Posted on 04/18/2006 12:26:41 AM PDT by albyjimc2
Demographics may bring about what the Moors and Ottoman Empire couldn't: a Muslim Europe
Anyone know where we can find some Etruscans? You know, members of the Etruscan civilization that existed in ancient Italy, predating even Rome?
Well, there aren't any. The Etruscans were absorbed by the Roman civilization and ceased to exist as a distinct people.
Ominously, if a growing number of experts and cultural observers are right, it's entirely possible that the same question may be asked 100 years from now -- only about Italians or Spaniards or Russians.
As writer Mark Steyn glumly put it in The New Criterion, "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."
What could possibly cause such a cataclysm? Another world war? A nuclear confrontation? The devastation of a plague, similar to that caused by the Black Death in the 14th century? Nothing quite so dramatic, say the experts. Rather, Europe is slowly dying simply by refusing to have enough children to replace the people who die each year.
Catholic scholar George Weigel, a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of The Cube and The Cathedral, says Europe is "committing demographic suicide, systematically depopulating itself."
For any population to remain stable, it must maintain a birthrate of 2.1 births per woman. That rate provides a replacement for both mother and father, while the .1 covers infant and child mortality. When the birthrate falls below that number, a population goes into decline - unless it invites in large numbers of immigrants.
"The 'birth dearth' is what demographers call plummeting birth rates in most of the industrialized world," says culture critic Chuck Colson. "Throughout Western Europe and East Asia, the birth rate is well below 2.1 births per woman ...."
Sociologist Ben Wattenberg, author of Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future, puts this birth dearth in historical perspective. "Never in the last 650 years, since the time of the Black Plague, have birth and fertility rates fallen so far, so fast, so low, for so long, in so many places."
According to U.N. figures and other projections, Patrick Buchanan states in The Death of the West that by 2050 Europe (from Iceland to Russia) will see its population drop from 728 million (in 2000) to 600 million - and perhaps 556 million. And if current trends continue, by the end of the century Europe's population will stand at 207 million.
Why has this happened? As it turns out, a variety of factors and trends have combined to create, as it were, the "perfect storm."
World magazine's Gene Edward Veith sums it up this way: "Why the population decline? The worldwide collapse of what are, literally, family values. Thanks to contraceptive technology, sex has become separated from childbearing. With women pursuing careers of their own and men getting sex without the responsibility of marriage, why bother with children? For many women and men, pregnancy has become an unpleasant side effect, something to prevent with contraceptives or easily treated with a trip to the abortion clinic."
Abortion comes in for particular blame in Veith's view. "The dirty little secret of the population implosion, one seldom mentioned by demographers, is that the world is aborting its future generations," he says.
Pro-family groups in the U.S., for example, rightly bemoan the abortion rate here, where Veith says one-third to one-fifth of all pregnancies end in abortion. Some European nations are far worse, however. "In Russia, the average woman may have as many as four abortions in her lifetime," he says. "There are two abortions for every live birth. That is to say, Russians kill two-thirds of their children before they are born."
All this is symptomatic of a pervasive hedonism that permeates the West, "a complete philosophy of pleasure," according to Allan Carlson, president of The Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society.
"Everywhere in the European Community and Anglo-America, real attention focuses on the consumption of food (alternately rich and fat-free), frequent sex, and raucous fun," Carlson says. "Relatively few are pestered these days by children. Fertile young adults rely on mechanical devices and chemical agents to thwart the designs of nature. In places as culturally different as Spain, Italy, Denmark and Germany, the sexual experimentation starts early, but hardly anyone brings forth a child."
Despite efforts on the part of some European nations to increase the desire of adults to have children - such as tax breaks or cash incentives -- some experts think the pursuit of personal fulfillment will triumph.
Joseph Chamie, director of the U.N. Population Division, says, "No demographers believe birth rates will rebound. How much will it take to convince a woman to have four children? People are concerned about their appearances, their education, their careers."
What's ironic, however, is that this pursuit of personal pleasure and personal wealth may result in economic ruin.
"When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the nearest thing to hard numbers," Steyn argues. "If only a million babies are born in 2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 ...."
Veith lists but a few of the ramifications of population decline. "Citizens are not just consumers but producers," he says. "Having fewer people can wreak havoc on an economy, creating both a labor shortage and a shortage of buyers. A government with a shrinking population faces a smaller military and fewer taxpayers. Dwindling populations have always signaled cultural decline, with less creativity, energy, and vitality on every level of society."
These explanations do not go far enough to suit culture critic and columnist Don Feder, who sees Europe's abandonment of its Christian heritage as the true root cause of its population problems.
"It's no coincidence that central to the new Europe ... is a refusal to acknowledge the continent's origins," says Feder, who is Jewish. "The proposed constitution for the European Union (a document of over 70,000 words) contains not a single reference to Christianity. Thus more than a millennium of European history is effectively erased."
The abandonment of Christianity in most European countries has been well-documented. For example, author and journalist James P. Gannon says that in five key European countries - France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy - over the last 30 years regular church attendance has fallen from roughly 40% of the population to about 20%." As Weigel says, Western Europe has become a "post-Christian society."
Feder believes there is a clear link between a lack of faith and the loss of that sense of duty to the future that leads people to conceive and bear children. "Having lost their faith and embraced an ethic of radical autonomy," he says, "Europeans stopped going to church, stopped taking the Bible seriously, stopped believing in the future and stopped having children."
Maria Burani, president of the Parliamentary Commission for the Family and Infancy in Rome, told Citizen magazine that faith is a foundation for the kind of lifestyle that parenting requires. "If you don't have inside your head great religious and ethical principles," she insists, "you're just not going to want to go and have these kids because it's a sacrifice."
Beyond that, of course, is the fact that religious principles also restrain the often selfish behavior that grows out of the "radical autonomy" that permeates Europe. "Among the consequences of Europe's abandonment of its religious roots and the moral code that derives therefrom is a plunge in its birth rates to below the replacement level," says Gannon. "Abortion, birth control, acceptance of gay marriage and casual sex are driving the trend."
However, the prognosis for Europe gets even worse because many of the nations there have chosen a risky path for making up for their population shortfalls: immigration. Because North Africa and the Middle East represent a relatively convenient source of cheap labor, millions of Muslim immigrants have been flooding the continent for a half century.
"Western Europe has gone from a Muslim population of 250,000, 50 years ago, to 20 million today," says Feder.
Unlike Westerners, however, Muslims typically have large families. According to Robert S. Leiken, director of the Immigration and National Security Program at the Nixon Center, higher Muslim birthrates combined with Muslim immigration have led the U.S. National Intelligence Council to project that Europe's Muslim population will double by 2025.
As a result, Colson says flatly, "demographics may bring about what the Moors and Ottoman Empire couldn't: a Muslim Europe."
But so what? Isn't such hand-wringing about Muslim immigrants nothing more than utter bigotry?
Hardly, say concerned Westerners. The Islamification of Europe would bring incredible cultural changes to Europe. "In 50 to 100 years, the Europe of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, the Europe of Rembrandt and Bach, the Europe of Churchill and Karol Wojtyla will exist only in textbooks and museums," Feder says. "Or, perhaps the remnants of Christian Europe will be subjected to the fate of Afghanistan's Buddhist statues, demolished by the Taliban regime."
Political changes would also be inevitable, Steyn insists. "Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?"
It is a rhetorical question, of course, and Steyn predicts that by 2050 many European nations will be forced to apply Sharia - Muslim law - to Muslim communities. He notes the results of a 2004 poll that found that over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under Muslim law - while living in the United Kingdom.
At first, most European governments would probably resist the demands of an increasingly assertive Muslim population. But in response, it would not be surprising to see an escalation of what has already begun to transpire: terrorist bombings in London and Madrid; the 2002 assassination of conservative Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, who campaigned on a platform of limiting Muslim immigration; the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004 for allegedly insulting Islam; rioting by Muslim youths throughout France in 2005; and rioting this year in response to political cartoons that were deemed offensive to Muslim sensibilities.
Steyn thinks Europe will see more such unrest -- and soon. "It seems more likely that within the next couple of European election cycles, the internal contradictions of the [European Union] will manifest themselves in the usual way," he says, "and that by 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on American network news every night."
In any case, Carlson says, "the Great Party of Western hedonism will not last much longer. There is an iron law in history: the future belongs to the fertile. Just as the clan-centered, child-rich barbarian tribes of the Germans swept away the sensuous and sterile Western Roman Empire, so shall new barbarians arise."
Scripture teaches that God rules over the nations, and the future of Europe looks increasingly like that of Israel when its prophets warned of impending chastisement and judgment. Are we on the brink of God's chastisement of Europe, even after a century of wars and other atrocities failed to bring the continent back to Christianity?
How ironic it would be that a European culture that demanded unlimited personal freedom might wind up living under the repressive heel of Muslim totalitarianism. Or that a culture that rejected its Christian heritage might, instead, be subjected to Islamic fundamentalism.
Cultures have disappeared before. Just ask the Etruscans. If you can find one.
Good summation.
The part that truly shocked me was the point that the average Russian woman has 4 abortions. I stomach almost came out of my mouth. that is absolutley disgusting...
Most of the Muslim population in European countries is 3% at most.
Only in France is it 9%.
The increase is due to immigration legal and illegal.
Yes Muslims have large families in the countries of the births, but there children born in a Western country are not interested in large families, but more interested in enjoying the same things there white or Christian counterparts want.
And also latest figures have shown that the birth rate is going up again for Europeans. Coupled with stricter immigration, as well as a concerted effort to remove the illegals.
I would question the motives of those who write these articles, what is is they want to achieve with these doom and gloom scenarios based on very shaky facts and premises.
Is it that a scared population is more easy to manipulate.
The Nazis used similar scare tactics and were very involved in turning everyone into baby breeding units.
Muslim Europe
by Daniel Pipes
Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam." So declares Oriana Fallaci in her new book, La Forza della Ragione, or, "The Force of Reason." And the famed Italian journalist is right: Christianity's ancient stronghold of Europe is rapidly giving way to Islam.
Two factors mainly contribute to this world-shaking development.
*The hollowing out of Christianity. Europe is increasingly a post-Christian society, one with a diminishing connection to its tradition and its historic values. The numbers of believing, observant Christians has collapsed in the past two generations to the point that some observers call it the "new dark continent." Already, analysts estimate Britain's mosques host more worshippers each week than does the Church of England.
* An anemic birth rate. Indigenous Europeans are dying out. Sustaining a population requires each woman on average to bear 2.1 children; in the European Union, the overall rate is one-third short, at 1.5 a woman, and falling. One study finds that, should current population trends continue and immigration cease, today's population of 375 million could decline to 275 million by 2075.To keep its working population even, the E.U. needs 1.6 million immigrants a year; to sustain the present workers-to-retirees ratio requires an astonishing 13.5 million immigrants annually. (more)
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1796
LOL let me guess she has a book to sell.
So more people go to a Mosque in Britain than the Church Of England even tho, the Muslim population in Britain is 3% at most.
"So more people go to a Mosque in Britain than the Church Of England even tho, the Muslim population in Britain is 3% at most."
"...the traditional ‘usual Sunday attendance’ measure showed a drop of two per cent to just over 900,000.." - http://www.cofe.anglican.org/news/pr0106.html
Muslim Britain: More people attend mosques than Church of England
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/000743.php
So how many closed churches do you pass on the way to work?
(hate to post and run, but I'm off...)
None but there are three churches within 10 min walking distance from me. One Church of England two Catholic, and a Baptist meeting hall down the road
bookmark
Logical fallacy of guilt-by-association. The Nazis also built compact cars and expressways. Does that make compact cars and expressways bad?
and were very involved in turning everyone into baby breeding units.
Historically false. They wanted more "Aryan" German babies, but promoted contraception, sterilization, and abortion for Slavs and Jews.
Well my reply seemed to have rattled you.Maybe its just part of a bums on seats operation, to get more people into church and more money into the church coffers.
LOL using the Muslims as the bogey men
What's really important here is not the actual figure now, but rather the direction of the trend and the projected figures if present rates are maintained. That's what has some people alarmed.
Sure, we're a long way from a Muslim dominated Europe- at least numerically- but I think it would be rather dangerous to equate a 3% population figure with a 3% influence on European civilization in terms of laws, customs and societal stability. If there's one thing that we've learned in recent years, it's that Muslims have the potential to produce destabilization to a degree which is disproportionate to their numbers.
Furthermore, the 3% figure does not mean that Muslims are dispersed throughout European society in a more or less homogenous distribution. They are concentrated heavily in certain areas where their numbers often approach 70-100%. In the UK, parts of Leeds, Bradford, Birmingham and the East End of London come to mind. They have not integrated into western society. At least not yet.
Banking on the next generation of Muslims all forsaking the mosque for soccer stadiums, pubs and nightclubs seems a little like playing Russian roulette to me, except that the chances of disaster are higher. I don't see it happening. The radicals and bomb throwers who now afflict us seem to be drawn from this younger generation and if anything, seem even more dangerous than their parents. Case in point: those responsible for the recent London Underground bombings.
Oh I know they are more radical, they remind me of the Badder Meinhoff and Red Army Faction.
But they are not breeding like there parents to put it bluntly, so we are not going to be out bred by them.
There has only been one attack in Britain, you can say one attack too many but its hardly the beginning of the end.
The IRA were more of a threat.
The Muslim radicals in Britain are on the defensive, many have fled abroad, we have arrested and detained most of the more prominent who didn't run.
We have there measure now.
Don't forget to factor in the continued migration of many of the well educated European young people to other Western nations because they can't find acceptable wages or employment after graduation in their liberal/socialist states.
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