The new hedonism seems unable to give people a reason to go on living. Its earliest fruits appear to be poisonous. Will this new “liberating” culture that our young have so enthusiastically embraced prove the deadliest carcinogen of them all? And if the West is in the grip of a “culture of death,” as the pope contends and the statistics seem to show, is Western civilization about to follow Lenin’s empire to the same inglorious end?
A century ago, Gustave Le Bon wrote in his classic The Crowd:
The real cause of the great upheavals which precede changes of civilisations, such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Arabian Empire, is a profound modification in the ideas of the peoples … . The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought … .The present epoch is one of these critical moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation.17
Le Bon was speaking of his own time, the end of the nineteenth century, but what he wrote is truer of ours.
For it is this cultural revolution that has led to just such a “profound modification in the ideas” of peoples. And those ideas have made Western elites apparently indifferent to the death of their civilization. They do not seem to care if the end of the West comes by depopulation, by a surrender of nationhood, or by drowning in waves of Third World immigration. Now that all the Western empires are gone, Western Man, relieved of his duty to civilize and Christianize mankind, reveling in luxury in our age of self-indulgence, seems to have lost his will to live and reconciled himself to his impending death. Are we in the twilight of the West? Is the Death of the West irreversible? Let us review the pathologist’s report.
ONE
ENDANGERED SPECIES
Europeans are a vanishing species.1
—London Times
The most important single new certainty—if only because there is no precedent for it in all of history—is the collapsing birthrate in the developed world.2
—Peter F. Drucker
As a growing population has long been a mark of healthy nations and rising civilizations, falling populations have been a sign of nations and civilizations in decline. If that holds true, Western civilization, power and wealth aside, is in critical condition. For, like the Cheshire Cat, the people of the West have begun to fade away.
As late as 1960, European people, including Americans, Australians, and Canadians, numbered 750 million, one-fourth of the 3 billion people alive. Western nations were in the baby boom of the century. Shorn of their empires, the wounds of war healed, they seemed alive with vitality. Indeed, neo-Malthusians were bewailing the population explosion, warning darkly that the earth’s resources and land were running out. They were laughed at. By 2000, however, no one was laughing.
While world population had doubled to six billion in forty years, the European peoples had stopped reproducing. Their populations had begun to stagnate and, in many countries, had already begun to fall. Of Europe’s forty-seven nations, only one, Muslim Albania, was, by 2000, maintaining a birthrate sufficient to keep it alive indefinitely. Europe had begun to die.
The prognosis is grim. Between 2000 and 2050, world population will grow by more than three billion to over nine billion people, but this 50 percent increase in global population will come entirely in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as one hundred million people of European stock vanish from the earth.
In 1960, people of European ancestry were one-fourth of the world’s population; in 2000, they were one-sixth; in 2050, they will be one-tenth. These are the statistics of a vanishing race. A growing awareness of what they portend has induced a sense of foreboding, even panic, in Europe.
EUROPE
In 2000, the total population of Europe, from Iceland to Russia, was 728 million. At present birthrates, however, without new immigration, her population will crash to 600 million by 2050. That is the projection of World Population Prospects: The 2000 Revision Highlights released by the authoritative UN Population Division on February 28, 2001. Another study has Europe’s population plummeting to 556 million by midcentury.3 The last time Europe’s population showed a drop of this magnitude was during the Black Plague of 1347-52. Economics professor Jacqueline Kasun of Humboldt State University in California, author of War Against Population, considers today’s birth dearth an even graver crisis:
With a plague like the [fourteenth-century] Black Death, maybe a third of Europe died, but it took the elderly as well as the young … . But this plunging fertility takes only the young. A couple still has parents and grandparents to support, directly or through their taxes. Since they’ve got fewer or no siblings to share that burden, having children seems even more unaffordable. So how do you dig your way out of a hole like a shrinking population?4
Excellent question, and if Europe does not find the answer soon, Europe dies. How bleak is the situation? Of the twenty nations with the lowest birthrates in the world, eighteen are in Europe. The average fertility rate of a European woman has fallen to 1.4 children, with 2.1 needed just to replace the existing population. Says columnist Ben Wattenberg: This does not mean ZPG (Zero Population Growth), this means ZP—Zero Population.5
Americans in NATO will soon be defending a vast Leisure World.
If the present fertility rates hold, Europe’s population will decline to 207 million by the end of the twenty-first century, less than 30 percent of today’s. The cradle of Western civilization will have become its grave.
Why is this happening? Socialism, the beatific vision of European intellectuals for generations, is one reason. “If everyone has the promise of a state pension, children are no longer a vital insurance policy against want in old age,” argues Dr. John Wallace of Bologna’s Johns Hopkins University: “If women can earn more than enough to be financially independent, a husband is no longer essential. And if you can also have sex and not babies—and this seems to be true now of Catholic Italy as it is of secular Britain—why marry?”6
By freeing husbands, wives, and children of family responsibilities, European socialists have eliminated the need for families. Consequently, families have begun to disappear. When they are gone, Europe goes with them. But as Europe is dying, the Third World adds one hundred million people—one new Mexico—every fifteen months. Forty new Mexicos in the Third World by 2050, while Europe will have lost the equivalent of the entire population of Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway—and Germany! Absent divine intervention, or a sudden desire on the part of Western women to begin having the same-size families as their grandmothers, the future belongs to the Third World. As T. S. Eliot wrote in “The Hollow Men”: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”7
CLEMENCEAU’S REVENGE
“There are twenty million Germans too many!” muttered Georges Clemenceau, the “Tiger of France” and the statesman most responsible for the Versailles Treaty, which stripped Germany of her colonies, a tenth of her land, and an eighth of her people.8 Clemenceau’s hatred is understandable. As Alistair Horne writes in his history of the fall of the Third Republic, “Clemenceau had been one of the deputies to protest against the surrender of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, and had narrowly escaped being lynched in the civil war that followed with the Commute.”9 He had witnessed the dethronement of his emperor and seen a German kaiser crowned at Versailles. In the Great War, he had seen his beloved France ravaged by the armies of Hindenburg and Ludendorff which had left behind the bodies of 1.5 million Frenchmen when they marched home to the Reich.
In fifty years, the Tiger will have his revenge, for German women are refusing to have children. For ten years, Germany’s birthrate has stood at 1.3 children per woman, far below the 2.1 needed to replace the present population. Here is the future that is now hard upon the German nation. By 2050:
• Twenty-three million Germans will have disappeared.
• Germany’s eighty-two million people will have fallen to fifty-nine million.
• The number of German children
under fifteen will have dropped to 7.3 million.
• A third of Germany’s population will be over sixty-five. These seniors will outnumber German children more than two to one.
• Germany’s total population will be two-thirds of I percent of the world’s population, and only 1 of every 150 people on earth will be a German. And Germans will be among the oldest people on earth.
At the request of the author, Joseph Chamie, director of the UN’s Population Division, projected the population of several European nations out to 2100. If the present German birthrate is sustained and immigration is zero, Germany’s population will fall from 82 million to 38.5 million by century’s end, a drop of 53 percent.10
The Bavarian conservative and potential chancellor Edmund Stoiber considers Germany’s birthrate a “ticking time bomb.”11 He urges a tripling of the child allowance for the first three years of life. Today, Germany pays monthly subsidies of $140 a child for the first two, more for a third. Stoiber’s idea is called radical today; it will not be tomorrow.
“My reason for not having kids is that I like to sleep. I read a lot, and 1 can sleep throughout the night,” says Gabrielle Thanheiser, thirty-four, a banker in Berlin vacationing in Rome with her live-in boyfriend.12 “We are DINKS,” confirmed Andreas Gerhmann, thirty-seven, using the acronym popular even in Germany for “double income, no kids” couples.13 In the long run, the self-indulgence of DINKS like Gerhmann and Thanheiser may prove more fateful for the German people than the Third Reich.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl sought to reunify his country after forty-five years of Cold War division. In Britain, Russia, France, even in the United States, were heard anguished cries that the world could not trust a united Germany. Twice, Germany had tried to conquer Europe, it was protested. What guarantee have we that a united Germany will not march again on Europe?
This is one worry the West can lay to rest. With the German people aging and dying, with five million fewer German children expected in 2050 than are alive in 2000, Germany, like the old soldier of General MacArthur’s ballad, is about to “just slowly fade away.”
ITALY, A THEME PARK
Prospects for the Italian race, which gave us Rome and all its glory, St. Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel, Dante and Michelangelo, Columbus and Galileo, are even more dire. Italy’s birthrate has been below replacement levels for twenty-five years and is down to 1.2 children per woman. At this rate, Italy’s fifty-seven million people will fall to forty-one million by 2050. Writes population researcher Nicholas Eberstadt of American Enterprise Institute: “Barely 2 percent of the [Italian] population in 2050 would be under five years old, but more than 40 percent would be 65 or older.”14 The birthrate in “that most Catholic and romantic of nations,” adds New Republic’s Greg Easterbrook, “means that Italy will be a theme park in a few generations.”15
A recent survey in the popular “semifeminist” magazine Noi Donne found that 52 percent of Italian women between sixteen and twenty-four planned to have no children.16 “Career” was their principal reason for not wanting any kids. University of Rome demographer Antonio Golini says that the nation is already dependent upon immigrants to bear the load of its deeply indebted pension system. But now Italian culture is at risk. Golini believes, “Italy will no longer be Italian … . It will be the end of society as we know it.”17
Golini was called a “demographic terrorist” twenty years ago, when he first warned of Italy’s impending population crisis.18 He is called that no longer, though Dr. Golini remains deeply pessimistic about his country: “In an increasingly globalized labor market, Italy must compete with France, with the United States, with India. How can we, with such an aged society and so few young people?”19
Cardinal Giacomo Biffi of Bologna has called on Rome to restrict immigration to Catholics to “save the nation’s identity,” raising eyebrows with his remark that Muslims have “different food, festivals, and family morals.”20 But where does His Eminence propose to find these Catholics?
Certainly not in Spain, where in the days of the Caudillo, Gen. Francisco Franco, big families were sacred and received medals and gifts from the state. The Spanish birthrate is the lowest in all Europe, lower than that of Italy, the Czech Republic, or Romania, all of which have fallen to 1.2 children per woman. In Spain, the birthrate is down to 1.07 children per woman, and the population is projected to fall by 25 percent in fifty years as the number of Spaniards over sixty-five soars by 117 percent. “In one generation we have gone from a society in which families of eight or even 12 children were not unusual to one in which childless couples are common, or people think long and hard about having a second child,” says Madrid sociologist Victor Perez Diaz.21 By 2050, the median age in Italy will be fifty-four and in Spain fifty-five, fourteen years above the median age of Japan, the oldest nation on earth today.
“Prosperity has strangled us,” says Dr. Pierpaolo Donati, a leading Catholic intellectual and professor of sociology at the University of Bologna. “Comfort is now the only thing anybody believes in. The ethic of sacrifice for a family—one of the basic ideas of human societies—has become a historical notion. It is astonishing.”22
In 1950, Spain had three times as many people as Morocco across the Strait of Gibraltar. By 2050, Morocco’s population will be 50 percent larger. If one hundred Spanish young people marry today, they can expect to have fifty-eight children, thirty-three grandchildren, but only nineteen great-grandchildren.
RUSSIA
What of the late command post of a Soviet Empire that shook the world for seventy years? With a birthrate of 1.35 children per woman, Russia’s 147 million people will fall to 114 million by 2050, a greater loss than the 30 million dead attributed to Stalin. The number of children in Russia under fifteen will have fallen from 26 to 16 million, while today’s 18 million seniors will have grown to 28 million.
In December 2000, however, more ominous news came in. Russia’s birthrate had already plummeted to 1.17 children, below Italy’s. Its population had fallen to 145 million; one estimate had it headed to 123 million by 2015. “If you believe the forecasts made by serious people who have devoted their whole lives to studying this question,” warns President Putin, “in 15 years’ time there will be 22 million fewer Russians. Just think about that figure—it’s a seventh of [Russia‘s] population.”23 A loss of 22 million Russians in fifteen years would be greater than all the Soviet Union’s losses in the Hitler-Stalin war. Putin went on to add ominously, “If the present tendency continues, there will be a threat to the survival of the nation.”
Life expectancy for Russian men is now fifty-nine, and two of every three pregnancies in Russia are terminated before birth. Russian women average 2.5 to 4 abortions each, and Russia’s death rate is now 70 percent higher than the birthrate.24 Even the return of millions of Russians from the former Soviet republics cannot offset the dying. Most ominous for the largest nation on earth, the population of vast, vacant Siberia is in a steep decline as China’s enormous population swells inexorably.
When the deputy speaker of the state duma, the rabid nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, advanced such ideas as polygamy, allowing every Russian male to have five wives, plus a ten-year ban on abortion and a prohibition on Russian women traveling abroad, his ideas were ridiculed and his population bills hooted down.25 But the life crisis of Russia cannot be dismissed, and the geostrategic implications for America are ominous.
Mr. Chamie projected Russia’s population, at present birthrates with zero immigration, out to the century’s end, and came up with fewer than eighty million Russians in 2100, roughly the population of the United States when Theodore Roosevelt left office in 1909.26
GREAT BRITAIN
What does the future hold for the cousins?
“Demographers have calculated that by the end of this century the English people will be a minority in their homeland. The English are not having enough children to reproduce themselves,” writes th
e syndicated columnist Paul Craig Roberts.27 This is the first time in history, says the London Observer, “that a major indigenous population has voluntarily become a minority, rather than through war, famine or disease.”28
The Observer is mistaken. The honor of being the first nation to voluntarily turn its majority indigenous population into a minority will go to the United States. President Clinton predicted it would happen by 2050, half a century before Great Britain. But the British are clearly heading in the same direction. Ethnic minorities already constitute 40 percent of London’s population, and, as Lee Jasper, the race relations adviser to the mayor of London, states, “The demographics show that white people in London will become a minority by 2010.”29
Among the reasons is the steadily falling birthrate among nativeborn British. In 2000, there were 17,400 fewer births in England and Wales than in 1999, a drop of almost 3 percent, and the fertility rate fell to 1.66 births per woman, the lowest since statistics began to be kept in 1924.30
JAPAN
Of the twenty-two nations with the lowest birthrates, only two are outside Europe—Armenia and Japan, the first Asian nation to enter the modern era.
Not until 1868 did Japan break out of her isolation. But within thirty years this dynamic nation was a rival of the Western powers. Japan had defeated China, colonized Taiwan, and in 1900 sent her soldiers to march beside Europeans and Americans to relieve the diplomatic legations in Peking besieged by the Chinese rebels known as “the Boxers.” The Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) was the first in which an Asian people defeated a great Western power. Begun with a surprise attack on the Russian naval squadron at Port Arthur, the war ended in one of the most decisive battles in history, the sinking of the czar’s Baltic fleet in the Straits of Tsushima in thirty-six hours by Admiral Togo.
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