Two VDARE.com  blog posts today—Brenda Walker's quoting of Robert Spencer (Jihad Terror Is the New Normal for Europe) and James Kirkpatrick's account of the murder of Thomas Shaw Jr.—have reminded me of a grim metaphor that first occurred to me when reading Richard Adams' wonderful Watership Down (I believe Steve Sailer is a big fan of this book). There's a sequence in that novel where its rabbit protagonists, in search of a home, come to a "warren" (a rabbit colony) led by a rabbit named Cowslip, a warren that seems like paradise.

All the rabbits are bigger and sleeker than the norm, there are no foxes or other predators, and food is abundant—but periodically, one of the rabbits goes missing, and no one in the warren will ever explain where he went. It turns out, of course, that the warren is a rabbit farm filled with wire traps that kill off a few rabbits at the time.

Cowslip and his followers have decided to ignore this danger in order to enjoy their otherwise cushy living conditions; they spend their spare time cultivating the arts (or the rabbit version thereof), have forgotten all older rabbit religion and folklore, and congratulate themselves on their advanced state. They're also very passive and mild, but the only thing that will rouse them to rage is when someone dares to ask about a missing rabbit or to "mention the wires;" they even kill an outsider rabbit when they think him guilty of this offense.

This episode in Watership makes a perfect analogy for the current state of our civilization, in both Europe and America; we congratulate ourselves on our superiority to our ancestors, refuse to take old-fashioned ideas seriously, and become murderously angry when anyone endangers our bubble of smug security by mentioning the "wires"—i.e., the black and Muslim killers who walk among us, but who can't be expunged lest doing so call into question our dreams of earthly perfection. We're living in Cowslip's Warren—and, unfortunately, we can't leave it to found another warren, as the heroes of Watership Down do after they discover the existence of the wires.