MOJO Academy Book Brief

Book Title: The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
Author: Douglas Murray
Publishing Year: 2017
Number of Pages: 352
Audible Time: Approximately 12 hours

Brief Summary

Europe is not being conquered. It is choosing to die. That is Douglas Murray’s take in 2017 and I believe we are seeing this unfold now in 2026.

As we write this book brief, France is experiencing widespread unrest, with riots reported in many of its major cities.

This is not the first time France has experienced riots.

France experienced several major waves of unrest over the past two and a half decades, against a backdrop of growing debate over immigration, integration—which I believe has too often failed—and inequality. Those issues, however, have not driven every protest.

The current school protests, reportedly sparked by complaints about staffing and classroom conditions—an explanation I find questionable—have become another serious crisis. They are drawing comparisons with the Yellow Vest riot that began in 2018, the mass protests against pension reform in 2023, and the destructive riots following the police killing of Nahel Merzouk that same year. It is still too early to say the current unrest matches those episodes in overall severity.

That brings us back to this book and Douglas Murray’s charge in The Strange Death of Europe: “it is committing suicide.”

This is a perfect book to read now to understand what is happening in France in particular and Europe as a whole. What I love about Murray is that he makes this suicide claim without flinching and with complete confidence—and frankly, I think he is right!

Who is Douglas Murray? Murray is a British journalist and was an associate editor of The Spectator when he wrote this sobering, prophetic book.

I had known about Douglas Murray’s book for years, but I had never read it. That changed when I read Matt Goodwin’s Suicide of a Nation, which referenced this book, published back in 2017.

So I had to go back and read it.

Murray does an incredible job documenting, step by step, how Europe got where it was by 2017. He connects the dots one by one.

Here we are, almost a decade later, and it’s even more tragic.

Murray names two forces working together.

The first is decades of mass migration that no government seemed able or willing to stop. Along with those migrants not willing to assimilate to Western Culture.

The second is deeper and more dangerous: Europe lost faith in its own beliefs, its own traditions, and its own right to exist.

Either one alone might be survivable. Together, they are deadly.

Two Important Quotes

1. The Leaders Decided

“Europe is committing suicide, or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide. Whether the European people choose to go along with this is naturally another matter.”

Did you catch that? The leaders—the ruling elites—decided. Not the people.

Murray draws a hard line between those who govern Europe and those who live there.

The leaders made the decisions from a safe distance. The citizens absorbed the consequences on their own streets, and when they objected, they were called bigots for noticing.

We know this split well in America. A ruling class makes the policy, and working families pay the bill.

2. Europe Got Hooked on Migration

“The first is the mass movement of peoples into Europe. In all Western European countries, this process began after the Second World War due to labor shortages. Soon Europe got hooked on migration and could not stop the flow even if it wanted to.

The result was that what had been Europe, the home of the European peoples, gradually became a home for the entire world. The places that had been European gradually became somewhere else. Places dominated by Pakistani immigrants resembled Pakistan in everything but their location, with the recent arrivals and their children eating the food of their place of origin, speaking the language of their place of origin, and worshiping the religion of their place of origin.

Streets in the cold, rainy northern towns of Europe filled with people dressed for the foothills of Pakistan or the sandstorms of Arabia. ‘The Empire Strikes Back,’ noted some observers, with a barely concealed smirk. Yet whereas the empires of Europe had been thrown off, these new colonies were obviously intended to be for good.”

Now notice the word Murray chooses: hooked.

What started as a short-term fix for postwar labor shortages became a habit no one could break. The guest workers were supposed to go home. They didn’t, and no one planned for what came next.

You see, the problem was never simply that people came. It was that Europe stopped asking them to become European. Assimilation used to be the deal, and Europe quietly walked away from its end of it.

My Nuggets of Wisdom!

Murray backs his case with facts that are hard to hear:

• The 2011 census showed that white Britons had become a minority in London, their own capital city.

• In Rotherham, an official inquiry estimated that 1,400 children were sexually exploited by grooming gangs between 1997 and 2013, while officials looked away for fear of being called racist.

• In 2015, Angela Merkel opened Germany’s doors, and roughly a million asylum seekers arrived in a single year.

Fourteen hundred children. Sixteen years. That is agonizing.

And here comes our most important nugget: a civilization that stops believing in itself cannot ask anyone else to believe in it.

Europe emptied its churches, apologized for its history, and offered newcomers nothing to join except a welfare office and a passport.

This connects directly to work we’ve already covered in MOJO Book Briefs:

• Crisis of Islam by Bernard Lewis — Lewis showed a civilization that fell behind and raged; Murray shows the mirror image: a civilization that fell asleep and surrendered.

• Christian Patriot by Taylor Marshall — Marshall argues that Western civilization is really Christian civilization, and Murray’s Europe proves it by showing what happens when the Christian foundation is stripped out.

• America’s Cultural Revolution by Christopher Rufo — Rufo’s “elaborate guilt rituals” are the same guilt Murray says left Europe unable to defend itself.

• Overrun by Todd Bensman — The same flood of migration Murray describes is playing out at America’s southern border.

• Witness to Hope by George Weigel — Pope John Paul II warned Europe for years not to forget its Christian roots, and Europe did not listen.

Now, Murray calls himself a “Christian atheist.” He doesn’t share the faith, yet he sees clearly that Europe’s culture cannot survive without it. So even an atheist is defending Western civilization and its roots in Christendom. Imagine that!

Final Recommendation

If you want to know what’s happening to Europe, read this book. It provides the best backstory to our current events!

Now, I will say that it is a grim read, and Murray offers more diagnosis than cure. Some readers will finish the last chapter wanting a clearer path forward.

But you cannot fix what you refuse to name, and Murray names it with clarity and courage.

For us in America, this is a warning about where we go if we keep walking the same road.

It is also a reminder that a civilization lives or dies by what it believes.

Here is what I want you to do: learn the story of Western civilization—not from Howard Zinn, but from better sources—and pass it on to your children.

Europe forgot who it was, and we still have time to remember who we are.

If You Liked This Book, You Might Like These

• Suicide of a Nation by Matt Goodwin — The book that sent me back to Murray and a natural companion to this one.

• The War on the West by Douglas Murray — Murray’s follow-up, turning the lens on the campaign to discredit Western history and culture on both sides of the Atlantic.

• Without Roots by Joseph Ratzinger and Marcello Pera — The future Pope Benedict XVI and an Italian philosopher ask why Europe turned its back on its Christian foundations.

Keep fighting the good fight.