I highly recommend Mark Steyn's book, 'America Alone'. It's an outstanding read, something that everyone in America should read in order to get an understanding of where we stand in the world today, and where we're headed. Check out the first link to see my review of it, and more information about it. If you want to get the general idea of the book without reading the whole thing, he posted a condensed version of the book's general idea at the Wall Street Journal a couple years ago. Here are some excerpts:
One prime example is multiculturalism:
Steyn argues that radical Islam is ideally suited to multiculturalism because multiculturalism refuses to look at the actual society and what it does, but rather seeks to make the looker feel good about saying nice things about radical Islam. He goes on to offer numerous examples of how multiculturalism has allowed radical Islam to flourish, often at the expense of those very same multiculturalists who support radical Islam. As Steyn puts it:
Multiculturalism is turning our attention away from things that are important to things that are unimportant (like 'saving' the environment). The underlying reality of our world is that it's all about the use and utilization of resources, and multiculturalism has skewed what we consider to be important resources. While we in the Western world are focused on conserving oil and other fossil fuels, Muslims are exploiting the one resource even more indispensible than those: people.
It is this fundamental misunderstanding in the West (i.e. the demographics factor) that Steyn suggests will end the world as we know it in the next few decades:
The Western world is seeing unprecedented declines in population, but by contrast Muslim nations are skyrocketing:
Now, I should interject here to say that in the two years since this article was posted, the U.S. has seen a bit of a rise in the birth rate, up to 2.1, or right on the replacement rate. Steyn goes on:
Steyn illustrates some very sobering conclusions:
And that's precisely the point. Muslims are patient, and are strategically taking over Europe. Steyn's entire argument is that in the next one or two generations, Europe's multiculturalism will allow so many Muslims to have moved in that it won't be able to be anything but Islamic.
The short version: it's the demographics, stupid.
This is what Steyn means when he says that the world as we know it will cease to exist. The Western world is quite literally dying, and is being replaced with Muslims who overwhelmingly want to live under Islamic rule. This process will transform the world, and there's nothing to keep America from the same fate as Europe...except Americans who understand this strategy and work to prevent it from coming to fruition.
Again, I cannot recommend 'America Alone' highly enough. If you are concerned by radical Islam -- personally, I believe it is the battle of our generation, as our parents/grandparents faced the Nazis -- you need to understand the endgame, and how the pieces are being positioned. If you've already been check-mated, it's too late to act, so we need to understand what's going on NOW, before the endgame, and take moves to prevent it.
There's my two cents.
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 not 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 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 and Human Services.
The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism 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 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only 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--then 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 opportunistic 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.
One obstacle to doing that is 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 and Human Services.
The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism 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 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only 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--then 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 opportunistic 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.
One prime example is 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.
Steyn argues that radical Islam is ideally suited to multiculturalism because multiculturalism refuses to look at the actual society and what it does, but rather seeks to make the looker feel good about saying nice things about radical Islam. He goes on to offer numerous examples of how multiculturalism has allowed radical Islam to flourish, often at the expense of those very same multiculturalists who support radical Islam. As Steyn puts it:
[M]any enlightened Western leaders ... will [congratulate themselves] on [their] boundless tolerance even as the forces of intolerance consume [them].
Multiculturalism is turning our attention away from things that are important to things that are unimportant (like 'saving' the environment). The underlying reality of our world is that it's all about the use and utilization of resources, and multiculturalism has skewed what we consider to be important resources. While we in the Western world are focused on conserving oil and other fossil fuels, Muslims are exploiting the one resource even more indispensible than those: people.
It is this fundamental misunderstanding in the West (i.e. the demographics factor) that Steyn suggests will end the world as we know it in the next few decades:
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 80 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 . . .
The Western world is seeing unprecedented declines in population, but by contrast Muslim nations are skyrocketing:
[T]he 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.
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.
Now, I should interject here to say that in the two years since this article was posted, the U.S. has seen a bit of a rise in the birth rate, up to 2.1, or right on the replacement rate. Steyn goes on:
[D]emographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage.
[T]he 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 U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.
Can these trends continue for another 30 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 M. Chirac, Herr Schroeder & 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 Mr. 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.
[T]he 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 U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.
Can these trends continue for another 30 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 M. Chirac, Herr Schroeder & 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 Mr. 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.
Steyn illustrates some very sobering conclusions:
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 slut: 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 birthrates? 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.
This is something about which I've often been completely befuddled. The liberal Left is filled with people who place tolerance as their highest virtue, whether it be tolerance for the gay/lesbian lifestyle, tolerance for those who choose abortion, tolerance for those of different skin color, or tolerance for treating women the same (not equal, but the same) as men despite men and women being very different in some ways. None of these things are tolerated by Islam, and the punishment for these intolerances are brutal, often fatal. Under the auspices of Islam, Muslim women are treated like animals, there is no free speech, and utterly ridiculous things incur severe penalties (a female rape victim receiving 200 lashes for encouraging the rapist, fingers being cut off for smoking cigarettes, etc.). It's truly a wonder to me why any woman or gay person would support anything remotely Islamic, because they will be the first ones to get their heads chopped off when Islam runs the joint! Unfortunately, multiculturalism prevents them from looking at the reality of Islam, instead relying on feeling good about saying nice things about it.And that's precisely the point. Muslims are patient, and are strategically taking over Europe. Steyn's entire argument is that in the next one or two generations, Europe's multiculturalism will allow so many Muslims to have moved in that it won't be able to be anything but Islamic.
According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60% of British Muslims want to live under Shariah--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"?
The short version: it's the demographics, stupid.
This is what Steyn means when he says that the world as we know it will cease to exist. The Western world is quite literally dying, and is being replaced with Muslims who overwhelmingly want to live under Islamic rule. This process will transform the world, and there's nothing to keep America from the same fate as Europe...except Americans who understand this strategy and work to prevent it from coming to fruition.
Again, I cannot recommend 'America Alone' highly enough. If you are concerned by radical Islam -- personally, I believe it is the battle of our generation, as our parents/grandparents faced the Nazis -- you need to understand the endgame, and how the pieces are being positioned. If you've already been check-mated, it's too late to act, so we need to understand what's going on NOW, before the endgame, and take moves to prevent it.
There's my two cents.
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