Just over a century ago, the nations of Europe were the Masters of the Universe. Europe’s far-flung empires girded the globe. Europe had the biggest, the best, and the most of everything. Then everything went to hell. The relatively peaceful century after Napoleon I ended with World War I, which led to WWII. Europe lost her preeminence and her empires, and fell under the protectorate of a former colony.

Europe was brought low by a century of horrible political leadership. From Asquith, Wilhelm II, Clemenceau, Chamberlain, the fascists, the traitors of the Euro-Arab Dialogue to the current bureaucrats at the EU headquarters, Europe’s leaders have been one godawful disaster after another. For every Churchill there’s been bunches of scoundrels, incompetents, madmen, and dummies with delusions of national, if not personal, grandeur.

After her blunders, failures, and sins over the last century, Europe is now a “fallen continent.” The most cataclysmic events of the last century started in Europe. The Holocaust was not so very long ago, yet naked anti-Semitism is again common in Europe. European Jewry is again under attack, and Jews are again emigrating. Europe seems to have learned nothing.

Europe is committing suicide. Europe has been working on that little project since 1914, however. But now Europe is getting really serious about suicide, as it allows millions of unassimilable Muslims to invade the homeland. Europe’s leaders seem paralyzed to stop the influx.

The demographers have done the math, and it is almost certain that unless something is done, and soon, Muslim immigration and breeding, combined with the low birthrates of native Europeans, will transform Europe into a Muslim-majority continent in this century. Europe will cease being Europe. Europe will become Eurabia, a caliphate. The wellspring of Western Civilization will be gone, and it will be the greatest tragedy in history.

On pages 188-9 of While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, American author Bruce Bawer quotes Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard on Europe’s dismal future:

“Unless they build up a cadre of intellectuals in Europe who can think,” he said, America “can kiss Europe good-bye.” The Continent’s future, he predicted, “is going to be vastly different than we imagine…. It’s going to be war. Like Lebanon,” with some enclaves dominated by Christians and others by Muslims. There will be “permanent strife,” and no one will have the “power to mollify or mediate… It will be more gruesome than we can imagine.” When the horror comes, he warned, the journalists who helped bring it about will “wag their heads and flee -- and leave it to those who can’t flee to fight it out.”

Speaking to his party leadership on Muslim immigration, the late Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn said: “But this is about the future of your children and grandchildren …There is no other issue [p. 167].” Decent Europeans must then ask themselves: what has brought us to this dreadful point?

Europe’s problem is, yet again, its leadership. It is Europe’s leaders who have brought the continent, yet again, to the edge of the abyss. But the problem is not only its political elites; it’s Europe’s entire cultural elite: its intellectuals, media, academics, and even its clergy.

What Europe needs is a purge of its elites. If need be Europeans must do as the martyred Pim Fortuyn did: create new political parties. Europeans must vote out the establishment and vote in a new bloc of patriots who won’t sell them out, who won’t betray them. If Europe and its civilization are to be saved, Europeans must do whatever it takes, even if it means the breakup of the EU. And while they’re at it, Europeans need to start making babies again. (One can understand why young Europeans might be averse to starting families, given the future their elders are giving them.)

Outside the West, the world is a pretty bleak affair. But under a caliphate Europe will be a Hell, a Hell in which Europe’s children will live. Europe got yet another horrific look at Hell with the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13. That very night Canadian Mark Steyn dashed out this must-read article: “The Barbarians Are Inside, And There Are No Gates.”

If Europe is to avoid the New Dark Ages that Steyn predicts in his seminal America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, then Europe needs to act now. To spur such action, Europeans might reflect on what they’re about to lose.

The foundation of all that Europe will lose is Freedom. All else that Europe holds dear is built upon that foundation of Freedom. The entire history of the West can be seen as one long painful march towards Freedom. Only in the West can the Common Man have a little dignity and hope.

But Freedom can degenerate into license unless in the service of a higher cause. And that’s the core of the problem in Europe: nihilism. This is where the Islamists have an edge on Europe. They believe in something, and too many Europeans don’t. And with that loss of belief, Europeans are unwilling to sacrifice. So the Islamists sneer at Freedom; what good is it?

Apart from Freedom, Europe is about to lose its identity. Will Europe’s new Muslim overlords allow Europe to keep the Vatican and Chartres? Or will they destroy them, like the Taliban destroyed Afghanistan’s ancient Buddhist statues or like ISIS destroyed the antiquities in Iraq and Syria? But perhaps Europe’s structures will be spared destruction if they are sufficiently Islamized. Maybe they’ll look better adorned with minarets. Or maybe their loss of faith makes Europeans indifferent to the fate of Christendom’s monuments.

One of the dearest things Europeans will lose is their self-respect. For after 1,300 years of success at fighting these guys, today’s generation will be the one that lost it all. But how will they have lost? In pitched battles? Or by doing not a damned thing? And if Europe is lost, today’s Europeans will not be worthy of their great ancestors nor the great civilization their forefathers bequeathed them. Their sin will be more egregious than Esau’s: rather than selling their own birthright for a mess of potage, they will have given away their children’s inheritance.

Europe will also lose, and let us not minimize its importance -- fun. Fun has been an important element in Western advances, in addition to being a value in itself. But will the caliphate allow fun? Will they ban kite flying like the Taliban did? How would old Ben Franklin have learned about electricity without a kite?

And Europeans will also lose modernity, prosperity, and everything they cherish and take for granted. It will all be ground to dust.

Contrary to certain Muslim propagandists, the word “Islam” doesn’t mean “peace”; it means “submission.” Islamism is an ideology of submission, a breed of fascism, entirely totalitarian. There can be no accommodation, no middle ground, only submission. So, I submit: If Europeans can believe in neither God nor Western Civilization nor Freedom, they should believe in their children’s future. If they cannot do that, is Europe worth saving?

If Europe is to survive, Europe must change. Europe must get past the loss of the last century. Instead, Europeans should focus on pre-1914 Europe, the 2,500 years of glory and advancement. That is the heritage the whole world is about to lose.

Jon N. Hall is a programmer/analyst from Kansas City.