Just finished America Alone, by Mark Steyn. I can readily recommend it to anyone interested in the current state of the world.
Steyn spends the first portion of the book laying out his fundamental point that demographics is destiny. This is of particular import to western civilization. The US alone is the only major western nation that is maintaining it's native population. New Zealand and Ireland are not too far behind. the numbers out of Europe are stunning. The total fertility rate of various nations is as follows: USA-2.11, New Zealand-2.01, Ireland-1.9, Austrailia-1.7, United Kingdom-1.6, Canada-1.48, France-1.89, EU-average-1.38, Germany-1.35, Japan-1.32, Italy-1.23, Russia-1.14
These numbers are significant for two reasons. For the largely socialized states of the EU there are going to be fewer and fewer native born citizens to support the benefits of an aging populace. Immigration is necessary for the EU countries to maintain their economies, today and more so in the future. Countries such as Russia may well implode. The nature of immigration, present and future, is of interest. The vast portion of immigrants to EU countries are Muslim. They are already a significant part of the workforce and demand will continue to rise. As witnessed in Britain and the Netherlands, most graphically, these immigrants are not assimilating into western culture. In fact, they are maintaining their own culture and installing it within Europe. This is of great import in the traditionally socialist and liberal western nations. The Netherlands, for instance, has no answer, under current law and culture, for a people who do not share the Dutch enlightened liberlism. The shooting of Theo Van Gogh is a graphic example of the phenomenon. These immigrants do not shun child-bearing as evidenced by the native populaces. Europe is in the process of becoming an Islamic culture through breeding alone. Russia faces an even worse crisis with her Islamic populace alone in expansion. Steyn quotes Colonel Gaddafi, "There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe-without swords, without guns, without conquests. The fifty million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades."
Steyn goes on, "Mohammed is: (a) the most popular boy's name in much of the Western world (b) the most common name for terrorists (c) the name of the revered prophet of the West's fastest growing religion. It's at the intersection of these statistics-religous, demographic, terrorist-that a dark future awaits." Steyn deals, at some length, with the fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, nor support terrorism. The deafening silence heard from Muslim "moderates" regarding terrorism is cause for concern.
Steyn is scathing in his crticism of the US for continuing to consider Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Muslim countries as our allies. The Saudi's in particular come in for some harsh words for their support of Whabbism.
The author notes that the will of the West is suspect. Europe is accomadationist and America fears the label of imperialist. "Britain was never an unrivaled colossus, even at it's zenith. Yet today, in language, law, politics, business, and the wider culture, there is simply nothing comparable in scale or endurance to the Brittanic inheritance. We now live in the American moment....How does America want to use it's moment? What does it wish to bequeath the world? Even to present the question in those terms feels vaguely un-American. The United States has an unmatched dominance that the British never enjoyed and that is historically unprecedented. Yet it remains a paradox: the non-imperial superpower. For good or ill, the American people don't have an imperialist bone in their body-as we saw, in fact, in post-liberation Iraq."
"For a serious power, the correct answer to "What's the exit strategy?" is: there isn't one, and there shouldn't be one, and it's a dumb expression. The more polite response came in the president's second inaugural speech: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."
"If you want an example of "exit strategy" thinking, look nom further than the southern "border". A century ago, American policy in Mexico was all exit and no strategy. That week's president-for-life gets out of hand? Go in, whack him, exit, and let the locals figure out who gets to be the new bad guy. If the new guy gets out of hand, go back, whack him, and exit again. The result of that stunted policy is that three-quarters of Mexico's population is now living in California and Arizona-and, as fine upstanding members of the Undocumented American community, they've got no exit strategy at all."
"By contrast, the British went in to India without an exit strategy, stayed for generations, and midwifed the world's most populous democracy and a key US ally in the years ahead. Those American conservatives-the realpolitik crowd-who scorn "nation-building" ought to reflect on what the Indian sub-continent would look like if the British had been similarly skeptical: today it might well be another Araby-a crazy quilt of authoritarian sultanates, Hindu and Muslim, punctuated by thug dictatorships following Baath-type local variations on Fascism and Marxism."
Steyn's criticism of the US government on 9/11: "...what worked that day was municipal government, small government, core government-the firemen, the NYPD cops, rescue workers. What flopped-big time, as the vice-president would say-was federal government, the FBI, CIA, INS, FAA, and all the other hotshot, money-no-object, fancypants acronyms. Under the system operating that day, if one of the many Algerian terrorists living on welfare in Montreal attempted to cross the US border at Derby
Line, Vermont, and got refused entry by an alert official, he would be able to drive a few miles east, attempt to cross at Beecher Falls, Vermont, and they had no way of knowing that he'd been refused entry just half an hour earlier. No compatible computers. Yet, if that same Algerian terrorist went to order a book online, Amazon.com would know that he'd bought The A-Z of Infidel Slaying two years earlier and their "We have some suggestions for you" box would be proffering a 30 percent discount on Suicide Bombing for Dummies. Amazon is a more efficient data miner than US immigration. Is it to do with their respective budgets? No. Amazon's system is very cheap, but it's in the nature of government to do things worse, and slower."...."Most of what went wrong on September 11 we knew about in the first days after. Generally, it falls into two categories: 1. Government agencies didn't enforce their own rules (as in the terrorists' laughably inadequate visa applications). or 2. The agencies' rules were out of date-three out of those four planes reached their targets because their crews, passengers, and ground staff all blindly followed the FAA's 1970s hijack procedures untilm it was too late, as the terrorists knew they would."
"This book isn't an argument for more war, more bombing, or more killing, but for more will. In a culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practise of "suttee"- the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural: "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow custom. And then we will follow ours." "India today is better off without suttee. if you don't agree withm that, if you think that's just dead-white-Eurocentrism, fine. But i don't think you really do believe that....After all, most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society."
Steyn presents three resolutions to the probem with Islam. Submit, destroy, or reform. The first two he rejects. On the third he advocates ten points: 1. Support women's rights. 2. Roll back Wahhabi, Iranian, and other ideological exports that radicalize Muslims everywhere. 3. support economic and political liberty in the Muslim world. 4. Ensure that Islamic states that persecute non-Muslims are marginalized on the world stage. 5. Throttle the funding of mosques, madrassas,etc.. in America by Saudi Arabia, Iran, and others. 6.Develop a strategy for countering Islam on the ideological front. he suggests froming somehing like Britain's colonial office. 7. "Marginalize and euthanize the UN, NATO, the IAEA, and other September 10 transnational organizations and devote the energy wasted on them to result=oriented multilateralism. We need real allies now." 8. "Cease bankrolling unreformable oil dictatorships by a long overdue transformation of the energy industry." 9. "End the Iranian regime." 10. "Strike militarily when the opportunity presents itself."
All in all a quite good book, and a call to arms for America. Why America? As Steyn shows, the rest of the world either can't or won't and, America, because she can, should.
Linear Mode
