Yet even if all the incomers were a clear threat, even if Europeans regarded all further migration as composed entirely of people who would grow to dislike them, even then the fatigue returns. For if that is the case then an attitude will have to be taken towards it and a reaction, even a rebellion, will have to take place. Before this there is a weariness Europeans have felt before – most obviously after the Great War. Can it be possible that having lost so much, another problem of perhaps an even greater scale can emerge? Surely such sacrifice and disaster earns us some time off in the grand calendar of history?

The lack of questions and discussion about the change that is happening in Europe may in large part come down to this: it is better off not to ask the questions because the answers to them are bad. Certainly that would help explain the otherwise extraordinary levels of opprobrium heaped on dissenting voices in the era of mass immigration. In particular it explains the adamant belief that if the people shouting fire are silenced or stopped then the problem they are identifying will go away. After the offices of Charlie Hebdo were fire-bombed in 2011, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius attacked the magazine. ‘Is it really sensible to pour fuel on the fire?’ he asked. Nobody asked him, in reply, who had turned French society into a fire.

An era that was unafraid of the consequences of its decisions would not have tried to silence every one of the voices that even said ‘pause’. Yet the burden of tiredness can fall even, or especially on those who have sounded critical alarms. In an interview with an Italian paper in 2016 Ayaan Hirsi Ali was asked about the situation back in her formerly adopted country of Holland. After she had left, what had happened to the people who spoke out on the issues she warned about before she was chased out? The writers, artists, cartoonists, intellectuals and journalists. Had they all just fallen silent? She replied: ‘The people in the Netherlands who write and talk about Islam and these issues are tired.’12

WHY THE EAST IS DIFFERENT