[O]n December 31st in the year 406, the Rhine froze and tens of thousands of Germanic Barbarians, crossed the river, flooded the Empire and went on a rampage, destroying every city they passed. In 410, Rome was sacked.Bringing down the Barbarians should have been a simple, solvable problem for the formidable Romans. But Rome was weakened from within by the conquered Germanic tribes that had been accepted into Roman lands, and all those other non-Romans who were making Rome a little less Roman, a little at a time.
On that fateful day in 406, nature collaborated when the Rhine froze and allowed the non-Roman Barbarians to move across Roman lands unhindered to unleash their final rampage.
Undoubtedly, Rome would have fallen a little later (still with a whimper, as Wilders says) without the Rhine's great freeze over, but it puts a doomsday immensity to imagine endless, infinite, numbers of rampaging Barbarians hurtling across solid water to seize, unchallenged, the prestigious Roman lands. The gods showed their favor to the Germanic tribes in that one simple act of turning water into land.
The story continues that the Barbarians wrought, out of their unstoppable energy, Western civilization. And they didn't completely destroy Rome, and wisely (not an adverb one usually associates with hordes of savages) used it as a backbone to build their new world.
Wilders is too rational (and an atheist) to extrapolate this apocalyptic scenario into our modern world. God's wrath is real. Water can turn into whatever God wants it to. Civilizations can be destroyed in mere (I don't even know how to count God's time) minutes.
But what of the barbarians of our era? How are we in the West even remotely prepared for the Götterdämmerung that might occur? Like the Romans, we have included alien cultures and peoples into the fabrics of our societies. "Assimilation" was an imperialistic outreach and outstretch for the Romans. Hierarchies were strictly maintained. The Romans were always on top. But we have extended our reception of aliens with liberal notions of equalities and freedoms, and in fact put them on pedestals. We insist that they are better than us and willingly assume subordination. We think this is being civilized.
Immigrants piggy-back on our equality-seeking ethos and brazenly exploit it (and who is to blame them?), happily displacing their hosts and taking the helm themselves. But unlike the era of the Romans, these immigrants have nothing in common with us or with each other (our magnanimity keeps adding disparate groups to our shores, as different from us as they are from each other) and they all compete for the spoils of this new-found treasure chest. When immigration turns to conquest, as the Germanic tribes showed, how will we defend ourselves?
In fact, the time has come when this isn't simply a hypothetical question, or imagining a distant future. Our modern day barbarians have risen and are in war mode. Muslims have told us through their holy book, in their mosques, by their historical trajectory, and even in our own sacrosanct institutions of learning and knowledge, that they are getting ready. They are not satisfied with borrowed land and borrowed culture. Most important, though, they will not tolerate our God and our religion.
In the imaginable scenario that these modern day barbarians succeed with their invasion, what next? Will we see a renaissance of a new world, a new West, as we saw with the Germans? The short answer is "no." Their history of destruction and regression is too long and meticulously documented by the very West they are devastating. We have refused to learn from our own observations. We are ignoring history to our detriment.