"America Alone"


I haven't reviewed it yet, but Christopher Hitchens has
Christopher Hitchens reviews Mark Steyn's new book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It at City Journal. It's a book I haven't felt comfortable reviewing here yet.

Hitchens does put his finger on Steyn's key point though.

The second liberal disability concerns numbers. Any emphasis on the relative birthrates of Muslim and non-Muslim populations falls on the liberal ear like an echo of eugenics. It also upsets one of the most valued achievements of the liberal consensus: the right if not indeed the duty to limit family size to (at most) two children. It was all very well, from this fatuously self-satisfied perspective, for Paul Ehrlich to warn about the human “population bomb” as a whole, just as it is all very well for some “Green” forces to take a neo-Malthusian attitude toward human reproduction in general. But in the liberal mind, to concentrate on the fertility of any one group is to flirt with Nuremberg laws. The same goes for “racial profiling,” even when it’s directed at the adherents of an often ideological religion rather than an ethnic group. The Islamists, meanwhile, have staked everything on fecundity.

Mark Steyn believes that demography is destiny, and he makes an immensely convincing case. He stations himself at the intersection of two curves. The downward one is the population of developed Europe and Japan, which has slipped or is slipping below what demographers call “replacement,” rapidly producing a situation where the old will far outnumber the young. The upward curve, or curves, represent the much higher birthrate in the Islamic world and among Muslim immigrants to Western societies.

If Steyn is right, some of our "civilized" behavior may have already doomed us. Back in the 1970s when The Population Bomb was all the rage, I doubt if anyone saw the implications in warfare. It's one of our critical weaknesses, we expect the other side to play by the rules while we hobble ourselves to give them every advantage.

Both the review and the book are worth your time

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - January 26, 2007 at 02:19 PM  Tag


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