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~As a new year begins, it is sobering to find that one has outlived national stereotypes that endured for generations. A hundred and thirty-seven years ago, when I was just venturing out into the world, the universally acknowledged joke was some variant of:
In Heaven the chefs are French, the lovers are Italian, the engineers are German, the police are British, and it's all run by the Swiss.
In Hell the chefs are British, the lovers are Swiss, the engineers French, the police German and it's all run by the Italians.
How we all laughed!
Of course, times change. I was trying to work out an update for our new Heaven on Earth but I only got as far as "The daycare owners are Somali, the interpreters Afghan, the truck drivers Indian, the dogcatchers Haitian, the condom-distributors Syrian, the school superintendents Guyanese, the mayors are Muslim and/or transgender, the only genuine hard-nosed investigative reporters are devout abstemious virgins, and it's all run by USAid and the District Court Judge of Dead Moose Junction" before I got rear-ended by an illegal-immigrant policeman en route to a Ramaswamy Proposition Nation rally.
But these novelty additions to the gaiety of the passing parade are not as significant as the accelerating rotting of what were assumed to be near immutable characteristics of what we used to call "the host community". To return to the original formulation:
In Heaven, the chefs are French?
One would hope so. It would be hard to conceive of anything less Gallic than dining out of a polystyrene container from the drive-thru window: would you like fries with that? or a supersized Châteauneuf-du-Pape?
Yet France is now third on the planet for fast-food consumption, behind only the United States (inventor of the scourge) and the United Kingdom (its principal "vassal state", as Veronica in our comments section likes to say). McDonald's business plan is to put a franchise within twenty minutes of every single sod-bollocking Frenchman.
I see that numbers four and five on the fast-food hit parade are Sweden and Austria. Hmm. As with the decline of French wine sales, might this have anything to do with, ahem, certain, ah, um, cough, demographic changes? Well...
FIVE GUYS : L'ENSEIGNE FAIT POLÉMIQUE EN PASSANT AU HALAL ET EN SUPPRIMANT L'ALCOOL DANS SIX RESTAURANTS
Which means:
Five Guys [an American fast-food brand operating in France]: The chain causes controversy by going halal and alcohol-free in six restaurants.
So in Heaven the chefs are French but they're Sharia-compliant and without a wine list. In le Grand Remplacement, you will be denied even the consolations of culture.
What's next? The lovers are Italian? Not, obviously, in the go-forth-and-multiply sense:
Italy is set to suffer a further drop in the number of births this year to a new historical low, aggravating the country's demographic crisis, national statistics bureau ISTAT said on Tuesday.
Last year recorded just 370,000 new births, the lowest figure since Italy's unification in 1861, and the 16th year in a row in which the figure declined.
In 2023 there were 358 villages and towns where not a single baby was born. Italy's fertility rate is 1.18 babies per woman - or half the "replacement rate" of 2.1: that's to say, no growth, no decline, merely a stable population. Instead, the number of Italians is halving with every generation, so good luck finding the new Marcello Mastroianni at a Milano singles bar. However, notwithstanding his eschewing of a candlelit table, a bottle of vino and Ornella Vanoni singing "Senza Fine" on the stereo, the New Italian is also something of a lover. He'll let you watch so you can pick up tips:
Rome Italy 🇮🇹
3 migrants attack a young Italian couple and rape the 18 year old girl.
Remigration to save the nations pic.twitter.com/EZGkVr9WXi
— Real News Éire (@real_eire) November 25, 2025
Next? The engineers are German? Aside from the country's general "economic free fall", engineering in particular is bidding a fond auf wiedersehen:
Der lange Abstieg des deutschen Ingenieurs
Which means:
The Long Decline of the German Engineer
But hang on: just a decade ago, didn't Mutti Merkel bring in over a million Syrians to be the next generation of German engineers? Alas:
A survey by Reuters of the 30 companies in Germany's DAX stock market index found they could point to just 63 refugee hires in total....
Of the 63 hires, 50 are employed by Deutsche Post DHL (DPSGY), which said it applied a "pragmatic approach" and deployed the refugees to sort and deliver letters and parcels.
"Given that around 80% of asylum seekers are not highly qualified and may not yet have a high level of German proficiency, we have primarily offered jobs that do not require technical skills or a considerable amount of interaction in German," a spokesman said by email.
What is clear is that early optimism that the wave of migrants could boost economic growth and help ease a skills shortage in Germany — where the working-age population is projected to shrink by 6 million people by 2030 — is evaporating.
So German companies are moving to countries that do not look to the Middle East to ease their "skills shortage":
More than one in five companies surveyed (22%) are considering relocating production activities from Germany to Central and Eastern Europe. Within the next twelve months, 19% are considering such a move.
So what does that leave? In Heaven the police are British? I certainly hope not:
Police make 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages
In Bleephole Britain tweeting about a Pakistani Muslim rapist will attract more attention from the coppers than being a Pakistani Muslim rapist. I don't mean to give you the impression that His Majesty's constabulary spend all their time arresting tweeters and Facebookers. Sometimes they take a day off to lose your records, threaten you for going on The Mark Steyn Show, or just to cut to the chase and rape you themselves:
"He knew where we used to hang out, he would request either oral sex or rape us in the back of the police car," she tells the BBC.
If she tried to refuse his requests, says Willow, he would even contact the grooming gang directly to threaten her.
"I would rather be raped once, or give one man oral sex, than to be taken somewhere where I know it'd be 15... 20 guys one after another. That was just easier," she says.
Or as South Yorkshire Constable Hassan Ali put it:
You do it for the other officer. So you're gonna do it for me.
But don't worry, we've still got the Swiss to run it all...
In the early hours of the New Year, dozens of revellers were incinerated in a very upscale ski resort where "it's all run by the Swiss". In Crans-Montana, as I write, over forty are dead and over one hundred are seriously injured. Thirty-six hours after the conflagration, the death toll continues to rise: one young woman tells the BBC two of her friends have just died in hospital. Swiss officials have "categorically ruled out an attack" - as if it is supposed to be some sort of consolation that your kid died not because of some elaborate Bondi jihadist plot but just because he went to a bar on New Year's Eve.
There is much (premature) speculation about health-and-safety violations, but photographs (see above) show merely that the waitresses (as they do every year) put lit sparklers in champagne bottles and then hoisted them above their heads in a low-ceilinged room. I am glad that at my own "party at the end of the world" the Nordic blondes preferred to pair their magnums with decapitating swords, but that's probably illegal in Switzerland. Still, the symbolism gives one pause: most of those now in Swiss, French or Italian hospitals will "survive", but their lives as healthy attractive hedonist teens and twentysomethings are over forever.
So being "run by the Swiss" cannot save you when the powder keg goes up. It is an oddly poignant portent of the first-gradually-then-suddenly trajectory, of an entire continent living like a party about to go up in smoke. Welcome to the world of suddenly.
Thus the multiculti Eutopia: The chefs are Arab, the lovers are Aghan, the police are Pakistani, and the engineers are terrorists:
Whatever else Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is – privileged young Nigerian, pious introvert and all the other details in those journey-to-jihad profiles – he is also a graduate in mechanical engineering from University College London. That slots the Detroit plane bomber into a gruesome tradition: Islamist terrorists who trained as engineers.
There are plenty more. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Mohamed Atta, 9/11 mastermind and ringleader respectively: both engineers. Imam Samudra, plotter of the Bali nightclub bombings: an engineer. Kafeel Ahmed, who tried to bomb Glasgow Airport in 2007: an MPhil in aeronautical engineering from Belfast.
Exit question for the pre-revolutionary conditions now prevailing: If the chefs are Muslim and the lovers are Muslim and the engineers are Muslim and the police are Muslim and it's all increasingly run by Muslims (the New York mayor) and the Muslim-adjacent (the Somaliphiliac Minneapolis mayor), who are the violent revolutionaries? The French? The Italians? The Germans, British, Swiss? The Americans?
Just so long as the answer's not none of the above...
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