of the abduction and rape of Europa by Zeus who, assuming the form of a bull, entices her to climb onto his back. The bull carries her off to Crete, where he reveals his real identity.
Europa is of course the representation of the spirit and culture of the continent, and Titian, the great Italian Renaissance painter, made this painting when Europe was under mortal threat from the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Sultan Süleyman the First (r. 1520–1566) was pressing hard on the Eastern borders and Europeans were worried about him. In fact Titian had painted a picture of Süleyman a few decades earlier.
Just ten years before Titian painted Europa, Süleyman’s forces laid siege to Eger Castle in the northern part of Hungary, but the defenders led by István Dobó were just able to repel the attacks.
Art often prefigures reality.
Soon after Europa was painted, Süleyman began a new offensive in Hungary. The siege of Szigetvár was fought from 5 August to 8 September 1566 and although it resulted in an Ottoman victory, the losses were so great that Vienna was saved. The French statesman Cardinal Richelieu described it as “the battle that saved civilization.”
Vienna was not threatened again until the Battle of Vienna in 1683.
But what Titian foresaw in 1562, which was stopped in Szigetvár in 1566 or a century later in Battle of Vienna in 1683, has come to pass in the 21st century.
Europe is being destroyed culturally and spiritually.
There are estimates that Europe’s population at the end of the century will be half of what it is now (part of a worldwide process affecting Asia and the European world) and, more significantly, European whites will be in a minority in most parts of the continent.
Furthermore, there is something more sinister going on in Europe that is not affecting Asia.
Whereas Suleyman tried to beat down the doors to Europe and was eventually stopped, the leaders of modern Europe simply opened the gates to all, with no questions asked. Amongst people let in are those who hold European culture and civilization in profound contempt.
There is now a rape epidemic in Europe.
It has been facilitated by the attitudes of moral relativism and multiculturalism that European elites have embraced.
The crime epidemic
Look at the figure above. What catches the eye are the disparity in the figures going from the fringes to the center and the north, and also how bad the figures are for the United Kingdom, which is the most dangerous place for women in Europe. According to analysis, 1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted and nearly 3.2% of women were assaulted in just the previous year.
Sweden despite militant feminism embedded in its political culture and its educational system. has the second highest rate of sexual violence in Europe, just behind the UK.
The violence against women in the UK and Scandinavia is in stark contrast to Eastern Europe where the rates of violence are less by a factor of 10 to 50. The graph below shows that the recorded incidents of rape in the UK and Wales have increased by a factor of four since 2012.
Moral relativism has been embraced in the UK and Scandinavia to a much greater degree than in East Europe.
And for what?
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
What is happening in Europe is being replicated in Canada. There have been attempts to cover up the tragedy of the Yazidis whose community was massacred and taken into sex slavery by the ISIS in the 2010s. Here’s a story about Yazidi survivor Nadia Murad. In November 2021, a scheduled book club event in Toronto with Yazidi sex-slavery survivor and Nobel Prize winner Nadia Murad as speaker was boycotted by the Toronto District School Board president Helen Fisher, who declared “the students from her school would not participate over fear of offending Islamic students and fostering Islamophobia.”
The child sexual exploitation scandal in the UK
It has been estimated that from 250,000 to a million young white girls have been sexually exploited and raped in the UK by criminal gangs and that this process of exploitation may still be ongoing. Many call it the biggest social scandal in UK history.
The exploitation was ignored by local authorities for years. It came out when Rotherham Council commissioned Alexis Jay, a former chief social work adviser to Scotland, to conduct an independent inquiry into its handling of child-sexual-exploitation reports since 1997 in its jurisdiction. The Jay report was published in 2014, and it revealed that an estimated 1,400 children, by a “conservative estimate”, had been sexually exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. According to the report, children as young as 11 were “raped by multiple perpetrators, abducted, trafficked to other cities in England, beaten and intimidated.”
Taxi drivers would pick up children for sex from schools and care homes. The inquiry team found examples where “a child was doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, children who were threatened with guns, children who witnessed brutally violent rapes and were threatened that they would be the next victim if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators, one after the other.”
Europe is being destroyed by its thinking class and intellectuals, and also by the bureaucrats in Brussels who set the policy agenda for different countries.
In 1976, Alexander Solzhenitsyn said this on the decline of Great Britain: “Great Britain, the kernel of the Western world, has experienced this sapping of its strength and will to an even greater degree, perhaps, than any other country. For some twenty years Britain’s voice has not been heard in our planet; its character has gone, its freshness has faded. British common sense — so lucid, so universally acknowledged — seems to have failed her now. Contemporary society in Britain is living on self-deception and illusions, both in the world of politics and in the world of ideas. People build rickety structures to convince themselves that there is no danger and that its irrevocable advance is nothing more than the establishment of a stable world.”
What Solzhenitsyn said of Britain is true of all of Europe.
There are economic costs to the betrayal of commonsense by Europe and as the chart above shows, it has fallen over 30% behind the US in the last two decades.
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