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In Mark Steyn’s very entertaining book, America Alone, the idea behind his central thesis is that demography is our best tool for understanding the course of future events. After demography, Steyn focuses on two other ideas: (1) the will, as in the will of a people to survive, and (2) the unsustainability of the socialized state. In Steyn’s view, America stands alone because of its birth rate in combination with the potential to summon the will to avoid the onset of something like the next dark ages.
Steyn likes to say that while demography isn’t everything, it’s a good 90%. It’s the demography of the developed world which threatens the next dark ages because the population of the developed world, unmolested by war, famine, or disease, is in decline. To put the point very simply, folks ain’t havin’ kids no more. This kind of decline is unprecedented in the history of the world; it is the ultimate manifestation of a culture of death, or more accurately, of a death cult. Everyone drinks the Kool-Aid and waits for the aliens - it’s horrifying when we see this on the news, but this is something akin to the reality across the entire developed world. Instead of Kool-Aid and cyanide, we’re being done in by abortion, contraception, selfishness, and a general lack of will to raise the next generation.
Japan has been going down this road for some time now. Moreover, because the Japanese population is largely unaffected by immigration (as we are in Europe and America), the demographic death spiral can be viewed in laboratory-like conditions. Russia is deathly ill with something like 60% of pregnancies ending in abortion and a birth rate of 1.28 children per woman. Both Russia and Europe, which has similarly low birth rates, though it varies from country to country, are threatened in another way by demographics: the Muslims are reproducing, and thus the post-Christian population grows older while the “youths” are more and more Muslim by percentage.
When Steyn draws attention to these facts in writing, he’s commonly accused of racism. People say: “this is what the ‘native’ population in America said about the latest wave of immigrants from Greece, Italy, Ireland, Germany, that they have too many babies and that they’re going to overrun the place.” At a pub in Oxford the other night, I myself heard the very same thing from my enlightened liberal friends.
The difference the liberals are missing is that those immigrant populations which came to America were eager to assimilate, to learn the language, and to work hard in a land of opportunity. Even if we have a problem in America today because Spanish seems to have become an official second language, there is at least the positive fact that the Hispanic immigrants share the common cultural heritage of Christian civilization. Though the Freemasons brutally devastated and oppressed Mexico, the Catholic Church is alive and well there to this day. The immigrants who came to America became Americans; in Europe today, the multi-cultural state with its lack of religion, good or bad, its ideology of diversity and tolerance, good or bad, doesn’t offer an identity strong enough to unify an ethnically and religiously diverse population. On the other hand, Islam offers a sense of belonging and an identity, and so a home for those who would otherwise feel adrift in post-modern Europe.
Do you remember hearing about all of those Irish immigrants who came to America hot for jihad? Don’t you remember hearing the stories from your great-grandparents? If a religion makes folks feel at home - good for them, the liberal will say; but everyone, liberal or conservative, has to worry when the religion making the young men of Europe feel good about themselves is, at least in name, the force behind suicide attacks aimed at infidels from Manhattan and Bali to Madrid and Jerusalem. Liberals persist in thinking of Islam as just another religion, as a religion of peace and flaccid happiness. But at the end of the day, aren’t we all more interested in what someone like Mohammed Atta understands Islam to be and believe than in what the columnists at the New York Times think?
What’s the way out of this mess, especially in the case of Europe? This is where the question of will comes into the picture. If the response of the Spaniards after the Madrid bombings is any indication of the kind of will the Europeans can summon, Europe is done. Didn’t the Spanish ever see a Bruce Willis movie? Any idiot American kid can tell you that you don’t let yourself get shot by the bad guy and then, post-mortem as it were, also accede to all of his demands! At the very least, you give in to the bad guy’s demands only to save your own skin; and the characters who do that generally don’t get the hot chick at the end of movie. As Steyn writes in American Alone, not the day of the Madrid bombings, but the day the Spaniards voted in the Socialist, yellow-belly government is the day that will live in infamy.
But Europe has bigger problems than fighting in Iraq. First, they have to worry about their own unassimilated Muslim populations at home; second, Europeans who are capable of preserving European culture must begin to have children again. For anyone that’s listening: that means 2.1 children per woman, i.e. not just 2 and a white picket fence! Amazingly, there are some people so ignorant as to think that the problem is a lack of libido: those undeveloped folk sure love to get it on, but the rich, developed guys, how indolent in bed and no romance! Contraception, abortion, and sterilization - the bare technologies or methods - aren’t entirely to blame either; pace the case of China, which will grow old before it can grow powerful (so Steyn argues), these methods and technologies aren’t impositions, but choices which people make. I choose to contracept or to have an abortion; these aren’t things that happen to me.
In its commentary on the second graph on this page, the US Census Bureau claims that “Growth rates [in population] . . . started to decline due to rising age at marriage as well as increasing availability and use of effective contraceptive methods.” Oh, was that it? This might sound nice in a report no one reads, but if someone stops to ask the evidence for that claim, it’s bound to be wanting. If the explanation for the population being cut in half is a deadly disease which ravages 1 in 2 persons, it’s a good explanation, even if it might not be altogether air-tight. But as far as the Census Bureau’s explanation is concerned, I might just as well say that birth rates began to decline in the 1960s because my favorite beverage, Coke, was spreading rapidly around the world. Of course there may well be a correlation in the numbers with a rise in contraceptive technology, but this isn’t the ultimate cause of the decline.
So then what has sapped the will of Japan, Russia, Europe and the blue states to reproduce and raise the next generation? Steyn lays part of the blame at the feet of the modern, socialized state, a system of government which holds the population in permanent childhood. The state will take care of everything, the state will provide healthcare, old folks care, young folks care, this, that, and the other. The one thing that the state can’t provide is more warm bodies who can work and pay taxes in order to keep the cycle of enfeeblement rolling along. If half the population is over 65, retired, and living off a government pension, the tax burden on the remaining workers must grow. Listen to one of the brilliant minds they have working on this problem in Japan:
Japan already has the highest number of elderly people and the lowest number of young as a percentage of its population. The imbalance is threatening future economic growth and raising fears over whether the government will be able to fund pensions.
But Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki said: “It’s impossible for the pension system to collapse due to the declining birth rate because we will adjust the amount of money put into it.”
Did they teach him that kind of mathematical genius at Princeton? Or maybe he learned how to manage finances like that at Cambridge? If you have no money, just get more money. Okay.
Yet the modern socialist state can’t be the whole of the explanation behind the lack of will to reproduce. In theory, at least, there’s nothing hindering the couple determined to have 12 children from living well in a socialized state - as long in the redistribution of wealth, families with more children have enough money coming to them through the relevant government programs. Today, in fact, in places like Germany and Australia, the government is providing incentives for couples to have more children. Yet while this BBC article celebrates the “baby boom” in Australia, for which the government is taking credit, the 2006 estimate for fertility rate in Australia is still only 1.76 children per woman. Hey, that beats Russia and Japan! but Australia is hardly out of the woods.
Remember when considering the birth rate that though the government may care (for a time) only about warm bodies to man the factories and pay the taxes, there’s a big difference between a healthy fertility rate across the population and a booming fertility in certain limited segments of the population. Steyn tells us that in Russia, too, there are districts of growth, despite an overall birth rate at death spiral levels; and what’s the predominant religion in all of these growing districts? You guessed it - Islam.
As I was saying, I don’t think that a socialist state is the whole of the problem in Europe. Faithful Catholics are going to have children, and lots of them, whether they live in America or Italy. But consider the estimated 2006 birth rates for Italy, Spain, and Austria, once three of the most Catholic countries in Europe: 1.36 in Austria, 1.28 in Italy, and 1.28 in Spain. Whether these countries are waiting for the aliens or not, get the morgue ready: less than 1.3 children per woman is considered “lowest low fertility”, from which a population cannot recover. Remember, again, these numbers say nothing about which portions of the population in Spain, Austria and Italy are having children and which are not.
What happened in Spain and Italy? When people began paying heavy taxes and receiving “free” health care, did they also give up on the idea of having children? I don’t find this explanation plausible, though it may be a contributing factor. I think that the moral and religious formation of a nation is a more likely explanation of the will or lack thereof to raise a family. Steyn frequently mentions the fact that Euorpe is “post-Christian”. More accurately, though, all of Europe is “post-Catholic”, a condition in which parts of Euorpe have been for different amounts of time. I’m inclined to believe that it was the success of an ideology which some will associate with the Freemasons and others will call “secularism” in places like Spain and Italy which contributes in large part to Europe’s present demographic crisis. Why blame secularism? because it was this ideology which conquered all of Europe - not to mention Japan and Russia (in a more extreme form) - not always by force of arms, but always in a way which sought to sever the Church from the state and the formation of the young.
Through the reign of Pius XII, this separation of Church and state happened by a violence done to the then current arrangement of things, especially in France. But after the Second Vatican Council, it was the Church Herself, or rather, certain wicked members of her, tares among the wheat, even though ennobled with the office of the bishop, who precipitated the separation and hurried civil leaders down roads which have lead to today’s demographic crisis.
Abortion was preceded by contraception which was preceded by divorce. There is one Church in the world which has always opposed all three, but this opposition, in the public square, at least, melted away before the dictates of modern European sensibilities. Romano Amerio writes at length in Iota Unum about the missed opportunities and deliberate withdrawls of the Church, especially in Italy, over matters such as religious education, divorce, and abortion. Benedict XVI and Cardinal Ruini are doing what they can to reinject the Church into the “public square” of Italy, but they cannot regain in a short time the ground that was lost over many decades. Yet Benedict also seems to have accepted the multi-cultural, religious state, even in Europe, even in Italy, as a fait accompli in which the atheist, the Catholic, and the Muslim all have a voice. But when - given the demographic numbers today - Muslims can begin to accomplish the overthrow of old Europe by recourse to democratic institutions, what voice will the Church have and for how long?
Besides, the damage may be irreversible, by which I mean that the dire consequences of a dwindling population living in a socilaized state may have taken place before the trends in reproduction can be reversed. And how, after all, does one reverse trends in demographics? As I quoted above, the Australian government claims to have done so by providing tax incentives and even cash handouts for each new born child. But the numbers belie this short-term success: the nation as a whole still has a sickly birth rate. Will cash from the government make your average Joe and Jane more generous in raising children? Will they marry earlier and contracept less because their tax advisor says it will be a good thing? This doesn’t seem likely.
Or will people be convinced to have more children because Uncle Sam asks it? When discussing this question with Catharina Oxoniensis, she thinks that such a turnaround wouldn’t be impossible in a place like Corea, because of the “collective culture” mentality there. Once upon a time, the government of Corea said “We all need to have fewer children!” and the nation listened. Today, the birth rate is below lowest low at 1.27 births per woman.
But in the Western world, which seems to pride itself on something the very opposite of the collective culture mentality, will couples have another child on the basis of a “take one for the team” mentality? Instead, like many other things in life, won’t they say: “Why is it my problem? We’ve had one or two and that’s good enough.” Indeed, it’s a problem of collective action, for any one family can truly say that the solution of the problem isn’t up to them, even if they do have 16 kids.
In our lifetimes, we’ll be able to see whether the demographic doom-mongers, like Steyn, were right to worry. I’m convinced that they are.
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
Ducunt Fata volentem, nolentem trahunt.
“…Not merely the importance but the very existence of industry depends upon the existence of the hundred thousand talented, rigorously schooled brains that command the technique and develop it onward and onward. The quiet engineer it is who is the machine’s master and destiny.His thought is as possibility what the machine is as actuality. There have been fears, thoroughly materialistic fears, of the exhaustion of the coal-fields. But so long as there are worthy technical path-finders, dangers of this sort have no existence. When, and only when, the crop of recruits for this army fails - this army whose thought-work forms one inward unit with the work of the machine - the industry must flicker out in spite of all that managerial energy and the workers can-do. Suppose that, in future generations, the most gifted minds were to find their soul’s health more important than all the powers of this world; suppose that, under the influence of the metaphysic and mysticism that is taking the place of rationalism today, the very elite of intellect that is now concerned with the machine comes to be overpowered by a growing sense of its Satanism (it is the step from Roger Bacon to Bernard of Clairvaux) - then nothig can hinder the end of this great drama that has been a play of intellects, with hands as mere auxiliaries.”
In another chapter Spengler continues: “…When reason have to be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself has become questionable. At that point begins prudent limitation of the number of births. The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of “mutual understanding.” It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady’s who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne’s who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine’s who “belongs to herself” - they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful…
At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which last for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements…
Consequently we find everywhere in these Civilizations that the provincial cities at an early stage, and the giant cities in turn at the end of the evolution, stand empty, harbouring in their stone masses a small population of fellaheen who shelter in them as the men of the Stone Age sheltered in caves and pile-dellings. Samarra was abndoned by the tenth century; Pataliputra, Asoka’s capital, was an immense and completely uninhabited waste of houses when the Chinese traveller Hsuan Tsang visited it about A.D. 635, and many of the great Maya cities must have been in that condition even in Cortez’s time. In a long series of Classical writers from Polybius onward we read of old, renowned cities in which the streets have become lines of empyu , crumbling shells, where the cattle browse in forum and gymnasium, and the amphitheatre is a sown field, dotted with emergent statues and hermae. Rome had in the fifth century of our era the population of a village, but its Imperial palaces were still habitable.”
Although I have a catholic viewpoint on world-history and identify with the “fellaheen” of Spengler, his words are wise and prophetic beyond belief.
Trebics
Steyn has an important point about demography, but in other respects he is insane. He complains about Americans who demand an exit strategy from Iraq, and notes that the Iranians who are meddling in Iraq have no intention of leaving. Watch Iranian tv and you’ll never hear anyone demanding an exit strategy, he says. Apparently we need the will to have our army involved in foregin adventures indefinitely! We have the maxim gun, and we need to be willing to use it more frequently and for longer duration!
Steyn’s imperialist foregin policy is the exact opposite of what we need to resolve the demographic crisis which he rightly deplores. His diagnosis is accurate but his prescription is off the wall; the jingoism of Steyn is exactly what drove America’s government into the hands of pro-abortion Democrats this last election. Let’s try ceasing to blame our problems on the sinister other, that exotic and hate-worthy foreigner who makes his wife wear a bedsheet, and place the blame where it belongs: squarely on ourselves. Our exalted American values of separation of church and state and freedom of expression, our false, masonic definition of “freedom”, and our sexual and cultural degeneracy are what is ruining our country.
We do September 11 and worse to ourselves every day through legalized abortion. Europe wouldn’t need Muslim immigrants if it would reject the French revolution and embrace a Catholic social order. Muslims wouldn’t fly planes into our buildings if we didn’t provide Israel with its cluster bombs, prop up oppressive regimes over them to ensure a steady supply of oil, and assault them with our depraved cultural imperialism. Let’s face it, the first four things to follow an invading American army are condoms, pornography, Protestant evangelists, and money for the local feminist ideologues. We merit the title of “Great Satan.”
Before Ben Douglass gets pounded, let me say that I would have written precisely what he wrote a few years ago. And for the most part I agree with his analysis of many of the problems facing us (I haven’t read Steyn’s article, yet, I admit). But I must point out something here: “Muslims wouldn’t fly planes into our buildings if we didn’t provide Israel with its cluster bombs, prop up oppressive regimes over them to ensure a steady supply of oil, and assault them with our depraved cultural imperialism.” Our pro-Zionist government, our support for oppressive regimes (which I *do not* entirely condemn — many of these oppressors are the better of two evils, and the neocons also want to destabilize these guys), and our cultural imperialism are all genuine provocations to the Moslem world. But, because we have provoked them, and because they use this provocation as a pretext for terrorism, does *not* mean that the provocation is the real cause of their violence. Islamists of alls stripes in Iraq are killing Chaldeans, the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt is intimidating Copts, Hezbollah is undermining Christian power in Lebanon, the Islamic Courts Union was taking over Somalia until Ethiopia (with a long Christian history) invaded, Moslems murdered Christians in Nigeria after the Denmark cartoons, Moslems are killing Catholics in East Timor, Islamists in the Philippines are taking Catholics hostage . . . need I go on? None of this violence has any provocation, yet Moslems are there, murdering, raping, oppressing. The Christians of the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, Nigeria, East Timor, and the Philippines are *not* pro-Israeli (with the exception of the Lebanese Christians, who will take any help they can get), nor are they bolstering kleptocrats (though I bet they prefer kleptocrats to mullahs), nor are they engaging in cultural imperialism. The Moslems will use a pretext when they can, but they will wage jihad even when they can’t. I agree that the United States should fundamentally reassess its “special relationship” with Israel, that it should end its promotion of immorality via the instruments of pop culture, and — well, I support secularist thugs over fanatics with a death wish, so I would probably keep up U.S. support for the moderate Moslem rulers (though the Saudis fund extremism). Hopefully the lack of ostensible provocations would indeed decrease the effectiveness of jihadist propaganda amongst Iraqis, Iranians, Palestinians, Saudis, etc. But there would still be a terrorist virus within Islam, one that lay dormant during the decay of the Ottoman Sultanate and that now has been reawakened (not least of all via Soviet funding of anti-western movements in “developing nations,” just to work the Fatima revelations in). These people will kill us for being bad Christians today and kill us for being good Christians tomorrow. I am not a neoconservative, and I reject the errors of that movement. But Belloc predicted the reawakening of Islam back when the neocons were still open Trotskyites — it’s been coming for awhile. And, pace Pat Buchanan (whom I admire), the vanguard of the New Caliphate will *not* “stop coming over here as soon as we stop being over there.” Rather, they will see retreat as a sign of Allah’s support and will turn even more savagely on the West. Do we deserve it? Sure. But that does not mean that we should passively accept the scourge. That is cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face. I want God to treat my country mercifully, not justly. And, mercifully, I hope that the people here use the threat of reinvigorated Islam to come to their senses. Remember, Martin Luther was condemned in “Exsurge Domine” for saying that, since the Turks (i.e. Moslem terrorists) are a scourge for our sins, therefore it is sinful to fight crusades against them. Is Islamic terrorism a scourge against the U.S. for its sins (including Zionist aggression, messianic democratism, smut-peddling)? I think so. But I still want the U.S. to set up someone, anyone in Iraq who will neutralize terrorists there. That does *not* mean that I condone going there in the first place, or that I support toppling Middle Eastern regimes left and right. But in order to face long-term problems (like the demographic collapse), we need to survive immediate problems (the War on Terror).
“Do we deserve it? Sure.” I mean that a country that supports the four sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance (and our govt. supports all four) deserves what it gets. I do not mean that the people on Sept. 11 and the soldiers and civilian dead since then deserved to die at the hands of the murderers who killed them.
Of course Islam is an inherently violent religion. When Muslims assault Christians, by all means, let’s protect the Christians. But Christians were not under assault in Hussein’s Iraq (in fact, Hussein protected the Chaldeans far better than we are protecting them), and they are not under assault in Ahmadinejad’s Iran. They are under assault in Kosovo, following our bombing of the Christians (http://www.interfax-religion.com/kosovo/), and they are under assault in Israel.
I think there is something to the correlation Steyn sees between socialism and degraded family values. They each come from wanting lots of autonomy and no responsibility. Contraception and socialism are similar in some ways… they both aim to spread giant safety nets below everybody, so that their actions won’t have to have consequences.
I’m torn on the question of how irreversible the damage is. On the one hand, this downturn in birth rates has been fairly dramatic, right? So it seems demographic tendencies can take pretty large swings at times. Why not the other way, too? On the other hand, the “have less kids” poison went down pretty easily. The opposite would probably be harder to stomach. Such candy to the ears of liberals: they could live completely selfish lives and feel virtuous about it! They could pursue their careers and spend all their money on themselves and still look down their noses in contempt on those un-liberated women who were wasting their lives and destroying the planet by raising kids. Growing up, I knew only children who told me loftily that their parents had decided to have only one “for the sake of the earth.” The snub to my family (I have four siblings) was obviously intended, but their parents probably really did tell themselves that… and the fact that this enabled two incomes and plush lifestyles was just the hard price they had to pay for their gift of sterility, their generosity to THE EARTH. Such delightful excuses die hard.
The thing is, though, their reasoning (demographically speaking) wasn’t entirely crazy. Life expectancy has gone way up in the past few centuries, and infant mortality rates dropped way down. If people still had as many kids as they did a century ago, the population really would rise in a hurry… trouble is, people these days seem to want just one child, or none. It’s possible, though, that watching the crumbling of Europe may inspire people to yearn for the family-oriented culture of yesteryear. And if so, the fact that we can successfully bring more newborns to adulthood nowadays, could help to repair the gap relatively quickly. Just a possible ray of hope.
Steyn is a true cultural imperialist, but that doesn’t necessarily make him insane. He’s not American, by the way — I think he’s Canadian? But anyway, it’s not just a matter of taking a moral high ground; he probably would want us to do that to some degree, though he’d likely agree that we’ve got a lot of moral problems here too. But he also just thinks that our system of doing things works better, and that, if we had any backbone, we’d be unashamed about imposing significant elements of it on others. Of course there are all sorts of practical difficulties in implementation, but at least Steyn thinks that we should stand proud and say to some really messed up countries, “Yes. You would do well to model your society more after ours. Your ways of organizing a society just don’t work.” We’ve lost the confidence to do that, and maybe it’s time we got it back.
True, Chaldeans were better protected under Saddam than under the American occupation. They currently flee to Syria, which should tell us something about that country. But I think that our correspondent Joe Six Pack may have some comments about the Chaldean hierarchy’s resonse to the occupation. Also, it is true that Christians are under attack in Israel. But, as far as Iraq goes, whether we originally should have invaded is a moot point now. We are there — shall we just surrender the place to mullahs or not?
Mark Steyn prides himself on being the worlds only Canadian Warmonger (justifiably, I might add), and, joins those of us ‘real’ Americans who support the war, and, who’ve placed our bodies in jeopardy at least once, by going to Iraq…outside the Walls. I’m in Iraq, now, and I can appreciate Mark’s initiative in spending his own money to back his mouth, travelling to Iraq through Jordan.
I wholly agree with his read on the state of conception and birth in the “Civilized” world, and, I’d like to add that it fits the profile of the “End of Golden Ages.”
Two of the markers delineating the end of Civilizations have been declining birth rates (of the Aristocracy and Nobility), and, a simple phrase uttered by the Ladies while protected and pampered behind Walls and surrounded by Foreign Bodyguards (prefaced by a plan to make everyone safe): “The People don’t need weapons, it will only encourage them to foment sedition and rebellion. We have enough weapons to provide all the security they need. After all, We’re Civilized.”
The act of disarming the “People” who fought the wars, and, conquered the land that became the core of that Age is the last act of a dying empire, and, impossible to survive, because there is always an Alexander or Saladin, just over the hill.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/02/04/iraq.main/index.html
I think the best way to salvage the situation now is to split Iraq into three countries: one for the Shiites, one for the Sunnis, and one for the Kurds. If the Shiite part gets annexed by Iran, so be it. That would at least bring the place some stablility and peace. If Iran suddenly went from an economy 2% the size of America’s to 2.5%, that wouldn’t constitute a threat to our national security. Turkey couldn’t afford to stop the creation of a Kurdistan, since they are trying to become a member of the world community. Several thousand people would have to move to a different part of Baghdad to be in the country run by their co-religionists, but when you have a situation where 1,000 people are dying in a week, drastic measures can be justified.
So, Ben, once we split that country up, will we take the responsibility to prevent the three sides from “going at” each other? Right or wrong, we still have soldiers in Germany, Japan, and Korea. We did leave Vietnam, and look what happened. The problem that I have with the anti-war position is that it says, “continued occupation is untenable” without stating what we are supposed to do. We leave. Iran invades. Let them do it? We split the country in three, we leave. Iran takes its Shiites — and goes for Kurdistan. Turkey simultaneously goes for Kurdistan. The Jordanians, Saudis, and Syrians back the Sunnis, whom Iran also attacks. After splitting the country in three, would we have any more idea that this was working than we do now with the erstwhile provisional government? Shall we be fickle and flee from known dangers to unknown ones? I know that it is bad to keep up a bad policy . . . unless every other policy is equally bad or worse. We can’t assure ourselves whether the current policy can work, but neither can we assure anyone that another policy will work. I do know that the people our soldiers are killing in Iraq are bad men, and regardless of the case before 2003, Al-Queda and Islamist terrorists are there now. Let us either get rid of them, or — better — find someone there who can do that for us.
Whoops, I meant “Corea.”
David Warren is also a Canadian warmonger; see his http://www.davidwarrenonline.com. As for Israel, crazed fundamentalist enthusiasm for that country on the grounds of its being the fulfilment of some obscure passage in the Book of Revelations should not lead Catholics to disparage that country. The notion that Israeli attacks on Palestinians are a main cause of (as opposed to pretext for) Muslim hatred of the West, and that eliminating American support for Israel, or Israel itself, would lessen Muslim aggression, is nonsense. Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories, while often cruel (as is generally the case with military occupations), is no worse than the average treatment of most Muslim populations by their own states (e.g. Egypt, where torture by the police is routinely to be expected by any ordinary Egyptian who falls in their hands). Israeli Arabs - ie those Arabs who live in the state of Israel proper rather than in the occupied territories - are better off than any other Arab population; and Palestinian Christians are leaving the country primarily because of persecution at the hand of their Muslim brethren (who have become more powerful with the establishment of a Palestinian authority), rather than because of Israeli actions. (Compare the treatment of Christians by Israel with the treatment of Christians by most Muslim countries - you won’t be in any doubt as to where they are better off.) What really makes the Muslims hate Israel is the blow it gives to their ego; the fact that they have been defeated by a people they hate, and that they cannot succeed in destroying them despite their enormous advantage in wealth and population. They couldn’t care less about cruelty as such - they belong to some of the most cruel societies on earth, and monstrously cruel practices (honour killing of women for the crime of having been raped, etc.) are a valued part of their culture. I find this anti-Israel attitude a disturbing amalgam of traditional anti-Semitism and appeasement of Muslims. The idea that Israel is responsible for hatred of the post-Christian western countries, and that the destruction of that state would appease Muslims, is the opposite of the truth. Muslim aggressive war has been a fact of history ever since the time of Mohammed - there was no state of Israel when the Turks were attacking Vienna. And the destruction of that state, far from appeasing typical Muslims (ie the violent kind), would enormously increase their strength and aggressive ambitions, because it would hand them a great victory. Israelis may not always kill the right Muslims, but at least they are making efforts in that direction. For example, I read today that Mossad is claimed to have assassinated a leading Iranian nuclear scientist, a great boon for civilisation - and who else would have accomplished that? I am profoundly grateful to them (breaks into Israeli patriotic song).
There are no solutions to these problems.
To say that redrawing boundaries will fix anything is a fallacy. Every such suggestion is a complete joke.
There is nothing, naturally speaking, America can do besides watch these regions auto-destruct and millions of innocent men, women, and children perish.
As long as we persist in the belief that we can somehow fix these problems around the world, we will continue to spend 300 to 400 million dollars a day on the operational costs of war and more on our defense budget - the cost of merely maintaing our military force (almost 700 billion dollars per year now) almost more than the rest of the world’s national defense budgets combined, not to mention the human cost in deaths, and have nothing to show for it.
On the other hand, with regard to military spending, the USA spends less dollars as a percentage of GDP than 45 other countries.
To say another way, USA ranks number 45 in spending as a percentage of GDP — about the same as France.
an interesting website for crunching these numbers
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/mil_exp_dol_fig_pergdp-expenditures-dollar-figure-per-gdp
A quote from George Orwell posted as a comment by “3Case” on an article (MiniPax) by “Wretchard” on The Belmont Club blog, would be especially appropo here:
“All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.”
“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
It is foolish to assume that we can know the hearts of others when their most cherished values are directly opposed to ours, and, slanted toward the commandments of a god we cannot comprehend: Allah, son of Sin, Son of Seht, the god of the Crescent Moon.
Sorry about the double post, but, simply removing the quote marks around The Belmont Club, cured the Link problem…now, I need to find out what happened…?
One point that needs to be brought up is the forcing of women into the workplace. I think that an overlooked factor in the reason for small families is that wives are just too tired and too stressed to have more than one or two children. If society really wants more children, then there has to be a reversal of the mothers in the workforce syndrome. I personally know and have known many, many women who would love to stay home with their children and have more children, but feel pressured by economics to go back to work. They are also pressured by their husbands and society. Plus there no longer exists the neighborhood and familial support network of moms and grandmas and aunts and cousins who are also staying home (except in some TLM communities), so staying home right now is a very lonely existence.
Having more than one or two children takes a lot of time and effort that cannot be split with work outside the home. The American government consciously reconfigured its policies and tax code away from supporting families some years ago. To reinvigorate larger families, it will take some long-term, large-scale effort to support those families instead of belittling them.
Theophile
The American government consciously reconfigured its policies and tax code away from supporting families some years ago.
Don’t vote liberal democrat!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Although really, it isn’t like single people are any better off — right?
Tobias Petrus,
A garrison of maybe 50,000 troops in Kurdistan would probably suffice to prevent the great conflagration you forsee. That would be much safer for our soldiers than making them patrol the streets of Baghdad and Tikrit.
john I,
Listen to yourself. You are applauding a murder.
No, Ben, I have to disagree with you on this point, he is not applauding ‘murder’, but, Justifiable Homicide, the permanent removal of a threat to the entire world.
Not saying that this “Nuclear Scientist” was anything other than a money-grubbing fool, but, fools have killed more human beings than Lions.
One point we should all ponder is that much of this violence devolves from the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood by the NAZI SS during WWII. The first leader of the Brotherhood was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and, is most prevalent as a coherent Terrorist Organization in Egypt, today. Modern Islamist philosophy is based on the teachings of the SS, and, Anti-Semitism is a founding principle.
Achmedinejad, and everyone who follows him, is steeped in the philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood, and we can be assured that the ultimate purpose of their Nuclear adventure has few greater purposes than the destruction of Israel. Nuking the “Great Satan” is only Candy to make world conquest easier.