Recommendation: America Alone

I just finished reading Mark Steyn's America Alone, and it's a whopper!

Steyn's background is a writer and demographer, and that shines through in this book. The topic is all about how the world is in the process of a monumental shift whether we want to acknowledge it or not - the question is what we (in America) are going to do about it. So what's the shift?

The Islamization of the world.

We all know there's an ideological battle between Islam and the West (America, Europe, and other democracies like Japan and Australia), but there's a key element that gets overlooked by almost everyone: demographics and birth rates.

For a nation to sustain its population (not growing, not shrinking), the birth rate has to be at least 2.1 children per woman. Steyn finds that most Western nations are far below that:

United States - 2.11
Australia - 1.7
Canada - 1.5
Germany - 1.3
Austria - 1.3
Italy - 1.2
Russia - 1.2
Spain - 1.1

Japan is already declining - why do you think they're investing so much in companion robots? It's for their aging population with no children. By contrast, take a look at some of the countries with the highest birth rates:

Niger - 7.46
Mali - 7.42
Somalia - 6.76
Afghanistan - 6.69
Yemen - 6.58

What's the difference? Islam.

So, just looking down the road a generation or two, it's a safe bet that Islam will be the dominant religion in much of the West (it's already the fastest growing religion in both North America and Europe), gaining political control of many nations simply through sheer numbers.

America is the only powerful, industrialized nation with a birth rate capable of sustaining non-Islamic growth.

From this statistical foundation, Steyn also examines in-depth the perils of Islam, the reasons socialist Europe tanked and what America needs to do to avoid a similar decline, and how political correctness is the cancer that eats away a society's ability and willingness to resist the incoming tide of Islamization.

This is probably one of the most illuminating and utterly terrifying books I've ever read. That is precisely why I believe every American needs to read and understand it - Mark Steyn hits so many nails dead on their heads that I found I had to put the book down frequently to think about how reality precisely matched what he said. His writing style is so delightfully snarky that I often found myself laughing out loud. At the same time, his conclusions are as sobering as they are undeniable.

If you want to understand Islam and why it matters that America stand up to it, you absolutely MUST read America Alone.