Caliphate Kindle Edition

Those who are concerned about the current flood of "Syrian" refugees being predominantly single and male may be missing the point of the danger they represent.

Kratman's novel "Caliphate" explores the future of Europe as a Muslin-dominated society, its Christian population relegated to second-class citizens. Multiple factors are the cause: different reproduction rates of the two groups, failure of Muslim immigrants to assimilate into the society they have joined, and the basic philosophy of Islam as antithetical to democracy. (In the afterword, Kratman adds another: the widespread choice of Christian Europeans for present-day benefits over the welfare of their grandchildren.)

You may debate Kratman's conclusions, but the information that triggers his story is incontestable. When I was a youngster, a similar tale by Cyril Kornbluth was titled "Marching Morons." Whether the out-producing parents are Muslim or moron, the result is the same: you get more of whichever you breed more of. Eventually, moron or Muslim values and goals prevail, and society changes irrevocably.

I first read "Caliphate" in 2009, and enjoyed it more then as military sci-fi than as societal commentary. The story is gripping: two Christian children are removed from their parents in payment of the tax assessed on non-Muslim citizens in Germany. The boy becomes a janissary, "reverts" to Islam—and then becomes a rebel secret Christian again after he is forced to crucify a priest. The girl becomes a slave, first as a companion for a favored Muslim daughter, then as a sex slave in a brothel. Unlike her brother, the girl is allowed—even encouraged—to continue to display her Christian faith, as a titillation to her rapists.

Kratman avoids the "Evil Nazis/Good Allies" trap. The nastiest characters in the story are Christian (or at least non-Muslim) scientists eager to produce a biological weapon in exchange for money and "objects of lust." Slavery of the obvious kind is practiced by Christians from South Africa in support of the native slavery in the Muslim world. Chinese and Americans opposed to Islam use "chipped agents"—humans enslaved by control circuits built into them—to infiltrate the Islamic countries.

The action reads like a mashup of Spartacus, Where Eagles Dare, Andromeda Strain, and The Giver. But however you read the novel, you are left with the queasy realization that, while it may be fiction, it is far too close to real-world events to sleep easy at night.

Mr Kratman has painted a very dark picture of a world in which Islamic Sharia Law has been imposed on Europe, slavery is common and all who are not Islamic face a very cruel future. His premise is that Europe took no action when they had the chance to curtail Moslem immigration and that the demographics ended up dooming Christians to second class status as dhimis with little or no influence or control over their fate while the fate of others is even worse. Jews have completely disappeared from Europe (presumably killed by the Moslems), homosexuals are hung if caught and atheists, presumably, no longer exist, at least publicly.

The actual story takes place in two time periods - the "then" involving the time roughly contemporaneous to our time in which we follow the life of one of the main characters through her passionate anti-Americanism and her love for a moslem immigrant and the "now" (about 100 years later) involving the woman's descendants who (if still Christian) are now slaves and (if converted) now soldiers. The book may be a bit "over the top" but Mr Kratman has constructed a world which is true to its basic premise, that unfettered Islamic immigration will doom a Western society, with its limited birth rate, to ultimate Islamic rule and the end of the freedoms we think of as part of our Western Civilization's heritage. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech and the basic equality of all individuals are gone from Europe in this book and we see Mr Kratman's version of the period about 1000 years ago in Moslem controlled North Africa, Spain, part of Italy and the Mediterranean and the picture is far from that described in picturesque stories of Moslem Spain.

The United States, which basically has no part in the "now" storyline of this book, seems to have retained its basic structure as a Western nation although some of its freedoms are gone and it has been rendered basically "Moslem-free" through the actions taken after a series of nuclear terrorist actions destroyed several large cities and millions of people. The horrifying tale of the result of these actions, and those taken by the King of England after London suffered a similar attack, is best summed up by the term used in the book when it mentioned that the King, compared to the US President, "was sane". Traditional Moslem lands in the Middle East no longer exist as nations due to the nuclear retaliation of the US against those it felt were complicit in the attack on the US.

Your view of this book will depend upon your view of the future where Moslems compose a majority of Western Nations. If you believe that a Moslem majority would enact Sharia Law as general law, then this book serves as a prescient warning. If you believe that Moslems, like earlier immigrants, will assimilate into society and become Western in behavior, then this book is just another example of scare tactics. Regardless, Mr Kratman has crafted a book in which the characters take on the air of real people and the events seem like a plausible, if horrifying, future. Your view of the book is likely to be shaped by your current politics.

Sadly, the novel is somewhat dated by now - things have gotten MUCH worse since it was written - but that may be part of the reason why it still contains way too much PC and not enough cold, hard facts.
Seems to me that the author's heart was in the right place, but his historical knowledge might be lacking, which is why he sometimes makes the wrong or insufficient connections.
The writing is on a beach reading level - you'll be done in an afternoon - and if you're squeamish or easily offended, this book isn't for you.
It does, however describe a dystopian future of horrifying proportions, a future you can see unfold in Europe as we speak.