A sombre yet resolute atmosphere enveloped Paris as the city marked the tenth anniversary of the 13 November 2015 terrorist attacks, which claimed the lives of 132 people and severely injured over 400. Commemorative ceremonies took place in the eastern part of the capital, notably in front of the Bataclan music venue, where 90 concert-goers lost their lives after three Islamic extremists indiscriminately fired upon the attendees. The eulogy commenced outside the Stade de France, attended by the family of Manuel Dias, the first casualty of the attacks, when three suicide bombers blew themselves up during an international football game. Mourners also congregated at the bars and cafés that jihadi terrorists attacked. On the terraces of Le Carillon and Le Petit Cambodge, a solemn minute of silence filled the air as the names of the 39 victims were recited, and wreaths were respectfully placed in their memory.

Considered the deadliest act of violence in France since the second world war, these attacks initially claimed 130 lives, with the death toll rising to 132 after two Bataclan survivors tragically ended their own lives due to enduring trauma. A decade later, the psychological and physical wounds inflicted by these horrific acts of savagery remain unhealed.

The West’s neurotic obsession with immigration has sown the seeds of its own destruction. We are not witnessing a Fukuyama-style ‘end of history’ grand narrative in which cultural practices, religion and ethnicity coalesce to form a utopian global community founded on universal values. Instead, we face institutional entropy, a consequence of what may be termed suicidal empathy, in which elites have opened the borders in the name of slave wages and multiculturalism. And it has broken the hearts, minds and lives of millions.

Two of the Paris suicide bombers exploited the migration routes to reach Europe and seek asylum. The terrorists who killed eight people on London Bridge in 2017 were migrants from Morocco and Pakistan. Axel Rudakubana, who carried out a frenzied stabbing spree in Southport in 2024, resulting in the deaths of three young girls, is the child of Rwandan immigrants. The brothers who organised the horrific Sydney gang rapes in the early 2000s were born in Lebanon.

Multiculturalism holds the West hostage. For years, the progressive establishment has served as its handmaiden. Institutional capture has led to the dissemination of grievance narratives and identitarian anti-Western ideologies. Propaganda, according to the Soviet dissident and KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov, has been ‘pumped into the soft heads’ of successive generations of Western students. This polarising, hyper-racialised worldview has conditioned people to interpret every possible interaction as racist, such as criticising cousin marriage, a cultural tradition common in Pakistan, the country of origin for many Western immigrants. Activist discourse treats law enforcement as a proxy for radicalised state oppression. As one French-Algerian man told Ezra Levant, ‘Racists, they colonised us for 132 years… and now we’re going to colonise them for life until we die.’

There is a corrosive ideology at work. According to liberalism, people are interchangeable units that may be switched in and out. It doesn’t matter if you’re Australian, African, Chinese or Indian. You are interchangeable: there’s no difference between individuals. Guided by the principle of methodological individualism, this destructive ideology seeks to dismantle borders and erase distinctions among people in pursuit of a liberal universal order. The driving force is purely market logic, reducing individuals to mere resources – each immigrant, regardless of their legal status, contributes to GDP growth. From a macroeconomic perspective, the focus is on aggregate demand, with markets fostering mass immigration. This also involves open borders; it is neoliberalism that acquiesces to this destructive doctrine.

Left to its own devices, the market will seek the highest margins at the lowest costs. With a cheap and plentiful supply of immigrant workers, companies have no incentive to hire native workers. To lower labour costs, capital will inevitably prefer mass immigration. Western nations have increasingly welcomed low-skilled immigrants who predominantly flood the health, social care, and service sectors within local economies. There should be no trade-off between rape and murder to get a pad Thai delivered in a hurry.

This trend toward cheapness and convenience over all else has been documented since at least the mid-19th century. In his 1843 work Past and Present, Thomas Carlyle argued that human interactions with one another are guided by laws that transcend mere transaction. ‘Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man to man,’ Carlyle writes – it severs real social bonds between people, ruins communities, and leads to a life of perpetual nomadism in which each individual is uprooted. Everyone is viewed as a fungible, exchangeable asset, much like a coin being passed from hand to hand. People are left as atomised, solitary strangers. Carlyle contends that such consequences arise when those who are entrusted to govern leave the ship of state rudderless, without a captain or guiding moral precepts other than money.

Importing millions of people from the third world who openly despise you, your country and your way of life is possibly the most idiotic decision ever made by Western governments. In their collective arrogance, elites accepted the shibboleth that diversity is a strength. It isn’t. Every country that has experimented with unrestricted immigration has been demographically replaced or destroyed. Multiculturalism erodes what Gibbons described as the ‘vitals’ of civilisation. Germany’s borders were opened in 2015 by Angela Merkel and now armed guards patrol its Christmas markets after numerous terrorist attacks. When Sweden liberalised its migration policies, it probably didn’t expect it would have to teach migrant men from the Middle East and Africa classes about being tolerant decent blokes and not raping women.

Scandinavian countries are starting to realise the problem. Under its centre-left government, Denmark has enacted the most restrictive immigration laws in the West. The Bataclan attack stands as a stark reminder of what happens when you don’t control your borders. In countries that fall under the narcotising, stupefying spell of liberalism, such tragic events will continue to occur.