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Politics > Politics-USA |
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"NAH NAH@" |
| Date: |
01 Jan 2006 11:58:16 PM |
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It’s the demography, stupid - Mark Steyn <=== S U P E R B = |
http://www.newcriterion.com/archives/24/01/its-the-demography/
It’s the demography, stupid
The New Criterion
Jan 2, 2006
Mark Steyn
Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as
baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the western world will
survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within
our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries.
There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as
Italy or the Netherlands- probably-just as in Istanbul there’s still a
building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s
merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and
the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The
challenge for those who reckon western civilization is on balance
better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least
some parts of the west.
One obstacle to doing that is the fact that, in the typical election
campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political
platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much
all parties in the rest of the west are largely about what one would
call the secondary impulses of society-government health care,
government day care (which Canada’s thinking of introducing),
government paternity leave (which Britain’s just introduced). We’ve
prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national
defense, family, faith, and, most basic of all, reproductive
activity-"Go forth and multiply," because if you don’t you won’t be
able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like
cradle-to-grave welfare. Americans sometimes don’t understand how far
gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the
Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is
somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to
important jobs like the health department. I don’t think Don Rumsfeld
would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health & Human
Services.
The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it
requires a religious-society birth rate to sustain it. Post-Christian
hyper-rationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than
Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to
ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a
twenty-first-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who
were forbidden from reproducing and thus could only increase their
numbers by conversion. The problem is that secondary- impulse
societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths-or, at any rate,
virtues-and that’s why they’re proving so feeble at dealing with a
primal force like Islam.
Speaking of which, if we are at war-and half the American people and
significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada, and Europe don’t
accept that proposition-than what exactly is the war about?
We know it’s not really a "war on terror." Nor is it, at heart, a war
against Islam, or even "radical Islam." The Muslim faith, whatever its
merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of
us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general
rule, it’s easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants:
Muslims vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir,
Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand,
Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists
in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act
locally.
Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it’s not what this thing’s about.
Radical Islam is an opportunist infection, like AIDS: it’s not the HIV
that kills you, it’s the pneumonia you get when your body’s too weak
to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military,
they lose-as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World
War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over
some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the
smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on
the battlefield, but they figure there’s an excellent chance they can
drag things out until western civilization collapses in on itself and
Islam inherits by default.
That’s what the war’s about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As
a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: "Civilizations die from
suicide, not murder"-as can be seen throughout much of "the western
world" right now. The progressive agenda -lavish social welfare,
abortion, secularism, multiculturalism-is collectively the real
suicide bomb. Take multiculturalism: the great thing about
multiculturalism is that it doesn’t involve knowing anything about
other cultures-the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi,
who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It’s
fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was subliminally accepted on
that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal
don’t want to live in anything but an advanced western society:
Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched native
dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing
"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or that your holistic masseuse uses
techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that
you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or
Native-American society. It’s a quintessential piece of progressive
humbug.
Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of just about
every prominent western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush
did, the Prince of Wales did, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
did, the Prime Minister of Canada did… . The Premier of Ontario
didn’t, and so twenty Muslim community leaders had a big summit to
denounce him for failing to visit a mosque. I don’t know why he
didn’t. Maybe there was a big backlog, it was mosque drivetime, prime
ministers in gridlock up and down the freeway trying to get to the
Sword of the Infidel-Slayer Mosque on Elm Street. But for whatever
reason he couldn’t fit it into his hectic schedule. Ontario’s
Citizenship Minister did show up at a mosque, but the imams took that
as a great insult, like the Queen sending Fergie to open the
Commonwealth Games. So the Premier of Ontario had to hold a big
meeting with the aggrieved imams to apologize for not going to a
mosque and, as The Toronto Star’s reported it, "to provide them with
reassurance that the provincial government does not see them as the
enemy."
Anyway, the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died down, but it set
the tone for our general approach to these atrocities. The old
definition of a nanosecond was the gap between the traffic light
changing in New York and the first honk from a car behind. The new
definition is the gap between a terrorist bombing and the press
release from an Islamic lobby group warning of a backlash against
Muslims. In most circumstances, it would be considered appallingly bad
taste to deflect attention from an actual "hate crime" by
scaremongering about a purely hypothetical one. Needless to say, there
is no campaign of Islamophobic hate crimes. If anything, the west is
awash in an epidemic of self-hate crimes. A commenter on Tim Blair’s
website in Australia summed it up in a note-perfect parody of a
Guardian headline: "Muslim Community Leaders Warn of Backlash from
Tomorrow Morning’s Terrorist Attack." Those community leaders have the
measure of us.
Radical Islam is what multiculturalism has been waiting for all along.
In The Survival of Culture, I quoted the eminent British barrister
Helena Kennedy, QC. Shortly after September 11, Baroness Kennedy
argued on a BBC show that it was too easy to disparage "Islamic
fundamentalists." "We as western liberals too often are fundamentalist
ourselves," she complained. "We don’t look at our own
fundamentalisms."
Well, said the interviewer, what exactly would those western liberal
fundamentalisms be? "One of the things that we are too ready to insist
upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is
something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I’m not sure
that’s true."
Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance
is making us intolerant of other people’s intolerance, which is
intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the
highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you’re nice to
gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like
that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson
of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. In other words, just as the
AIDS pandemic greatly facilitated societal surrender to the gay
agenda, so 9/11 is greatly facilitating our surrender to the most
extreme aspects of the multicultural agenda.
For example, one day in 2004, a couple of Canadians returned home, to
Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto. They were the son
and widow of a fellow called Ahmed Said Khadr, who back on the
Pakistani-Afghan frontier was known as "al-Kanadi." Why? Because he
was the highest-ranking Canadian in al Qaeda-plenty of other Canucks
in al Qaeda but he was the Numero Uno. In fact, one could argue that
the Khadr family is Canada’s principal contribution to the war on
terror. Granted they’re on the wrong side (if you’ll forgive me being
judgmental) but no can argue that they aren’t in the thick of things.
One of Mr. Khadr’s sons was captured in Afghanistan after killing a
U.S. Special Forces medic. Another was captured and held at
Guantanamo. A third blew himself up while killing a Canadian soldier
in Kabul. Pa Khadr himself died in an al Qaeda shoot-out with
Pakistani forces in early 2004. And they say we Canadians aren’t doing
our bit in this war!
In the course of the fatal shoot-out of al-Kanadi, his youngest son
was paralyzed. And, not unreasonably, Junior didn’t fancy a prison
hospital in Peshawar. So Mrs. Khadr and her boy returned to Toronto so
he could enjoy the benefits of Ontario government healthcare. "I’m
Canadian, and I’m not begging for my rights," declared the widow
Khadr. "I’m demanding my rights."
As they always say, treason’s hard to prove in court, but given the
circumstances of Mr. Khadr’s death it seems clear that not only was he
providing "aid and comfort to the Queen’s enemies" but that he was, in
fact, the Queen’s enemy. The Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light
Infantry, the Royal 22nd Regiment, and other Canucks have been
participating in Afghanistan, on one side of the conflict, and the
Khadr family had been over there participating on the other side.
Nonetheless, the Prime Minister of Canada thought Boy Khadr’s claims
on the public health system was an excellent opportunity to
demonstrate his own deep personal commitment to "diversity." Asked
about the Khadrs’ return to Toronto, he said, "I believe that once you
are a Canadian citizen, you have the right to your own views and to
disagree."
That’s the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: you can choose
which side of the war you want to fight on. When the draft card
arrives, just tick "home team" or "enemy," according to taste. The
Canadian Prime Minister is a typical late-stage western politician: He
could have said, well, these are contemptible people and I know many
of us are disgusted at the idea of our tax dollars being used to
provide health care for a man whose Canadian citizenship is no more
than a flag of convenience, but unfortunately that’s the law and,
while we can try to tighten it, it looks like this lowlife’s got away
with it. Instead, his reflex instinct was to proclaim this as a
wholehearted demonstration of the virtues of the multicultural state.
Like many enlightened western leaders, the Canadian Prime Minister
will be congratulating himself on his boundless tolerance even as the
forces of intolerance consume him.
That, by the way, is the one point of similarity between the jihad and
conventional terrorist movements like the IRA or ETA. Terror groups
persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets:
the IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the
capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that
while they could never win militarily, they also could never be
defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is
that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first
truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole
world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: they want it and
they’ve calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see
them off.
We spend a lot of time at The New Criterion attacking the elites and
we’re right to do so. The commanding heights of the culture have
behaved disgracefully for the last several decades. But, if it were
just a problem with the elites, it wouldn’t be that serious: the mob
could rise up and hang ’em from lampposts-a scenario that’s not
unlikely in certain Continental countries. But the problem now goes
way beyond the ruling establishment. The annexation by government of
most of the key responsibilities of life-child-raising, taking care of
your elderly parents-has profoundly changed the relationship between
the citizen and the state. At some point-I would say socialized health
care is a good marker-you cross a line, and it’s very hard then to
persuade a citizenry enjoying that much government largesse to cross
back. In National Review recently, I took issue with that line Gerald
Ford always uses to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences: "A
government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to
take away everything you have." Actually, you run into trouble long
before that point: A government big enough to give you everything you
want still isn’t big enough to get you to give anything back. That’s
what the French and German political classes are discovering.
Go back to that list of local conflicts I mentioned. The jihad has
held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you’re not shy
about taking on the Israelis, the Russians, the Indians, and the
Nigerians, why wouldn’t you fancy your chances against the Belgians
and Danes and New Zealanders?
So the jihadists are for the most part doing no more than giving us a
prod in the rear as we sleepwalk to the cliff. When I say "sleepwalk,"
it’s not because we’re a blasé culture. On the contrary, one of the
clearest signs of our decline is the way we expend so much energy
worrying about the wrong things. If you’ve read Jared Diamond’s
bestselling book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,
you’ll know it goes into a lot of detail about Easter Island going
belly up because they chopped down all their trees. Apparently that’s
why they’re not a G8 member or on the UN Security Council. Same with
the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond’s other curious choices of
"societies." Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty much every society
collapses because it chops down its trees.
Poor old Diamond can’t see the forest because of his obsession with
the trees. (Russia’s collapsing even as it’s undergoing
reforestation.) One way "societies choose to fail or succeed" is by
choosing what to worry about. The western world has delivered more
wealth and more comfort to more of its citizens than any other
civilization in history, and in return we’ve developed a great cult of
worrying. You know the classics of the genre: In 1968, in his
bestselling book The Population Bomb, the eminent scientist Paul
Ehrlich declared: "In the 1970s the world will undergo
famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."
In 1972, in their landmark study The Limits to Growth, the Club of
Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of
mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and
copper, lead, and gas by 1993.
None of these things happened. In fact, quite the opposite is
happening. We’re pretty much awash in resources, but we’re running out
of people-the one truly indispensable resource, without which none of
the others matter. Russia’s the most obvious example: it’s the largest
country on earth, it’s full of natural resources, and yet it’s
dying-its population is falling calamitously.
The default mode of our elites is that anything that happens-from
terrorism to tsunamis-can be understood only as deriving from the
perniciousness of western civilization. As Jean-François Revel wrote,
"Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and
does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."
And even though none of the prognostications of the eco-doom
blockbusters of the 1970s came to pass, all that means is that thirty
years on, the end of the world has to be rescheduled. The amended
estimated time of arrival is now 2032. That’s to say, in 2002, the
United Nations Global Environmental Outlook predicted "the destruction
of 70 percent of the natural world in thirty years, mass extinction of
species… . More than half the world will be afflicted by water
shortages, with 95 percent of people in the Middle East with severe
problems … 25 percent of all species of mammals and 10 percent of
birds will be extinct …"
Etc., etc., for 450 pages. Or to cut to the chase, as The Guardian
headlined it, "Unless We Change Our Ways, The World Faces Disaster."
Well, here’s my prediction for 2032: unless we change our ways the
world faces a future … where the environment will look pretty darn
good. If you’re a tree or a rock, you’ll be living in clover. It’s the
Italians and the Swedes who’ll be facing extinction and the loss of
their natural habitat.
There will be no environmental doomsday. Oil, carbon dioxide
emissions, deforestation: none of these things is worth worrying
about. What’s worrying is that we spend so much time worrying about
things that aren’t worth worrying about that we don’t worry about the
things we should be worrying about. For thirty years, we’ve had
endless wake-up calls for things that aren’t worth waking up for. But
for the very real, remorseless shifts in our society-the ones truly
jeopardizing our future-we’re sound asleep. The world is changing
dramatically right now and hysterical experts twitter about a
hypothetical decrease in the Antarctic krill that might conceivably
possibly happen so far down the road there’s unlikely to be any
Italian or Japanese enviro-worriers left alive to be devastated by it.
In a globalized economy, the environmentalists want us to worry about
First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral,
primitive Third World backwaters. Yet, insofar as "globalization" is a
threat, the real danger is precisely the opposite-that the
peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First World.
Pigs are valued assets and sleep in the living room in rural China-and
next thing you know an unknown respiratory disease is killing people
in Toronto, just because someone got on a plane. That’s the way to
look at Islamism: we fret about McDonald’s and Disney, but the big
globalization success story is the way the Saudis have taken what was
eighty years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam
practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and successfully exported it
to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester, Buffalo …
What’s the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and
pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its
culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birth rate is
the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born
in 2006, it’s hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in
2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their
Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on
babies around the western world is that they’re running out a lot
faster than the oil is. "Replacement" fertility rate-i.e., the number
you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not
getting any smaller-is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well
above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83,
Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in
common?
Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and
you’ll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement
rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79,
Australia 1.76. But Canada’s fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below
replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the
death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half
replacement rate. That’s to say, Spain’s population is halving every
generation. By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22
percent, Bulgaria’s by 36 percent, Estonia’s by 52 percent. In
America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to
apply for honorary membership of the EU: in the 2004 election, John
Kerry won the sixteen with the lowest birth rates; George W. Bush took
twenty-five of the twenty-six states with the highest. By 2050, there
will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans-and
mostly red-state Americans.
As fertility shrivels, societies get older-and Japan and much of
Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever
been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going
out of business-unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is
that likely? I don’t think so. If you look at European election
results-most recently in Germany-it’s hard not to conclude that, while
voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they’re
unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their
government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a
generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously
reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a
proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It’s
presently sixty, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of
the average Scots worker is that that’s somebody else’s problem. The
average German worker now puts in 22 percent fewer hours per year than
his American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain
electorally viable will propose closing the gap in any meaningful way.
This isn’t a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and
the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to
allocate blame, one could argue that it’s a product of the U.S.
military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated
European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could
concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington’s
problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose
fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created
NATO as a post-modern military alliance? The "free world," as the
Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having
been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it’s
hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to
re-shoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care
on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this
long-term softening of large sections of the west makes them
ill-suited to resisting a primal force like Islam.
There is no "population bomb." There never was. Birth rates are
declining all over the world-eventually every couple on the planet may
decide to opt for the western yuppie model of one designer baby at the
age of thirty-nine. But demographics is a game of last man standing.
The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge
advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have
understood that their so-called "population explosion" was really a
massive population adjustment. Of the increase in global population
between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9
percent of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26 percent of the
increase. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from
just under 30 percent of the world’s population to just over 20
percent, the Muslim nations increased from about 15 percent to 20
percent.
1970 doesn’t seem that long ago. If you’re the age many of the chaps
running the western world today are wont to be, your pants are
narrower than they were back then and your hair’s less groovy, but the
landscape of your life-the look of your house, the lay-out of your
car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the
stuff in the fridge-isn’t significantly different. Aside from the
Internet and the cellphone and the CD, everything in your world seems
pretty much the same but slightly modified.
And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald
statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of
the global population as the Muslim world: 30 percent to 15 percent.
By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20 percent.
And by 2020?
So the world’s people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then
and a lot less "western." Europe is significantly more Islamic, having
taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)-or
the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries
(Ireland, Belgium, Denmark, and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing
religion in the west: in the UK, more Muslims than Christians attend
religious services each week.
Can these trends continue for another thirty years without having
consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent
after the neutron bomb: the grand buildings will still be standing but
the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a
remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or
ill, shaped the modern world.
What will Europe be like at the end of this process? Who knows? On the
one hand, there’s something to be said for the notion that America
will find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than
Monsieur Chirac, Herr Schröder, and Co. On the other hand, given
Europe’s track record, getting there could be very bloody. But either
way this is the real battlefield. The al Qaeda nutters can never find
enough suicidal pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to
topple America. But, unlike us, the Islamists think long-term, and,
given their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the
emerging Muslim lobby groups there, much of what they’re flying planes
into buildings for they’re likely to wind up with just by waiting a
few more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock ’em over?
The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows
a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. You
don’t notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually
there’s a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly,
self-deluding slogan-like Bill Clinton’s "It’s about the future of all
our children." We on the right spent the 1990s gleefully mocking
Clinton’s tedious invocation, drizzled like syrup over everything from
the Kosovo war to highway appropriations. But most of the rest of the
west can’t even steal his lame bromides: A society that has no
children has no future.
Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the
Russian, Austrian, German, and Turkish empires would be gone within
half a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who dismissed
Reagan as an "amiable dunce" (in Clark Clifford’s phrase) assured us
the Soviet Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA analysts’ position
was that East Germany was the ninth biggest economic power in the
world. In 1987 there was no rash of experts predicting the imminent
fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the USSR itself.
Yet, even by the minimal standards of these wretched precedents,
so-called "post-Christian" civilizations-as a prominent EU official
described his continent to me-are more prone than traditional
societies to mistake the present tense for a permanent feature.
Religious cultures have a much greater sense of both past and future,
as we did a century ago, when we spoke of death as joining "the great
majority" in "the unseen world." But if secularism’s starting point is
that this is all there is, it’s no surprise that, consciously or not,
they invest the here and now with far greater powers of endurance than
it’s ever had. The idea that progressive Euro-welfarism is the
permanent resting place of human development was always foolish; we
now know that it’s suicidally so.
To avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants at
a rate no stable society has ever attempted. The CIA is predicting the
EU will collapse by 2020. Given that the CIA’s got pretty much
everything wrong for half a century, that would suggest the EU is a
shoo-in to be the colossus of the new millennium. But even a flop
spook is right twice a generation. If anything, the date of EU
collapse is rather a cautious estimate. It seems more likely that
within the next couple of European election cycles, the internal
contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way,
and that by 2010 we’ll be watching burning buildings, street riots,
and assassinations on American network news every night. Even if they
avoid that, the idea of a childless Europe ever rivaling America
militarily or economically is laughable. Sometime this century there
will be 500 million Americans, and what’s left in Europe will either
be very old or very Muslim. Japan faces the same problem: its
population is already in absolute decline, the first gentle slope of a
death spiral it will be unlikely ever to climb out of. Will Japan be
an economic powerhouse if it’s populated by Koreans and Filipinos?
Very possibly. Will Germany if it’s populated by Algerians? That’s a
trickier proposition.
Best-case scenario? The Continent winds up as Vienna with Swedish tax
rates.
Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot sooner-and
we’re already seeing a drift in that direction.
In July 2003, speaking to the United States Congress, Tony Blair
remarked: "As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time
invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you
leave behind?"
Excellent question. Britannia will never again wield the unrivalled
power she enjoyed at her imperial apogee, but the Britannic
inheritance endures, to one degree or another, in many of the key
regional players in the world today-Australia, India, South Africa-and
in dozens of island statelets from the Caribbean to the Pacific. If
China ever takes its place as an advanced nation, it will be because
the People’s Republic learns more from British Hong Kong than Hong
Kong learns from the Little Red Book. And of course the dominant power
of our time derives its political character from eighteenth-century
British subjects who took English ideas a little further than the
mother country was willing to go.
A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history
triumphalism, the "what do you leave behind?" question is more urgent
than most of us expected. "The west," as a concept, is dead, and the
west, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.
What will London-or Paris, or Amsterdam-be like in the mid-Thirties?
If European politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean
the populace off their unsustainable thirty-five-hour weeks,
retirement at sixty, etc., then to keep the present level of pensions
and health benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from
North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to
majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the
primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society
become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without
becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?
This ought to be the left’s issue. I’m a conservative-I’m not entirely
on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading
sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a *****:
I’m with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is
feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult
of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society
is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first
victims of the west’s collapsed birth rates? Even if one were to take
the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping
imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case
that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by "a
woman’s right to choose," in any sense. I watched that big abortion
rally in Washington last year, where Ashley Judd and Gloria Steinem
were cheered by women waving "Keep your Bush off my bush" placards,
and I thought it was the equivalent of a White Russian tea party in
1917. By prioritizing a "woman’s right to choose," western women are
delivering their societies into the hands of fellows far more
patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad. If any of those women marching
for their "reproductive rights" still have babies, they might like to
ponder demographic realities: A little girl born today will be
unlikely, at the age of forty, to be free to prance around
demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting "Hands off my
bush!"
Just before the 2004 election, that eminent political analyst Cameron
Diaz appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to explain what was at stake:
"Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our
bodies… . If you think that rape should be legal, then don’t vote. But
if you think that you have a right to your body," she advised Oprah’s
viewers, "then you should vote."
Poor Cameron. A couple of weeks later, the scary people won. She lost
all rights to her body. Unlike Alec Baldwin, she couldn’t even move to
France. Her body was grounded in Terminal D.
But, after framing the 2004 Presidential election as a referendum on
the right to rape, Miss Diaz might be interested to know that men
enjoy that right under many Islamic legal codes around the world. In
his book The Empty Cradle, Philip Longman asks: "So where will the
children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from
people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if
sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven,
individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market
culture dominated by fundamentalism-a new Dark Ages."
Bottom line for Cameron Diaz: There are worse things than John
Ashcroft out there.
Longman’s point is well taken. The refined antennae of western
liberals mean that, whenever one raises the question of whether there
will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a
generation or three hence, they cry, "Racism!" To fret about what
proportion of the population is "white" is grotesque and
inappropriate. But it’s not about race, it’s about culture. If 100
percent of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it
doesn’t matter whether 70 percent of them are "white" or only 5
percent are. But, if one part of your population believes in liberal
pluralist democracy and the other doesn’t, then it becomes a matter of
great importance whether the part that does is 9 percent of the
population or only 60, 50, 45 percent.
Since the President unveiled the so-called Bush Doctrine-the plan to
promote liberty throughout the Arab world-innumerable "progressives"
have routinely asserted that there’s no evidence Muslims want liberty
and, indeed, Islam is incompatible with democracy. If that’s true,
it’s a problem not for the Middle East today but for Europe the day
after tomorrow. According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60 percent of
British Muslims want to live under sharia-in the United Kingdom. If a
population "at odds with the modern world" is the fastest-breeding
group on the planet-if there are more Muslim nations, more
fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims
within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in
more and more transnational institutions-how safe a bet is the
survival of the "modern world"?
Not good.
"What do you leave behind?" asked Tony Blair. There will only be very
few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the
midpoint of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories
that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings?
Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that
matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them
are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? It’s the demography,
stupid. And, if they can’t muster the will to change course, then
"what do you leave behind?" is the only question that matters.
--
"If somebody from al-Qaida is calling you, we'd like to know why."
- President George W. Bush - January 1, 2006
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| User: "Richard Dell" |
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| Title: Re: It?s the demography, stupid - Mark Steyn <=== S U P E R B = |
02 Jan 2006 08:57:21 AM |
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"NAH" <NAH@> wrote in message
news:a4ghr1pcdaisf7v26mk3l6k9f5t6669ub3@4ax.com...
| http://www.newcriterion.com/archives/24/01/its-the-demography/
An interesting site - worth following.
"As a critical periodical, The New Criterion is probably more
consistently worth reading than any other magazine in English."
-Julian Symons, the London Times Literary Supplement
The symposium that these articles derive from was jointly organised
with the Social Affairs Unit - lots of good stuff there.
http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/
This, for example:
http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000552.php
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