"Replacement" Afoot in Europe, Too, Thanks to "Western Guilt"

One opiner says (mixed metaphor alert) the poison pill of "guilt" is the vehicle that's driving this civilization off a cliff:

...of the many factors (such as secularization) behind this historically unprecedented acceptance of alien peoples, one stands out as most critical: a Western European sense of guilt. To many educated Western Europeans, their civilization is less about scientific advances, unprecedented levels of prosperity and the achievement of unique human freedoms, and more about colonialism, racism and fascism. 

The brutal French conquest of Algeria, the uniquely evil German genocide against the Jews and the legacy of extreme nationalism cause many Europeans, in the analysis of Pascal Bruckner, a French intellectual, to see themselves as “the sick man of the planet,” responsible for every global problem from poverty to environmental rapacity; “the white man has sown grief and ruin wherever he has gone.” Affluence implies robbery, light skin manifests sinfulness.

Bruckner labels this the “tyranny of guilt” and I encountered some colorful expressions during my recent travels of such self-hatred. A French Catholic priest expressed remorse over the record of the church. A conservative German intellectual preferred Syrians and Iraqis to his fellow Germans. A Swedish tour guide put down fellow Swedes and hoped he would not be perceived as one. 

Indeed, many Europeans feel their guilt makes them superior; the more they dislike themselves, the more they preen — inspiring a strange mix of self-loathing and moral superiority that, among other consequence, leaves them reluctant to commit the time and money required to bear children. “Europe is losing faith in itself, and birthrates have collapsed,” notes Irish scientist William Reville.

The para above, and the one that follows, sounds a lot what Mark Steyn outlined in America Alone--how civilizational self-loathing is resulting a precipitous--and calamitous--drop in the birth rate; in effect, a suicidal drive to "atone" for civilizational "crimes" via self-abnegation and, ultimately, extinction:

The catastrophic birth dearth underway has created an existential demographic crisis. With women of the European Union bearing just 1.58 children as of 2014, the continent lacks the offspring to replace itself; over time, this far-less-than-replacement rate means a precipitous decline in the numbers of ethnic Portuguese, Greeks and others. To maintain the welfare state and the pension machine requires importing foreigners.
These two drives — expiating guilt and replacing nonexistent children — then combine to encourage a massive influx of non-Western peoples, what the French writer Renaud Camus calls “the great replacement.”

To paraphrase the poet, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a "great replacement."