America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It

by Mark Steyn

  No one can give serious thought to Europe’s democratic deficit, unaffordable entitlements, and declining human capital and think it’s the way to go. It’s the end of history, not in the sense of reaching the top of the ladder but only in history sliding back down the chute to start anew—raw, primitive, and bloody.

  And even on the slippery slope the self-neutered West seems determined to outpace its satirists. At the end of 2007, I was struck by this item from the newspaper Göteborgs-Posten:

  Protests from female soldiers have led to the Swedish military removing the penis of a heraldic lion depicted on the Nordic Battlegroup’s coat of arms.

  The armed forces agreed to emasculate the lion after a group of women from the rapid reaction force lodged a complaint to the European Court of Justice….

  Oh, dear, that’s almost too forlornly parodic. As Christian Braunstein of the Swedish Army’s “Tradition Commission” told the newspaper, “We were given the task of making sure the willy disappeared.”

  That’s one task you can always entrust to the European Union.

  THE NAKED AND THE DEAD

  Not long after America Alone came out, I happened to be in the L Street branch of Borders in Washington, D.C., and was pleased, as authors are, to see my opus on one of the front display tables and a potential customer hovering over it. Alas, on closer inspection, he turned out to be hovering over the adjoining volume, The Playboy Book of Celebrity Nudes. So my anticipatory frisson was misplaced, although presumably the author of the Playbook Book would also have been pleased, it being hard work writing all those captions. Anyway, while I was cruising the adjoining table, the potential customer came slinking back, glanced at (I believe) Nancy Sinatra dishabille, wandered off, wandered back, glanced at (if memory serves) Victoria Principal, wandered off, wandered back, and finally picked up the Playboy with intent to purchase. At that point, discretion getting the better part of valor, he slipped it under a copy of America Alone and sauntered nonchalantly to the checkout.

  No complaints from me. I gather similar purchases accounted for about 60 percent of my sales. But here’s the real difference: In other countries, you slink by, glance around, and surreptitiously slip America Alone under The Playboy Book of Celebrity Nudes before sauntering nonchalantly to the checkout. As I said up at the top, this book’s about to be banned…not in Saudi Arabia, or Sudan, or Waziristan, but in Canada. If the Canadian Islamic Congress gets its way, the book will be beyond the pale. Objecting to an excerpt from America Alone published by Canada’s leading news magazine, Maclean’s, the CIC filed “human rights” complaints with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the British Columbia Human Rights Commission, and the Alberta Human Rights Commission on the grounds of my “flagrant Islamophobia.” So, if you’re browsing this in a Canadian bookstore, you may well be holding a bona fide “hate crime” in your hand, and, if you’re worried that’s an undercover Mountie across the aisle, you’d be well advised to take extra precautions and slip it between at least two more innocuous volumes—say, The Playboy Book of Celebrity Nudes plus Suicide Bombing for Dummies.

  The head of the Canadian Islamic Congress is a man called Mohamed Elmasry. In a TV interview in 2004, Dr. Elmasry said it was legitimate to kill any Israeli civilian, male or female, over the age of eighteen. He is, thus, an objective supporter of terrorism. Yet he’s accusing me of “hate speech,” and is apparently the new poster boy for liberal progressive “human rights” in Canada.

  And, in a nutshell, that paradox is what this book is about: What happens when a Western world so in thrall to platitudes about boundless “tolerance” allows the forces of intolerance to carve it out from the inside? In seeking to stifle the arguments of America Alone, the Canadian Islamic Congress is making my point more eloquently than I ever could—that a significant strain of Islam is incompatible with the rough and tumble of a free society. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Which is why so many radical Muslim lobby groups are eager to criminalize vigilance. And with the help of their dopey enablers among the multiculti progressives they may yet achieve it.

  The year and a half between the hardcover and paperback editions of this book confirms its argument. Very few of us write an end-of-the-world book because we want to bring it on. For one thing, total societal collapse plays hell with reliable royalty payments. You write it because you want to ward it off, because you want to make the world safe for non-apocalyptic stuff. A few years back, a publisher took me to lunch and pitched me a book. She wanted me to write a John Kerry election diary. Easy gig. All I had to do was follow him around and mock him mercilessly. Well, I hemmed and hawed and eventually she got the picture and said, “Okay, what would you like to write a book about?”

  And so I said, “Well, I’ve got this idea for a book about the end of the world.” And there was a pause and I could feel her metaphorically backing out of the room, and shortly thereafter she literally backed out of the room. But not before telling me, somewhat wistfully, “You know when I first started reading your stuff? Impeachment. Your column about Monica’s dress was hilarious.” She motioned to the waiter. “Check, please.” And I got the impression she was feeling like the great pop guru Don Kirshner when the Monkees came to him and said they were sick of doing this bubble gum stuff and they needed to grow as artists. My Monica’s dress column was the one in which I did a mock interview with said object: the dress had entered the witness protection program, had had reconstructive surgery and was now living as a pair of curtains in Idaho. The late ‘90s was a grand time for a columnist. A third Clinton term and I could have retired to the Bahamas. But I feel like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, when she tells Bogey, “I’ve put that dress away. When the Germans march out, I’ll wear it again.” I’ve put Monica’s dress away. When the Islamists march out, I’ll wear it again.

  None of us knows how things will stand in 2030, any more than most of our forebears in 1908 could have predicted the collapses of the Russian, Turkish, Austrian, and German empires within a decade. But I like the way the talk show host Dennis Prager put it: Some of us worry about a resurgent Islam and its attendant complications for a decayed Western civilization; some of us worry about global warming. In twenty years’ time, one of us will be proved right and the other will look like an idiot.

  Prologue

  To Be or Not to Be

  We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET (1601)

  Do you worry? You look like you do. Worrying is the way the responsible citizen of an advanced society demonstrates his virtue: he feels good about feeling bad.

  But what to worry about? Iranian nukes? Nah, that’s just some racket cooked up by the Christian fundamentalist Bush and his Zionist buddies to give Halliburton a pretext to take over the Persian carpet industry. Worrying about nukes is so eighties. “They make me want to throw up…. They make me feel sick to my stomach,” wrote the British novelist Martin Amis, who couldn’t stop thinking about them during the Thatcher Terror. In the introduction to a collection of short stories, he worried about the Big One and outlined his own plan for coping with a nuclear winter wonderland:

  Suppose I survive. Suppose my eyes aren’t pouring down my face, suppose I am untouched by the hurricane of secondary missiles that all mortar, metal, and glass has abruptly become: suppose all this. I shall be obliged (and it’s the last thing I feel like doing) to retrace that long mile home, through the firestorm, the remains of the thousand-miles-an-hour winds, the warped atoms, the groveling dead. Then—God willing, if I still have the strength, and, of course, if they are still alive—I must find my wife and children and I must kill them.

  But the Big One never fell. And instead of killing his wife Martin Amis had to make do with divorcing her. Back then it was just crazies like Reagan and Thatcher who had nukes, so you can understand why everyone was terrified. But now Kim Jong-il and the ayatollahs have them, so we’re all sophisticated and relaxed about it, like the French hearing that
their president’s acquired a couple more mistresses. Martin Amis hasn’t thrown up a word about the subject in years. To the best of my knowledge, he has no plans to kill the present Mrs. Amis.

  So what should we be cowering in terror over? How about—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—“climate change”? If you’ve seen Al Gore’s acclaimed documentary An Inconvenient Truth you’ll know that it begins with a searing, harrowing nightmare vision of the world to come:

  One day Chicken Little was walking in the woods when—KERPLUNK—an acorn fell on her head.

  “Oh my goodness!” said Chicken Little. “The sky is falling! I must go and tell the king.”

  Whoops, my mistake. I must be mixing Al’s movie up with a previous eco-doom blockbuster. They come rolling in like rising sea levels in the Maldives. You may have seen yet another example of the genre, the film The Day After Tomorrow, in which (warning: plot spoiler) a speech by Dick Cheney brings on the flash-freezing of the entire northern hemisphere. I’m not a climatologist so I’ll take Dennis Quaid’s word for it that that’s scientifically possible. But the point is that from Chicken Little to Al Gore to Dennis Quaid, respected figures have been forecasting the end of the world pretty much since the beginning of the world. In Professor Little’s day, the sky was falling. In Vice President Gore’s time, it’s the Earth that’s falling apart. Plus ça change of direction, plus c’est la même prose. But, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. So let me put it in a nutshell:

  It’s the end of the world!! Head for the hills!!!

  No, wait. Don’t head for the hills—they’re full of Islamist terrorist camps. Let me put it in a slightly bigger nutshell: much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands—probably—just as in Istanbul there’s still a building known as Hagia Sophia, or St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate.

  That’s just for starters. And, unlike the ecochondriacs’ obsession with rising sea levels, this isn’t something that might possibly conceivably hypothetically threaten the Maldive Islands circa the year 2500; the process is already well advanced as we speak. With respect to Francis Fukuyama, it’s not the end of history; it’s the end of the world as we know it. Whether we like what replaces it depends on whether America can summon the will to shape at least part of the emerging world. If not, then it’s also the end of the American moment, and the dawn of the new Dark Ages (if darkness can dawn): a planet on which much of the map is re-primitivized.

  Does that make me sound as nuts as Al Gore and the rest of the eco-doom set? It’s true the end of the world’s nighness isn’t something you’d want to set your watch by. Consider some of Chicken Little’s eminent successors in this field:

  In 1968, in his bestselling book The Population Bomb, distinguished scientist Paul Ehrlich declared: “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”

  In 1972, in their landmark study The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead, and gas by 1993.

  In 1976, Lowell Ponte published a huge bestseller called The Cooling: Has the New Ice Age Already Begun? Can We Survive?

  In 1977, Jimmy Carter, president of the United States (incredible as it may seem), confidently predicted that “we could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”

  None of these things occurred. Contrary to the doom-mongers’ predictions, millions didn’t starve and the oil and gas and gold didn’t run out, and, though the NHL now has hockey franchises in Anaheim and Tampa Bay, ambitious kids are still unable to spend their winters knocking a puck around the frozen Everglades. But that doesn’t mean nothing much went on during the last third of the twentieth century. Here’s what did happen between 1970 and 2000: in that period, the developed world declined from just under 30 percent of the global population to just over 20 percent, and the Muslim nations increased from about 15 percent to 20 percent.

  Is that fact less significant to the future of the world than the fate of some tree or the endangered sloth hanging from it? In 1970, very few non-Muslims outside the Indian subcontinent gave much thought to Islam. Even the Palestinian situation was seen within the framework of a more or less conventional ethnic nationalist problem. Yet today it’s Islam a-go-go: almost every geopolitical crisis takes place on what Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations, calls “the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims.” That looping boundary is never not in the news. One week, it’s a bomb in Bali. The next, some beheadings in southern Thailand. Next, an insurrection in an obscure resource-rich Muslim republic in the Russian Federation. And then Madrid, and London, and suddenly that looping, loopy boundary has penetrated into the very heart of the West. In little more than a generation.

  1970 doesn’t seem that long ago. If you’re in your fifties or sixties, as 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. And yet that world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: in 1970, the developed nations had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30 percent to 15 percent. By 2000, they were at parity: each had about 20 percent.

  And by 2020?

  September 11, 2001, was not “the day everything changed,” but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On September 10, how many journalists had the Council on American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the Muslim Council of Britain in their Rolodexes? If you’d said that whether something does or does not cause offense to Muslims would be the early twenty-first century’s principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.

  This book is about the seven-eighths below the surface—the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and that call into question the future of much of the rest of the world, including the United States, Canada, and beyond. The key factors are:

  Demographic decline

  The unsustainability of the advanced Western social-democratic state

  Civilizational exhaustion

  Let’s start with demography, because everything does.

  PEOPLE POWER

  If your school has two hundred guys and you’re playing a school with two thousand pupils, it doesn’t mean your baseball team is definitely going to lose, but it certainly gives the other fellows a big starting advantage. Likewise, if you want to launch a revolution, it’s not very likely if you’ve only got seven revolutionaries. And they’re all over eighty. But if you’ve got two million and seven revolutionaries and they’re all under thirty, you’re in business.

  I wonder how many pontificators on the “Middle East peace process” ever run this number: the median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8 years.

  Once you know that, all the rest is details. If you were a “moderate Palestinian” leader, would you want to try to persuade a nation—or pseudo-nation—of unemployed poorly educated teenage boys raised in a UN-supervised European-funded death cult to see sense? Any analysis of the “Palestinian problem” that doesn’t take into account the most important determinant on t
he ground is a waste of time.

  Likewise, the salient feature of Europe, Canada, Japan, and Russia is that they’re running out of babies. What’s happening in the developed world is one of the fastest demographic evolutions in history. Most of us have seen a gazillion heartwarming ethnic comedies—My Big Fat Greek Wedding and its ilk—in which some uptight WASPy type starts dating a gal from a vast, loving, fecund Mediterranean family, so abundantly endowed with sisters and cousins and uncles that you can barely get in the room. It is, in fact, the inversion of the truth. Greece has a fertility rate hovering just below 1.3 births per couple, which is what demographers call the point of “lowest-low” fertility from which no human society has ever recovered. And Greece’s fertility is the healthiest in Mediterranean Europe: Italy has a fertility rate of 1.2, Spain, 1.1. Insofar as any citizens of the developed world have “big” families these days, it’s the Anglo democracies: America’s fertility rate is 2.1, New Zealand’s a little below. Hollywood should be making My Big Fat Uptight Protestant Wedding, in which some sad Greek only child marries into a big heartwarming New Zealand family where the spouse actually has a sibling.

  As I say, this isn’t a projection—it’s happening now. There’s no need to extrapolate, and if you do it gets a little freaky, but, just for fun, here goes: by 2050, 60 percent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. The big Italian family, with papa pouring the vino and mama spooning out the pasta down an endless table of grandparents and nieces and nephews, will be gone, no more, dead as the dinosaurs. As Noel Coward once remarked in another context, “Funiculi, funicula, funic yourself.” By mid-century, Italians will have no choice in the matter.