Demography is destiny

Red Planet presents a couple of good articles to go with this cartoon. Here is one of them:

Mark Steyn, The Wall Street Journal (2006): It’s the Demography, Stupid.

If only a million babies are born in 2006, it’s hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026. And the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they’re running out a lot faster than the oil is. “Replacement” fertility rate–i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller–is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common…

Nineteen seventy doesn’t seem that long ago. If you’re the age many of the chaps running the Western world today are wont to be, your pants are narrower than they were back then and your hair’s less groovy, but the landscape of your life–the look of your house, the layout of your car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the fridge–isn’t significantly different. Aside from the Internet and the cell phone and the CD, everything in your world seems pretty much the same but slightly modified.

And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20%.

And by 2020?

So the world’s people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less “Western.” Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)–or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: In the U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.

Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.

The thing is though that it won't be an empty continent. It will be teeming with humanity - it's just that it will be Muslim humanity. By the middle of this century Europe will be majority Muslim, unless the Europeans find the political will to do something about it right now.

Unfortunately "doing something" would mean deporting tens of millions of Muslims - and not just immigrants but native born as well - back to the North African and Middle Eastern nations from which they, or their parents, came. Given the sheer number of Muslims living in Western Europe and the degree to which they have been radicalized this would likely mean continent wide civil wars of terrible savagery.

The question is whether Europeans will be willing to pay that kind of price to retain their civilization. I would guess that the answer is going to be "NO". After all if they do not even care enough about the survival of their culture to have enough children to replace themselves will they really be willing to turn their streets into rivers of blood to save it?