America Alone

Human Events interviews author Mark Steyn on the subject of his new book, "America Alone" in which the author examines the demographic collapse of Old Europe and the economic and political collapse which must inevitably follow. Mr. Steyn argues that the current trends will leave the United States as the primary repository of liberty, freedom and the cultural heritage of Western Civilization while Old Europe becomes Islamic with all of the misery and suffering that must inevitably follow from that fate.

In a recent conversation with Hugh Hewitt on his radio program, Mr. Steyn remarked on how extraordinary it is to see the Democrats advocating all of the policies for this country that have brought Europe to ruin. And it is indeed amazing to not only see an entire civilization collapsing before our very eyes, but to realize that the Democrats want to send all of us Americans down the very same road.

Well, basically I became concerned that we’re not looking at the War on Terror, so called, in the right way. I think we’re seeing the intersection of several different elements that are actually making this a very fast-moving, fast-changing world. On the one hand you have basically the entire collapse of the birth rates of most of the Western world and alongside that you have this, effectively, this successive population that’s moving into a lot of those countries. That’s a huge, unprecedented, demographic transformation that is taking place in our lifetime.

In other words, it’s not something that’s going to happen around—you know, when I listen to Al Gore and he’s worried about some bug you’ve never heard of that might go extinct or the rising sea levels, I think I say in the book that, on present rates the Maldives Islands, which everyone worries about, are going to be underwater by the year 2500—2500!—well, I’ll take my chances that by 2475 they’ll have invented something that will be able to prevent the Maldives from being submerged.

But this is happening now: Basically the European nations are dying and the populations in them are turning into relatively hostile Muslim populations, not all of them terrorists, but all of them, almost all of those people not sympathetic to America and American interests. And I feel that the great assumption that we all have, that the present tense is somehow permanent, or that it’s like technological progress. You know, it’s like, cars don’t go backwards. You don’t suddenly have a Cadillac Escalade and you go out into the yard one morning and it’s turned into a Ford Model T and it’s got a rumble seat and all kinds of other stuff in it. You take the view that—we think that social progress is like technological progress, that it can never be reversed, but I think it can be reversed and I think a lot of the world is going to be re-primitivized in the decades ahead and America has to change.

The Rape of Europe

On a related note, The Brussels Journal is similarly worried about the coming collapse of Old Europe in the face of Islamization. Demographically speaking, if you are a young person living in Old Europe, you had better get out now while the getting is good. And in fact the numbers of people leaving the old world are skyrocketing as more and more Europeans realize what has happened to their continent and understand what is still to come.

The German author Henryk M. Broder recently told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (12 October) that young Europeans who love freedom, better emigrate. Europe as we know it will no longer exist 20 years from now. Whilst sitting on a terrace in Berlin, Broder pointed to the other customers and the passers-by and said melancholically: “We are watching the world of yesterday.”

Europe is turning Muslim. As Broder is sixty years old he is not going to emigrate himself. “I am too old,” he said. However, he urged young people to get out and “move to Australia or New Zealand. That is the only option they have if they want to avoid the plagues that will turn the old continent uninhabitable.”

Many Germans and Dutch, apparently, did not wait for Broder’s advice. The number of emigrants leaving the Netherlands and Germany has already surpassed the number of immigrants moving in. One does not have to be prophetic to predict, like Henryk Broder, that Europe is becoming Islamic. Just consider the demographics. The number of Muslims in contemporary Europe is estimated to be 50 million. It is expected to double in twenty years. By 2025, one third of all European children will be born to Muslim families. Today Mohammed is already the most popular name for new-born boys in Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and other major European cities.

Liberals Gone Wild

Victor Davis Hanson writes this essay for RealClearPolitics in which he looks at the motivations that have driven the Angry Left over the edge of sanity. And there can be no doubt that the hard left base of the Democratic party has come totally unglued from reason and restraint in the last several years. Hanson argues that it is the result of frustration.

The Democrats have been out of power in the congress for 12 years now and have only occasionally had control of the White House. And one could argue that their brief tenure in the oval office had far more to do with Republican bungling than with any positive agenda on the part of Democrats. Carter got the office largely on the basis of the Watergate scandal while Clinton was the beneficiary of the Republican base rewarding George Bush the elder for breaking his pledge not to raise taxes. But no matter how you look at it, the Angry Left is filled with rage and frustration at being denied what they consider to be their natural authority over all the rest of us, and it is driving them crazy.