Demographic Politics And Population Growth - 2

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->MARK STEYN
Sept. 11, 2001, was not “the day everything changed,” but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On Sept.10, how many journalists had the Council of American-IslamicRelations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the MuslimCouncil of Britain in their Rolodexes? If you’d said thatwhether something does or does not cause offence to Muslimswould be the early 21st century’s principal politicaldynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Franceand the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought youwere crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of theiceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.


This is about the seven-eighths below the surface — thelarger forces at play in the developed world that have leftEurope too enfeebled to resist its remorselesstransformation into Eurabia and that call into question thefuture of much of the rest of the world. The key factorsare: demographic decline; the unsustainability of the socialdemocratic state; and civilizational exhaustion.
Let’s start with demography, because everything does:
If your school has 200 guys and you’re playing a school with2,000 pupils, it doesn’t mean your baseball team isdefinitely going to lose but it certainly gives the otherfellows a big starting advantage. Likewise, if you want tolaunch a revolution, it’s not very likely if you’ve only gotseven revolutionaries. And they’re all over 80. But, ifyou’ve got two million and seven revolutionaries and they’reall under 30 you’re in business.

For example, I wonder how many pontificators on the “MiddleEast peace process” ever run this number:

The median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8 years.

Once you know that, all the rest is details. If you were a”moderate Palestinian” leader, would you want to try to persuade a nation — or pseudo-nation — of unemployed poorly educated teenage boys raised in a UN-supervised European-funded death cult to see sense? Any analysis of the”Palestinian problem” that doesn’t take into account themost important determinant on the ground is a waste of time.

Likewise, the salient feature of Europe, Canada, Japan andRussia is that they’re running out of babies. What’shappening in the developed world is one of the fastestdemographic evolutions in history: most of us have seen agazillion heartwarming ethnic comedies — My Big Fat GreekWedding and its ilk — in which some uptight WASPy typestarts dating a gal from a vast loving fecund Mediterraneanfamily, so abundantly endowed with sisters and cousins anduncles that you can barely get in the room. It is, in fact,the inversion of the truth. Greece has a fertility ratehovering just below 1.3 births per couple, which is whatdemographers call the point of “lowest-low” fertility fromwhich no human society has ever recovered. And Greece’sfertility is the healthiest in Mediterranean Europe: Italyhas a fertility rate of 1.2, Spain 1.1. Insofar as anycitizens of the developed world have “big” families thesedays, it’s the anglo democracies: America’s fertility rateis 2.1, New Zealand a little below. Hollywood should bemaking My Big Fat Uptight Protestant Wedding in which somesad Greek only child marries into a big heartwarming NewZealand family where the spouse actually has a sibling.

As I say, this isn’t a projection: it’s happening now.There’s no need to extrapolate, and if you do it gets alittle freaky, but, just for fun, here goes: by 2050, 60 percent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, nocousins, no aunts, no uncles. The big Italian family, withpapa pouring the vino and mama spooning out the pasta downan endless table of grandparents and nieces and nephews,will be gone, no more, dead as the dinosaurs. As Noel Cowardonce remarked in another context, “Funiculi, funicula, funicyourself.” By mid-century, Italians will have no choice inthe matter.

Experts talk about root causes. But demography is the mostbasic root of all. A people that won’t multiply can’t goforth or go anywhere. Those who do will shape the age we live in.

Demographic decline and the unsustainability of the socialdemocratic state are closely related. In America,politicians upset about the federal deficit like to complainthat we’re piling up debts our children and grandchildrenwill have to pay off. But in Europe the unaffordable entitlements are in even worse shape: there are no kids orgrandkids to stick it to.

You might formulate it like this:

Age + Welfare = Disaster for you;

Youth + Will = Disaster for whoever gets in your way.

By “will,” I mean the metaphorical spine of a culture.Africa, to take another example, also has plenty of youngpeople, but it’s riddled with AIDS and, for the most part,Africans don’t think of themselves as Africans: as we saw inRwanda, their primary identity is tribal, and most tribeshave no global ambitions. Islam, however, has serious globalambitions, and it forms the primal, core identity of most ofits adherents — in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere.

Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare.

We are witnessing the end of the late 20th- centuryprogressive welfare democracy. Its fiscal bankruptcy ismerely a symptom of a more fundamental bankruptcy: itsinsufficiency as an animating principle for society. Thechildren and grandchildren of those fascists and republicanswho waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain nowshrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital. Toosedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly.Over on the other side of the equation, the modernmulticultural state is too watery a concept to bind hugenumbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship. So they look elsewhere and find the jihad. TheWestern Muslim’s pan-Islamic identity is merely the firstgreat cause in a world where globalized pathologies aretaking the place of old-school nationalism.

For states in demographic decline with ever more lavishsocial programs, the question is a simple one: can they getreal? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, thenthey’ll end their days in societies dominated by people witha very different world view.

Which brings us to the third factor — the enervated stateof the Western world, the sense of civilizational ennui, ofnations too mired in cultural relativism to understandwhat’s at stake. As it happens, that third point is closelyrelated to the first two. To Americans, it doesn’t alwaysseem obvious that there’s any connection between the “war onterror” and the so-called “pocketbook issues” of domesticpolitics. But there is a correlation between the structuralweaknesses of the social democratic state and the rise of aglobalized Islam. The state has gradually annexed all theresponsibilities of adulthood — health care, child care,care of the elderly — to the point where it’s effectivelysevered its citizens from humanity’s primal instincts, notleast the survival instinct. In the American context, thefederal “deficit” isn’t the problem; it’s the governmentprograms that cause the deficit. These programs would stillbe wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a cheque to cover themeach month. They corrode the citizen’s sense ofself-reliance to a potentially fatal degree. Big governmentis a national security threat: it increases yourvulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it lesslikely you’ll be able to summon the will to rebuff it. Weshould have learned that lesson on Sept. 11, 2001, when biggovernment flopped big-time and the only good news of theday came from the ad hoc citizen militia of Flight 93.

There were two forces at play in the late 20th century: inthe Eastern bloc, the collapse of Communism; in the West, the collapse of confidence. One of the most obvious refutations of Francis Fukuyama’s famous thesis The End Of History — written at the victory of liberal pluralistdemocracy over Soviet Communism — is that the victors didn’t see it as such. Americans — or at least non-Democrat-voting Americans — may talk about “winning”the Cold War but the French and the Belgians and Germans and Canadians don’t. Very few British do. These are all formal NATO allies — they were, technically, on the winning side against a horrible tyranny few would wish to live under themselves. In Europe, there was an initial moment ofeuphoria: it was hard not be moved by the crowds sweeping through the Berlin Wall, especially as so many of them werehot-looking Red babes eager to enjoy a Carlsberg or Stella Artois with even the nerdiest running dog of imperialism.But, when the moment faded, pace Fukuyama, there was nosense on the Continent that our Big Idea had beaten theirBig Idea. With the best will in the world, it’s hard tocredit the citizens of France or Italy as having made anyserious contribution to the defeat of Communism. Aucontraire, millions of them voted for it, year in, year out.And, with the end of the Soviet existential threat, theenervation of the West only accelerated.

In Thomas P. M. Barnett’s book Blueprint For Action, RobertD. Kaplan, a very shrewd observer of global affairs, isquoted referring to the lawless fringes of the map as”Indian territory.” It’s a droll joke but a misleading one.The difference between the old Indian territory and the newis this: no one had to worry about the Sioux riding downFifth Avenue. Today, with a few hundred bucks on his ATMcard, the fellow from the badlands can be in the heart ofthe metropolis within hours.

Here’s another difference: in the old days, the white mansettled the Indian territory. Now the followers of thebadland’s radical imams settle the metropolis.

And another difference: technology. In the old days, theInjuns had bows and arrows and the cavalry had rifles. Intoday’s Indian territory, countries that can’t feed theirown people have nuclear weapons.

But beyond that the very phrase “Indian territory” presumesthat inevitably these badlands will be brought within thebounds of the ordered world. In fact, a lot of today’s”Indian territory” was relatively ordered a generation ortwo back — West Africa, Pakistan, Bosnia. Though EasternEurope and Latin America and parts of Asia are freer nowthan they were in the seventies, other swaths of the maphave spiralled backwards. Which is more likely? That theparts of the world under pressure will turn intopost-Communist Poland or post-Communist Yugoslavia? InEurope, the demographic pressures favour the latter.

The enemies we face in the future will look a lot likeal-Qaeda: transnational, globalized, locally franchised,extensively outsourced — but tied together through apowerful identity that leaps frontiers and continents. Theywon’t be nation-states and they’ll have no interest inbecoming nation-states, though they might use the husksthereof, as they did in Afghanistan and then Somalia. Thejihad may be the first, but other transnational deformitieswill embrace similar techniques. Sept. 10 institutions likethe UN and the EU will be unlikely to provide effective responses.

We can argue about what consequences these demographictrends will have, but to say blithely they have none isridiculous. The basic demography explains, for example, thecritical difference between the “war on terror” forAmericans and Europeans: in the U.S., the war is somethingto be fought in the treacherous sands of the Sunni Triangleand the caves of the Hindu Kush; you go to faraway placesand kill foreigners. But, in Europe, it’s a civil war.Neville Chamberlain dismissed Czechoslovakia as “a farawaycountry of which we know little.” This time round, for muchof western Europe it turned out the faraway country of whichthey knew little was their own.

Four years into the “war on terror,” the Bush administrationbegan promoting a new formulation: “the long war.” Not agood sign. In a short war, put your money on tanks andbombs. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower.The longer the long war gets, the harder it will be, becauseit’s a race against time, against lengthening demographic,economic and geopolitical odds. By “demographic,” I mean theMuslim world’s high birth rate, which by mid-century willgive tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia.By “economic,” I mean the perfect storm the Europeans willface within this decade, because their lavish welfare statesare unsustainable on their post-Christian birth rates. By”geopolitical,” I mean that, if you think the United Nationsand other international organizations are antipathetic toAmerica now, wait a few years and see what kind of supportyou get from a semi-Islamified Europe.

Almost every geopolitical challenge in the years ahead has its roots in demography, but not every demographic crisiswill play out the same way. That’s what makes doing anythingabout it even more problematic — because differentcountries’ reactions to their own particular domesticcircumstances are likely to play out in destabilizing wayson the international scene. In Japan, the demographic crisisexists virtually in laboratory conditions — no complicatingfactors; in Russia, it will be determined by the country’srelationship with a cramped neighbour — China; and in Europe, the new owners are already in place — like a tenantwith a right-to-buy agreement.

Let’s start in the most geriatric jurisdiction on the planet. In Japan, the rising sun has already passed into the next phase of its long sunset: net population loss. 2005 was the first year since records began in which the country had more deaths than births. Japan offers the chance to observethe demographic death spiral in its purest form. It’s acountry with no immigration, no significant minorities andno desire for any: just the Japanese, aging and dwindling.

At first it doesn’t sound too bad: compared with the United States, most advanced societies are very crowded. If you’rein a cramped apartment in a noisy congested city, losing acouple hundred thousand seems a fine trade-off. Thedifficulty, in a modern social democratic state, is managing which people to lose: already, according to the Japan Times, depopulation is “presenting the government with pressing challenges on the social and economic front, includingensuring provision of social security services and securingthe labour force.” For one thing, the shortage of children has led to a shortage of obstetricians. Why would anytalented ambitious med school student want to go into afield in such precipitous decline? As a result, if you livein certain parts of Japan, childbirth is all in the timing. On Oki Island, try to time the contractions for Mondaymorning. That’s when the maternity ward is open — first dayof the week, 10 a.m., when an obstetrician flies in toattend to any pregnant mothers who happen to be around. Andat 5.30 p.m. she flies out. So, if you’ve been carelessenough to time your childbirth for Tuesday through Sunday,you’ll have to climb into a helicopter and zip off to givebirth alone in a strange hospital unsurrounded by tiresomeloved ones. Do Lamaze classes on Oki now teach you to timeyour breathing to the whirring of the chopper blades?

The last local obstetrician left the island in 2006 and the health service isn’t expecting any more. Doubtless most ofus can recall reading similar stories over the years fromremote rural districts in America, Canada, Australia. Afterall, why would a village of a few hundred people have agreat medical system? But Oki has a population of 17,000,and there are still no obstetricians: birthing is a dying business.

So what will happen? There are a couple of scenarios:whatever Japanese feelings on immigration, a country withgreat infrastructure won’t empty out for long, any more thana state-of-the-art factory that goes belly up stays emptyfor long. At some point, someone else will move in toJapan’s plant.

And the alternative? In The Children Of Men, P. D. James’dystopian fantasy about a barren world, there are specialdolls for women whose maternal instinct has goneunfulfilled: pretend mothers take their artificial childrenfor walks on the street or to the swings in the park. InJapan, that’s no longer the stuff of dystopian fantasy. Atthe beginning of the century, the country’s toy makersnoticed they had a problem: toys are for children and Japandoesn’t have many. What to do? In 2005, Tomy began marketinga new doll called Yumel — a baby boy with a range of 1,200phrases designed to serve as companions for the elderly. Hesays not just the usual things — “I wuv you” — but alsoasks the questions your grandchildren would ask if you hadany: “Why do elephants have long noses?” Yumel joins hisfriend, the Snuggling If bot, a toy designed to have the conversation of a five-year old child which its makers, with the usual Japanese efficiency, have determined is just enough chit-chat to prevent the old folks going senile. It seems an appropriate final comment on the social democraticstate: in a childish infantilized self-absorbed societywhere adults have been stripped of all responsibility, youneed never stop playing with toys. We are the children wenever had.

And why leave it at that? Is it likely an ever smallernumber of young people will want to spend their active yearslooking after an ever greater number of old people? Or willit be simpler to put all that cutting-edge Japanesetechnology to good use and take a flier on Mister Roboto andthe post-human future? After all, what’s easier for thegoverning class? Weaning a pampered population off the goodlife and re-teaching them the lost biological impulse orgiving the Sony Corporation a licence to become the Cloney Corporation? If you need to justify it to yourself, you’dgrab the graphs and say, well, demographic decline isuniversal. It’s like industrialization a couple of centuriesback; everyone will get to it eventually, but the first todo so will have huge advantages: the relevant comparison isnot with England’s early 19th century population surge butwith England’s Industrial Revolution. In the industrial age,manpower was critical. In the new technological age,manpower will be optional — and indeed, if most of theavailable manpower’s Muslim, it’s actually a disadvantage.As the most advanced society with the most advanceddemographic crisis, Japan seems likely to be the firstjurisdiction to embrace robots and cloning and embark on theslippery slope to transhumanism.

Demographic origin need not be the final word. In 1775,Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to Joseph Priestlysuggesting a mutual English friend might like to apply hismind to the conundrum the Crown faced:

Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed 150Yankees this campaign, which is £20000 a head… During thesame time, 60000 children have been born in America. Fromthese data his mathematical head will easily calculate thetime and the expense necessary to kill us all.

Obviously, Franklin was oversimplifying. Not every American colonist identified himself as a rebel. After therevolution, there were massive population displacements: asUnited Empire Loyalists well know, large numbers of NewYorkers left the colony to resettle in what’s now Ontario.Some American Negroes were so anxious to remain subjects ofKing George III they resettled as far as Sierra Leone. Forthese people, their primary identity was not as Americancolonists but as British subjects. For others, their newidentity as Americans had supplanted their formal allegianceto the Crown. The question for today’s Europe is whether theprimary identity of their fastest-growing demographic is Muslim or Belgian, Muslim or Dutch, Muslim or French.

That’s where civilizational confidence comes in: if “Dutchness” or “Frenchness” seems a weak attenuated thing,then the stronger identity will prevail. One notes other similarities between revolutionary America and contemporaryEurope: the United Empire Loyalists were older and wealthier; the rebels were younger and poorer. In the end,the former simply lacked the latter’s strength of will.

Europe, like Japan, has catastrophic birth rates and a swollen pampered elderly class determined to live in defiance of economic reality. But the difference is that onthe Continent the successor population is already in placeand the only question is how bloody the transfer of realestate will be.

If America’s “allies” failed to grasp the significance of9/11, it’s because Europe’s home-grown terrorism problemshad all taken place among notably static populations, suchas Ulster and the Basque country. One could make generallysafe extrapolations about the likelihood of holding NorthernIreland to what cynical strategists in Her Majesty’sGovernment used to call an “acceptable level of violence.”But in the same three decades as Ulster’s “Troubles,” thehitherto moderate Muslim populations of south Asia wereradicalized by a politicized form of Islam; previouslyformally un-Islamic societies such as Nigeria becamesemi-Islamist; and large Muslim populations settled in partsof Europe that had little or no experience of mass immigration.

On the Continent and elsewhere in the West, native populations are aging and fading and being supplantedremorselessly by a young Muslim demographic. Time for theobligatory “of courses”: of course, not all Muslims areterrorists — though enough are hot for jihad to provide animpressive support network of mosques from Vienna toStockholm to Toronto to Seattle. Of course, not all Muslimssupport terrorists — though enough of them share theirbasic objectives (the wish to live under Islamic law in Europe and North America) to function wittingly or otherwiseas the “good cop” end of an Islamic good cop/bad coproutine. But, at the very minimum, this fast-movingdemographic transformation provides a huge comfort zone forthe jihad to move around in. And in a more profound way itrationalizes what would otherwise be the nuttiness of theterrorists’ demands. An IRA man blows up a pub in defianceof democratic reality — because he knows that at the ballot box the Ulster Loyalists win the elections and the Irish Republicans lose. When a European jihadist blows somethingup, that’s not in defiance of democratic reality but merelya portent of democratic reality to come. He’s jumping the gun, but in every respect things are moving his way.

You may vaguely remember seeing some flaming cars on the evening news toward the end of 2005. Something going on inFrance, apparently. Something to do with — what’s the word?– “youths.” When I pointed out the media’s strangereluctance to use the M-word vis-à-vis the rioting “youths,”I received a ton of emails arguing there’s no Islamistcomponent, they’re not the madrasa crowd, they may be Muslimbut they’re secular and Westernized and into drugs and rapand meaningless sex with no emotional commitment, andrioting and looting and torching and trashing, just like anynormal healthy Western teenagers. These guys have economicconcerns, it’s the lack of jobs, it’s conditions peculiar toFrance, etc. As one correspondent wrote, “You right-wingshit-for-brains think everything’s about jihad.”

Actually, I don’t think everything’s about jihad. But I dothink, as I said, that a good 90 per cent of everything’sabout demography. Take that media characterization of thoseFrench rioters: “youths.” What’s the salient point aboutyouths? They’re youthful. Very few octogenarians want to gotorching Renaults every night. It’s not easy lobbing aMolotov cocktail into a police station and then hobblingback with your walker across the street before the searingheat of the explosion melts your hip replacement. Civildisobedience is a young man’s game.

In June 2006, a 54-year-old Flemish train conductor called Guido Demoor got on the Number 23 bus in Antwerp to go towork. Six — what’s that word again? — “youths” boarded the bus and commenced intimidating the other riders. There weresome 40 passengers aboard. But the “youths” were youthfuland the other passengers less so. Nonetheless, Mr. Demoorasked the lads to cut it out and so they turned on him,thumping and kicking him. Of those 40 other passengers, none intervened to help the man under attack. Instead, at thenext stop, 30 of the 40 scrammed, leaving Mr. Demoor to be beaten to death. Three “youths” were arrested, and proved tobe — quelle surprise! — of Moroccan origin. The ringleaderescaped and, despite police assurances of completeconfidentiality, of those 40 passengers only four cameforward to speak to investigators. “You see what happens ifyou intervene,” a fellow rail worker told the Belgiannewspaper De Morgen. “If Guido had not opened his mouth hewould still be alive.

“No, he wouldn’t. He would be as dead as those 40 passengersare, as the Belgian state is, keeping his head down, tryingnot to make eye contact, cowering behind his newspaper inthe corner seat and hoping just to be left alone. Whatfuture in “their” country do Mr. Demoor’s two children have?My mother and grandparents came from Sint-Niklaas, a town Iremember well from many childhood visits. When we stayedwith great-aunts and other relatives, the upstairs floors ofthe row houses had no bathrooms, just chamber pots. Mysister and I were left to mooch around cobbled streets withour little cousin for hours on end, wandering aimlessly pastsmoke-wreathed bars and cafes, occasionally buying friteswith mayonnaise. With hindsight it seemed as parochiallyFlemish as could be imagined. Not anymore. The week beforeMr. Demoor was murdered in plain sight, bus drivers inSint-Niklaas walked off the job to protest the thuggery ofthe — here it comes again — “youths.” In little more thana generation, a town has been transformed.

Of the ethnic Belgian population, some 17 per cent are under 18 years old. Of the country’s Turkish and Moroccanpopulation, 35 per cent are under 18 years old. The “youths”get ever more numerous, the non-youths get older. To avoidthe ruthless arithmetic posited by Benjamin Franklin, it isnecessary for those “youths” to feel more Belgian. Is thatlikely? Colonel Gadhafi doesn’t think so:

There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory inEurope — without swords, without guns, without conquests.The fifty million Muslims of Europe will turn it into aMuslim continent within a few decades.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the American mainland was attacked forthe first time since the War of 1812. The perpetrators wereforeign — Saudis and Egyptians. Since 9/11, Europe has seenthe London Tube bombings, the French riots, Dutch murders ofnationalist politicians. The perpetrators are their owncitizens — British subjects, citoyens de la Républiquefrançaise. In Linz, Austria, Muslims are demanding that allfemale teachers, believers or infidels, wear head scarves inclass. The Muslim Council of Britain wants Holocaust Dayabolished because it focuses “only” on the Nazis’ (alleged)Holocaust of the Jews and not the Israelis’ ongoingHolocaust of the Palestinians.

How does the state react? In Seville, King Ferdinand III isno longer patron saint of the annual fiesta because hissplendid record in fighting for Spanish independence fromthe Moors was felt to be insensitive to Muslims. In London,a judge agreed to the removal of Jews and Hindus from atrial jury because the Muslim defendant’s counsel argued hecouldn’t get a fair verdict from them. The Church of Englandis considering removing St. George as the country’s patronsaint on the grounds that, according to various Anglicanclergy, he’s too “militaristic” and “offensive to Muslims.”They wish to replace him with St. Alban, and replace St.George’s cross on the revamped Union Flag, which wouldinstead show St. Alban’s cross as a thin yellow streak.

In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are enteringtheir voting booths, some European countries will not beliving formally under sharia, but — as much as parts ofNigeria, they will have reached an accommodation with theirradicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intoleranttypes are expert at exploiting the “tolerance” of pluralistsocieties. In other Continental countries, things are likelyto play out in more traditional fashion, though without asignificantly different ending. Wherever one’s sympathieslie on Islam’s multiple battle fronts the fact is the jihadhas held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you’re not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians,why wouldn’t you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?

“We’re the ones who will change you,” the Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006.”Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries isproducing 3.5 children.” As he summed it up: “Our way ofthinking will prove more powerful than yours.

“Reprinted by permission of Regnery Publishing from AmericaAlone © 2006 by Mark Steyn

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