Right Mind : Death of the West

Japan braces for 'unprecedented' old society

Right-Mind — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 16:51:05 GMT

This article will apply to the USA in not so many years as our Baby Boomers retire and fewer and fewer...(read more)

Rising immigration fuels 26-year fertility high

Right-Mind — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 23:52:20 GMT

More “Death of the West” news. From the U.K. Telegraph : Rising immigration and older mothers...(read more)

Children 'bad for planet'

Right-Mind — Tue, 08 May 2007 02:55:29 GMT

This article combines it all — global warming, socialism, and population control! I’m all...(read more)

More on the Islamification of Europe

Right-Mind — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:26:09 GMT

As my friend Tim points out, this article touches on two major problems in Europe: A rapidly-growing...(read more)

Old Church Becomes Mosque in Uneasy Britain

Right-Mind — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 17:11:02 GMT

“A battle to turn a former Christian church into a mosque underscored Britain’s unease with...(read more)

Reining In Entitlement Spending

Right-Mind — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 13:06:34 GMT

The Heritage Foundation's Brian Riedl says that Bush is trying to rein in entitlement spending in his...(read more)

Swiss may expand assisted suicide law to the mentally ill

Right-Mind — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 17:17:43 GMT

One step closer to worldwide euthanasia. From the Associated Press : A ruling by Switzerland's highest...(read more)

Islam converts change face of Europe

Right-Mind — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 18:50:27 GMT

From The Jerusalem Post : “100,000 French, British citizens have converted to Islam over the last...(read more)

Fed Chief Warns That Entitlement Growth Could Harm Economy

Right-Mind — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 22:52:02 GMT

There’s never a good political time to deal with a looming crisis. But the Dem’s can taste...(read more)

In Germany, Mozart bows to Mohammed

Right-Mind — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 18:12:59 GMT

More slouching. Via United Press International : BERLIN, Sept. 26 (UPI) -- On the eve of the first German...(read more)

Death of a culture?

Right-Mind — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 02:47:16 GMT

I’ve blogged previously about the Death of the West (based on the title of the book by Pat Buchanan...(read more)

Making Babies in Berlin

Right-Mind — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 01:23:00 GMT

We've talked about the " Death of the West " quite a bit around here. Now this from the Jewish World...(read more)

Cradle Snatching: The Difficulties Of Living With A Low Birth-Rate

Right-Mind — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 20:16:00 GMT

Having attended a year of college in Munich, this topic is of direct interest to me. But we've discussed...(read more)

It's The Demography, Stupid: The Real Reason The West Is In Danger Of Extinction

Right-Mind — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 18:42:00 GMT

Mark Steyn has written a lengthy article in the Wall Street Journal "Opinion Journal" about the century ahead.

I'm going to extract just a brief part of his long article that could well be called "The Death of the West" and echoes many of the things we've been saying over here.

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.

I commend the long read to you.

France's End?

Right-Mind — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 01:44:00 GMT

Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the Population Research Institute. He's written a provocative article titled "France's End".

He argues that France's riots may portend France's end due to the unfashionable topic of demographics.

See my previous posts on the Death of the West:

Demographics is not a fashionable issue. Pundits and politicians prefer to discuss other aspects of social difference and reasons for social change such as economics and race. Most American news stories about and commentators on the recent riots in France have blamed a combination of high unemployment (economics) and discrimination (race) for the riots. They have suggested that more jobs, quotas, and government spending would solve France's problem with her young Muslim rebels. Unfortunately, another aspect (demographics) tells us that there is no practical solution to France's problem, and the radical Muslims are likely to win.

The importers of the Algerian insurrection certainly seem to have won this round, with French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin promising more money for areas dominated by immigrants and their offspring and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy forced to back off from the hard line he took when he called the rioters "scum." French authorities asked Muslim religious leaders to help end the violence, granting tacit legitimacy to the anti-Western imams. Regardless of the intrinsic wisdom of these decisions, the fact that they came in response to violence means they will encourage more violence. As Heywood Brown said, "Appeasers believe that if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will become a vegetarian." These riots were organized, at least to a large extent, according to de Villepin and Sarkozy. The tigerish organizers of the riots have achieved a victory. Terrorism works.

So what is France to do? She has failed to create employment for many of her young people, whether French or foreign, due to her socialistic policies, while the French electorate continues to demand continued statism and unaffordable social welfare policies. Despite trying hard, she has failed to assimilate her immigrants and their children, and contrary to what one might think, the children and grandchildren of the initial immigrants tend to be more radical and anti-Western than the immigrants themselves. The trends are all in the wrong direction. And the self-destructing, cringing, appeasing, and degenerate Western European nation in which they live will never win the respect of these radical young men, who will demand more and more and more. I read that the French media are full of stunned incomprehension: Why are they rioting here, when France has been so steadfast in opposing the war in Iraq and in leading international opposition to the United States generally? Their craven lack of understanding of basic human psychology, the psychology of men not so effete as themselves, condemns them.

The sort of young men that France has nurtured in her bosom are very scary indeed, and sound worse than many inhabitants of our own urban ghettos. In the Autumn 2002 City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple described the vicious street loiterers he saw when he visited Paris' government-planned immigrant suburbs. "A kind of anti-society has grown up in them—a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, 'official,' society in France," he wrote. "This alienation, this gulf of mistrust—greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years—is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against them."

The huge amounts of money that the French government has poured into these area has done nothing to improve mainstream France's image among these ghetto-dwellers, and never will. "Benevolence inflames the anger of the young men of the cités as much as repression, because their rage is inseparable from their being," said Dalrymple. "Ambulance men who take away a young man injured in an incident routinely find themselves surrounded by the man's 'friends,' and jostled, jeered at, and threatened. . . . Of course, they also expect him to be treated as well as anyone else, and in this expectation they reveal the bad faith, or at least ambivalence, of their stance toward the society around them. They are certainly not poor, at least by the standards of all previously existing societies: they are not hungry; they have cell phones, cars, and many other appurtenances of modernity; they are dressed fashionably—according to their own fashion—with a uniform disdain of bourgeois propriety and with gold chains round their necks."

Like all men reduced to useless dependence, they hate those who support them while being unable to throw off their sloth. Raising their standard of living without putting them to work will do nothing. "They enjoy a far higher standard of living (or consumption) than they would in the countries of their parents' or grandparents' origin, even if they labored there 14 hours a day to the maximum of their capacity," Dalrymple noted. "But this is not a cause of gratitude—on the contrary: they feel it as an insult or a wound, even as they take it for granted as their due. But like all human beings, they want the respect and approval of others, even—or rather especially—of the people who carelessly toss them the crumbs of Western prosperity. Emasculating dependence is never a happy state, and no dependence is more absolute, more total, than that of most of the inhabitants of the cités."

Yet the sloth of the native French is more debilitating, because though a people can survive the advanced degeneracy of its men, as many have, it cannot survive that of its women. If a people's women cease to bear and raise enough children, that people dies. If most of its women decide career, freedom, and pleasure are more important than hearth and family, that people dies. In no other area of life does the accumulation of individual decisions more profoundly affect society as a whole. Feminism kills.

Muslim women, in Europe and most other places, are relatively family- and child-oriented. Most Frenchwomen couldn't care less. Examining the birthrates for the two groups, the "French" French will be overwhelmed by their guests soon enough. France's overall birthrate of children per woman is about 1.9, a little less than the replacement rate. The French government forbids the collection of statistics by race or religion (it's one nation, they say), but demographic experts think that the mostly Muslim immigrant population's birthrate is an astonishing twice that of the native population, possibly higher—and more immigrants flood into France every day, where up to 10% of the population is already Muslim. Some folks think France will be 40% Muslim by 2050, perhaps sooner.

Though French unemployment may be high now, someone will have to work to support native France's aging population, which refuses to bear the next generations itself. The plan was to have the immigrants do it. Maybe the plan needs revision.

Even with immigration, the proportion of French people over 65, which was 16% in 2000, is projected to hit 27% in 2050, with all the attendant increases in the costs of already-bankrupt social security and health care systems. The proportion over 80 will go from 4% to 11%. At the same time, the proportion of people entering the workforce will shrink. It's unsustainable.

I could discuss all the other things I've learned about France recently from reliable sources: the six-fold increase in crime in the last few decades, the cultural acceptance of gang rape in immigrant neighborhoods, the foreign (often Saudi) funding of nearly all mosques in France, the rapidly growing influence of radical Islam among France's Muslims, and the fact that over half of France's prison population is of immigrant stock. There is also a lot of evidence to support the thesis that the native French have denigrated their guests: Walled them off in vast grim, modern housing projects; bombarded them with degenerate popular culture just as they were cut off from their original cultures; provided welfare rather than employment; and left their spiritual needs to be tended almost exclusively by Muslim firebrands with no competition from Christian missionaries.

Algeria was once a department of France. One day, France may be a province of Algeria. Demographics will likely make the difference.

Many French Muslims Reject French Culture, Prefer Islamic Ideals Instead

Right-Mind — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 17:55:00 GMT

NY POST: Many French Muslims Reject French Culture, Prefer Islamic Ideals Instead

It was only a matter of time before this pot boiled over.

Prediction: we're going to see a lot more of this in Western Europe. See my previous posts on the Death of the West.