SteAmer 07-01-03 AMERICA ALONE The End of the World as We Know It Mark Steyn Regnery Publishing, Inc, 2006, 224 pp., ISBN 0-89526-078-6

Mark Steyn is a hilarious, provocative and acerbic conservative columnist writing on war, politics and culture. The thesis of this book is to forget global warming and wake up to the dying of the West and the coming takeover of Islam. The substance of the book is in the Prologue. I read just the first 70 pages, which was enough to get the bitter flavor of the book. You may sadly agree with Steyn or furiously disagree but his writing doesn’t leave much of an option for complacency. “Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a muezzin. Europeans already are.” Islam is prolific and confident while the growing welfare state of the West nudges it toward sloth, self-indulgence and childlike oblivion to the coming ruins of civilization. Europeans are beyond hope and the future belongs to America alone. (flyleaf) “Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries.” (xiii) “Here’s what did happen between 1970 and 2000: in that period, the developed world declined from just under 30 percent of the global population to just over 20 percent, and the Muslim nations increased from about 15 percent to 20 percent.” (xiv) “Just to recap… in 1970, the developed nations had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world…. By 2000, they were at parity….” (xv) The book is about demographic decline, the unsustainability of the advanced Western social-democratic state, and civilizational exhaustion, which have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia. (xvi) A key root cause is demography. “The salient feature of Europe, Canada, Japan, and Russia is that they’re running out of babies.” (xvi) Militant Islam has the manpower and every evening the news shows trouble spots featuring militant Muslims. (xvii) “Age + Welfare = Disaster for you. “Youth + Will = Disaster for whoever gets in your way.” “Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare.” (xix) Western nations are too mired in cultural relativism to understand what’s at stake. “The state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood….” “They corrode the citizen’s sense of self-reliance to a potentially fatal degree.” (xx) “There were two forces at play in the late twentieth century: in the eastern bloc, the collapse of Communism; in the west, the collapse of confidence.” (xx) “The enemies we face in the future will look a lot like al Qaeda; transnational, globalized, locally franchised, extensively outsourced—but tied together through a powerful identity that leaps frontiers and continents.” (xxi) “By picking up the tab for Europe’s defense, (America) hoped to prevent those countries lapsing into traditional power rivalries. Nice idea. But it also absolved them of the traditional responsibilities of nationhood, turning the alliance into a dysfunctional sitcom family, with one grown-up presiding over a brood of whiny teenagers – albeit (demographically) the world’s wrinkliest teenagers.” (xxiii) “Our enemies have made a bet—that the West in general and the United States in particular are soft and decadent and have no attention span. America has the advantage of the most powerful army on the face of the planet, but she doesn’t have the stomach for war, so it’s no advantage at all.” (xxv) “In the 2005 rankings of Freedom House’s survey of personal liberty and democracy around the world, five of the eight countries with the lowest ‘freedom’ score were Muslim. Of the forty-six Muslim majority nations in the world, only three were free. Of the sixteen nations in which Muslims form between 20 and 50 percent of the population, only another three were ranked as free; Benin, Serbia and Montenegro, and Surinam. It will be interesting to follow France’s fortunes as a fourth member of that group.” (xxvi) “…in the U.S., the war (on terror) is something to be fought in the treacherous sands of the Sunni Triangle… But in Europe it’s a civil war.” (xxvii) “The longer the long war gets, the harder it will be, because it’s a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic, and geopolitical odds. By ‘demographic,’ I mean the Muslim world’s high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By ‘economic,’ I mean (European) lavish welfare states are unsustainable. By ‘geopolitical,’ I mean wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe.” (xxix) “The single most important fact about the early twenty-first century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States….” “These countries—or, more precisely, these people—are going out of business.” (2) “…those societies with expensive social programs dependent on mass immigration will be in the worst predicament.” “More immediately, Europe will be semi-Islamic in its politico-cultural character within a generation.” (3) “We are living through a rare moment: the self-extinction of the civilization which, for good or ill, shaped the age we live in.” (3) Regarding France’s attitude toward the U.S. in Iraq: “If the population of your cities was 30 percent Muslim, with spectacularly high youth unemployment rates and a bunch of other grievances, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Great Satan?” (4) “…aged societies by their nature, are more cautious and less dynamic: old people weigh exposure to risk more than potential for gain.” (5) Europeans are “elderly and fading and…their Muslim populations are young and surging, and in all these clashes the latter are putting down markers for the way things will be the day after tomorrow….” There are officially 20 million Muslims in Europe. (5) Mohammed was the fifth most popular name in the U.K. in 2005. (6) The replacement fertility rate is 2.1 babies per woman. Some fertility rates: Niger, 7.46; Mali, 7.42; Somalia, 6.76; Afghanistan, 6.69; Yemen, 6.58. These are all Muslim countries. Albania has the highest fertility rate in Europe. It’s Muslim. (10) Some other fertility rates: U.S., 2.11; Ireland, 1.9; Australia, 1.7; Canada, 1.5; Germany and Austria, 1.3; Russia and Italy, 1.2; Spain 1.1 (about half the replacement rate). Spain’s population is halving every generation. (10) “Islam is now the principal supplier of new Europeans, and currently the second biggest supplier of new Canadians.” “What proportion of Western Muslims is hot for jihad?” “In defiance of normal immigration patterns, the host country winds up assimilating with Islam.” (15) “…in Europe, the new owners are already in place—like a tenant with a right-to-buy agreement.” (24) “Russia has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world—1.2 children per woman—and one of the highest abortion rates. When it comes to the future, most Russian women are voting with their fetus: 70 percent of pregnancies are terminated.” (27) “Russia is the sick man of Europe…. It has the fastest-growing rate of HIV infection in the world.” “The virus is said to have infected at least 1 percent of the population….” (28) Russia will become unable to deploy enough young soldiers to secure its borders or young families to secure its future. The implosion of Russia could be a major destabilizer of this century. “So the world’s largest country is dying and the question is how violent its death throes will be.” Russia has nukes, a potential AIDS crisis, and an Islamist separatist movement. (29) “It will be Russia’s fate to have large chunks of its turf annexed by the Islamic world, and much of what’s left fall to the Chinese.” (31) France is about 10% Muslim, but it’s not evenly spread. It’s about 30% of those under twenty and about 45% in the urban centers. Thus the combatant ratio in any ethnic war may be one to one—right now! (34) “The fifty million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.” (36) “Today the typical advanced society trumpets its defects as virtues.” “A dependence on immigration from very limited and particular sources is not a strength but a weakness.” (41) Our government is mostly about “secondary impulses” such as government health care, government day care, and government paternity leave. “We’ve elevated the secondary impulses over the primary ones: national defense, self-reliance, family, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity.” (43) European governments “have become hooked on unaffordable levels of social programs which in the end will put those countries out of business.” (44) “Europe doesn’t need an enemy; it’s losing to its own torpor.” (48) “Euro-Canadian socialized health care is, in essence, subsidized by American taxpayers: since the end of World War Two, Washington has assumed the defense costs of its allies, thereby freeing up those countries to spend their tax revenues on lavish social programs.” (51) “…the biggest globalization success story…is not McDonald’s or Microsoft but Islamism….” “…we have the first globalized insurgency.” (61) “An insurgency that lurks within a religion automatically has a global network. You don’t need ‘deep cover’ as a ‘fifth columnist’” you can hang your shingle on Main Street and we won’t even notice it.” (62) “Islam has a political sovereignty too. There is an ‘Organization of the Islamic Conference’: it’s like the EU and the Commonwealth…that is, an organization of nation states….” Imagine if someone proposed an ‘Organization of the Christian Conference’ that would hold summits attended by prime ministers and presidents and voted as a bloc…. And Islam is also a legal code.” “…the religion itself is a political project—and, in fact, an imperial project—in a way that modern Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism are not.” “And, yes, Christianity has had its blood-drenched moments, but the Spanish Inquisition, which remains a byword for theocratic violence, killed fewer people in a century and a half than the jihad does in a typical year.” (62) “So we have a global terrorist movement insulated within a global political project insulated within a severely self-segregating religion whose adherents are the fastest-growing demographic in the developed world.” (63) “The jihad’s marketing strategists singled out the prison populations of North America, Australia, and Western Europe as a ripe target demographic.” Those who lie, cheat, steal, and kill women and children can do it for Allah. It’s a global gang culture. (67) “American taxpayers are in the onerous position of funding both sides in this war. In the five years after September 11, the price of oil rose from #12 per barrel to hit an all-time high of $70—so, if you sell oil, your revenues are five times what they were.” “Where does the extra half-bil go? It goes to the mosques and madrassas that the Saudis fund in every corner of the planet. Oil isn’t the principal Saudi export, ideology is—petroleum merely bankrolls it.” “The Saudis fund mosques that radicalize distant Muslim populations from Indonesia to Oregon, and the schools that turn out terrorists on every continent of the face of the Earth.” (69)

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