Posted on 02/20/2008 1:52:32 PM PST by forkinsocket
Steve Mosher is telling me about wolves returning to the streets of European towns. Not as part of some Vermont-model wildlife-recovery scenario but as emblems of a harsh comeuppance mankind is due--they're stalking out of the forests like an ancient judgment, coming to claim mankind's ceded land. We're sitting in a sunny Main Street cafe in Front Royal, Virginia--a beautifying ex-industrial town in the Shenandoah Valley that, as the far edge of DC's suburban sprawl, is lately home to a surprising number of conservative Christian ministries. Mosher, president of the Catholic anticontraception lobbyist group Population Research Institute (PRI), describes his grim vision of Europe's future: fields will lie fallow and economies will wither. A great depression will sink over the continent as it undergoes "a decline that Europe hasn't experienced since the Black Death." The comeuppance has a name, one being fervently hawked among a group of Christian-right "profamily" activists hoping to spark a movement in secular Europe. It's called the "demographic winter," a more austere brand of apocalypse than doomsayers normally trade in, evoking not a nuclear inferno but a quiet and cold blanket of snow in which, they charge, "Western Civilization" is laying itself down to die.
How so? Europe is failing to produce enough babies--the right babies--to replace its old and dying. It's "the baby bust," "the birth dearth," "the graying of the continent": modern euphemisms for old-fashioned race panic as low fertility among white "Western" couples coincides with an increasingly visible immigrant population across Europe. The real root of racial tensions in the Netherlands and France, America's culture warriors tell anxious Europeans, isn't ineffective methods of assimilating new citizens but, rather, decades of "antifamily" permissiveness--contraception, abortion, divorce, population control, women's liberation and careers, "selfish" secularism and gay rights--enabling "decadent" white couples to neglect their reproductive duties.
(Excerpt) Read more at thenation.com ...
The Valley had from the 1800’s “conservative” Christians.
I read this, and I see that I thought of this a year ago - and here it is, in academic discourse.
Maybe there’s hope for me. Even though there’s no hope for the West.
My, my, my.
I know they didn't say that, but they attribute the concern to racism on the part of the white folks. It's just as easy to attribute the concern to the prospect of re-establishing slavery, and since The Nation evaded that point, it's something I'd like to lay on their back.
These Commies just never give up do they. Their "New Soviet Man" didn't show up in Russia, and he's not showing up in China, so maybe some Middle Eastern migrant worker wandering around Paris may figure out how to become one.
To summarize the article, some of the parties concerned about the lack of babies in the western world are the Italian Prime Minister, Evangelical American Ministries, The Pope, The Mormons, the Russian Prime Minister, a Nixon Speechwriter, Think Tanks, Jewish Rabbis, The Heritage Foundation, the Family Research Council, and Focus on the Family. But such talk is racist and smacks of fascism because Mussolina had a program to increase the birth rate.
Bookmark for later comment.
In the US,
some bought the scare that we would overpopulate and run out of food and space, so they (responsibly /s) did not procreate;
some did not buy into the !growth is the answer! mantra that businesses, and regional governments have been selling for years, instead wanting the status quo or a less-hectic urban existance. Do we really need new shopping malls and McMansions?
some here imagine that one should establih roots to raise children that you can support without welfare assistance -
that reduces reproductive time span and therefore offspring.
Then it seems like here, as in Europe, the “GROWTH!” crowd can’t wait for natural population growth, just bus in the hordes!
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