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

by Mark Steyn

  You can argue about what these trends mean, but surely not that they mean absolutely nothing, which is what the complaceniks assure us. On the Continent and elsewhere in the West, native populations are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic. Time for the obligatory “of courses”: Of course, not all Muslims are terrorists—though enough are hot for jihad to provide an impressive support network of mosques from Vienna to Stockholm to Toronto to Seattle. Of course, not all Muslims support terrorists—though enough of them share their basic objectives (the wish to live under Islamic law in Europe and North America) to function wittingly or otherwise as the “good cop” end of an Islamic good cop/bad cop routine. But, at the very minimum, this fast-moving demographic transformation provides a huge comfort zone for the jihad to move around in. And in a more profound way it rationalizes what would otherwise be the nuttiness of the terrorists’ demands. An IRA man blows up a pub in defiance of democratic reality—because he knows that at the ballot box the Ulster Loyalists win the elections and the Irish Republicans lose. When a European jihadist blows something up, that’s not in defiance of democratic reality but merely a portent of democratic reality to come. He’s jumping the gun, but in every respect things are moving his way.

  You may vaguely remember seeing some flaming cars on the evening news toward the end of 2005. Something going on in France, apparently. Something to do with—what’s the word?—“youths.” When I pointed out the media’s strange reluctance to use the M-word vis-à-vis the rioting “youths,” I received a ton of e-mails arguing there’s no Islamist component, they’re not the madrassa crowd, they may be Muslim but they’re secular and Westernized and into drugs and rap and meaningless sex with no emotional commitment, and rioting and looting and torching and trashing, just like any normal healthy Western teenagers. These guys have economic concerns, it’s the lack of jobs, it’s conditions peculiar to France, etc. As one correspondent wrote, “You right-wing shit-for-brains think everything’s about jihad.”

  Actually, I don’t think everything’s about jihad. But I do think, as I said, that a good 90 percent of everything’s about demography. Take that media characterization of those French rioters: “youths.” What’s the salient point about youths? They’re youthful. Very few octogenarians want to go torching Renaults every night. It’s not easy lobbing a Molotov cocktail into a police station and then hobbling back with your walker across the street before the searing heat of the explosion melts your hip replacement. Civil disobedience is a young man’s game.

  Now ponder that bland statistic you heard a lot in the news reports: “about 10 percent of France’s population is Muslim.” Give or take a million here, a million there, that’s a broadly correct 2005 statistic as far as it goes. But the population spread isn’t even. And when it comes to those living in France aged twenty and under, about 30 percent are said to be Muslim, and in the major urban centers, about 45 percent. If it came down to street-by-street fighting, as Michel Gurfinkiel, the editor of Valeurs Actuelles, points out, “the combatant ratio in any ethnic war may thus be one to one”—already, right now. It is not necessary, incidentally, for Islam to become a statistical majority in order to function as one. At the height of its power in the eighth century, the “Islamic world” stretched from Spain to India yet its population was only minority Muslim. Nonetheless, by 2010, more elderly white Catholic ethnic frogs will have croaked and more fit healthy Muslim youths will be hitting the streets. One day they’ll even be on the beach at St. Tropez, and if you and your infidel whore happen to be lying there wearing nothing but two coats of Ambre Solaire when they show up, you better hope that the BBC and CNN are right about there being no religio-ethno-cultural component to their “grievances.”

  In June 2006, a fifty-four-year-old Flemish train conductor called Guido Demoor got on the number 23 bus in Antwerp to go to work. Six—what’s that word again?—“youths” boarded the bus and commenced intimidating the other riders. There were some forty passengers aboard. But the “youths” were youthful and the other passengers less so. Nonetheless, Mr. Demoor asked the lads to cut it out and so they turned on him, thumping and kicking him. Of those forty other passengers, none intervened to help the man under attack. Instead, at the next stop, thirty of the forty scrammed, leaving Mr. Demoor to be beaten to death. Three “youths” were arrested, and proved to be—quelle surprise!—of Moroccan origin. The ringleader escaped and, despite police assurances of complete confidentiality, of those forty passengers only four came forward to speak to investigators. “You see what happens if you intervene,” a fellow rail worker told the Belgian newspaper De Morgen. “If Guido had not opened his mouth he would still be alive.”

  No, he wouldn’t. He would be as dead as those forty passengers are, as the Belgian state is, keeping his head down, trying not to make eye contact, cowering behind his newspaper in the corner seat and hoping just to be left alone. What future in “their” country do Mr. Demoor’s two children have? My mother and grandparents came from Sint-Niklaas, a town I remember well from many childhood visits. When we stayed with great-aunts and other relatives, the upstairs floors of the row houses had no bathrooms, just chamber pots. My sister and I were left to mooch around cobbled streets with our little cousin for hours on end, wandering aimlessly past smoke-wreathed bars and cafes, occasionally buying frites with mayonnaise. With hindsight it seemed as parochially Flemish as could be imagined. Not anymore. The week before Mr. Demoor was murdered in plain sight, bus drivers in Sint-Niklaas walked off the job to protest the thuggery of the—here it comes again—“youths.” In little more than a generation, a town has been transformed.

  Of the ethnic Belgian population, some 17 percent are under eighteen years old. Of the country’s Turkish and Moroccan population, 35 percent are under eighteen years old. The “youths” get ever more numerous, the non-youths get older. To avoid the ruthless arithmetic posited by Benjamin Franklin, it is necessary for those “youths” to feel more Belgian. Is that likely? Colonel Gaddafi doesn’t think so: “There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe—without swords, without guns, without conquests. The fifty million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”

  THE RAIN IN SPAIN

  If the critical date for Americans in the new century is September 11, 2001, for Continentals it’s a day two and a half years later, in March 2004. On the eleventh of the month, just before Spain’s general election, a series of train bombings in Madrid killed more than two hundred people. That day, I received a ton of e-mails from American acquaintances along the lines of: “3/11 is Europe’s 9/11. Even the French will be in.” Friends told me: “The Europeans get it now.” Doughty warriors of the blogosphere posted the Spanish flag on their home pages in solidarity with America’s loyal allies in the war against terrorism. John Ellis, a Bush cousin and a savvy guy with a smart website, declared, “Every member-state of the EU understands that Madrid is Rome is Berlin is Amsterdam is Paris is London is New York.”

  All wrong. On Friday, March 12, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards filled Madrid’s streets and stood somberly in a bleak drizzle to mourn their dead. On Sunday, election day, the voters tossed out José María Aznar’s sadly misnamed Popular Party and handed the government to the Socialist Workers’ Party. Aznar’s party was America’s principal Continental ally in Iraq; the Socialist Workers campaigned on a pledge to withdraw Spain’s troops from Iraq. Throughout the campaign, polls showed the Popular Party cruising to victory. Then came the bomb.

  Having invited people to choose between a strong horse and a weak horse, even Osama bin Laden might have been surprised to see the Spanish opt to make their general election an exercise in mass self-gelding. Within seventy-two hours of the carnage, voters sent a tough message to the terrorists: “We apologize for catching your eye.” Whether or not Madrid is Rome and Berlin and Amsterdam and Paris, it certainly isn’t New York.

  To be sure, there were all kind
s of Kerryesque footnoted nuances to that stark election result. One sympathized with those voters reported to be angry at the government’s pathetic insistence, in the face of the emerging evidence, that the bomb attack was the work of ETA, the Basque nationalist terrorists, when it was so obviously the jihad boys. One’s sympathy, however, disappeared with their decision to vote for a party committed to disengaging from the war. And no one will remember the footnotes, the qualifications—just the final score: terrorists toppled a European government.

  So March 11 proved not to be a day that will live in infamy. Rather, March 14 seems likely to be the date bequeathed to posterity. That’s the true equivalent to September 11, in the sense of a day that defines a people, a day to be remembered as we remember those grim markers on the road to conflagration through the 1930s, the tactical surrenders that made disaster inevitable. At least in the two and a half years between September 11 and March 11, there was always the possibility of Europe stiffening itself. Now America lives with the certainty that it won’t, and can’t, until it’s too late. All those umbrellas in the rain at those demonstrations of defiance proved to be pretty pictures for the cameras, nothing more. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the slain. In the three days between the slaughter and the vote, it was widely reported that the atrocity had been designed to influence the election. In allowing it to do so, the Spanish knowingly made polling day a victory for appeasement and dishonored their own dead.

  Why would the Spanish do what they did? Well, why wouldn’t they? Who needs to show resolve when you’re a country with a fertility rate of 1.1 percent? Appeasement is a vote to live in the present tense, to hold the comforts of the moment. To fight for king and country is to fight for the future. But a barren society has no future, and so what’s to fight for? The terrorists would have their work cut out killing the Spanish people as fast as the Spanish are killing themselves. How can you “decimate” a population that’s already halving with every generation?

  On September 11, 2001, the American mainland was attacked for the first time since the War of 1812. The perpetrators were foreign—Saudis and Egyptians. Since September 11, Europe has seen the London Tube bombings, the French riots, Dutch murders of nationalist politicians. The perpetrators are their own citizens—British subjects, citoyens de la République française. That’s the difference: America is fighting a foreign war, Eurabia is in the early stages of an undeclared civil war.

  Who’ll win it? In Linz, Austria, Muslims are demanding that all female teachers, believers or infidels, wear headscarves in class. The Muslim Council of Britain wants Holocaust Day abolished because it focuses “only” on the Nazis’ (alleged) Holocaust of the Jews and not the Israelis’ ongoing Holocaust of the Palestinians.

  And how does the state react? In Seville, King Ferdinand III is no longer patron saint of the annual fiesta because his splendid record in fighting for Spanish independence from the Moors was felt to be insensitive to Muslims. In London, a judge agreed to the removal of Jews and Hindus from a trial jury because the Muslim defendant’s counsel argued he couldn’t get a fair verdict from them. The Church of England is considering removing St. George as the country’s patron saint on the grounds that, according to various Anglican clergy, he’s too “militaristic” and “offensive to Muslims.” They wish to replace him with St. Alban, and replace St. George’s cross on the revamped Union Flag, which would instead show St. Alban’s cross as a thin yellow streak. That’s a joke most satirists would reject as too crudely implausible.

  In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering its voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under sharia, but—as have parts of Nigeria—they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the “tolerance” of pluralist societies. In other Continental countries, things are likely to play out in more traditional fashion, though without a significantly different ending.

  Madrid and London—along with other events such as the murder of Theo van Gogh—were the opening shots of that European civil war. You can laugh at that if you wish, but the Islamists’ most oft-stated goal is not infidel withdrawal from Iraq but the re-establishment of a Muslim caliphate, living under sharia, that extends to Europe. There’s a lot to be said for taking these chaps at their word and then seeing whether their behavior comports. Furthermore, given that a lot more of the world lives under sharia than did in the early seventies, as a political project radical Islam has made some headway, and continues to do so almost every day of the week: early in 2005, some 10 percent of southern Thailand’s Buddhist population abandoned their homes because of Islamist violence—a far bigger disruption than the tsunami, yet all but unreported in the world press. And wherever one’s sympathies lie on Islam’s multiple battle fronts the fact is the jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you’re not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians, why wouldn’t you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?

  In 1903, in The Riddle of the Sands, the first great English spy novel, Erskine Childers has his yachtsman, Davies, try to persuade the Foreign Office wallah Carruthers to take seriously the possibility of German naval marauders in the Fresian Islands:

  Follow the parallel of a war on land. People your mountains with a daring and resourceful race, who possess an intimate knowledge of every track and bridlepath, who operate in small bands, travel light, and move rapidly. See what an immense advantage such guerrillas possess over an enemy which clings to beaten tracks, moves in large bodies, slowly, and does not “know the country.”

  Davies wants Carruthers to apply the old principles to new forms of warfare. The Islamists are doing that. Their most effective guerrillas aren’t in the Hindu Kush, where it’s the work of moments to drop a daisy cutter on the mighty Pashtun warrior. They’re traveling light on the bridle paths of Europe—the small cells, the opportunist imams, the ambitious lobby groups that operate in the nooks and crannies of a free society—while politicians cling to the beaten tracks of old ideas, multicultural pieties, and a general hope that things will turn out for the best.

  “We’re the ones who will change you,” Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. “Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children.” As he summed it up: “Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours.”

  Chapter Three

  Men Are from Venus

  PRIMARY IMPULSES VS. SECONDARY IMPULSES

  In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics…. For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.

  POLYBIUS, THE HISTORIES, BOOK XXXVI (CIRCA 150 BC)

  How did today’s demographic disaster happen? How did the wealthiest civilization in human history, the engine of global progress, opt for self-liquidation in favor of the modern world’s most technologically impoverished and backward culture? Today, the typical advanced society trumpets its defects as virtues. Immigration certainly has its blessings; the provincial restaurant scene in England would be a lot duller without curry houses, etc. But it’s very silly to boast about it as proof of one’s moral superiority. A dependence on immigration from very limited and particular sources is not a strength but a weakness. The Continent’s imams can certainly see that: they understand that Europe is the colony now.

  John O’Sullivan, a forme
r editor of National Review, once observed that postwar Canadian history is summed up by an old Monty Python song. “I’m a Lumberjack and I’m Okay” begins as a robust paean to the manly virtues of a rugged life in the north woods—as the intro goes, “Leaping from tree to tree! As they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia!”—but ends with the lumberjack having gradually morphed into some sort of transvestite pick-up who sings that he likes to “wear high heels, suspenders, and a bra” and “dress in women’s clothing and hang around in bars.”

  I know what he means. In 2005 I chanced to see a selection of images from the Miss Shemale World celebrations outside Toronto’s City Hall. And what struck me was not that “shemales” should want to have a big ol’ parade showing off their outsized implants—each to her own, even if in this case her own were purchased from Dow Corning. No, what seemed more pertinent was that the local government should think Miss Shemale World is an event that requires municipal approval. Of course, if they hadn’t approved, they would have been guilty of being “non-inclusive.” John O’Sullivan isn’t saying Canadian men are literally cross-dressers—certainly no more than 35, 40 percent, and me only on weekends—but nonetheless a once manly nation has undergone a remarkable psychological makeover. In 1945, the Royal Canadian Navy had the third-largest surface fleet in the world; the Royal Canadian Air Force was one of the most effective air forces in the world; Canadian troops got the toughest beach on D-Day. But in the space of two generations, a bunch of tough hombres were transformed into a thoroughly feminized culture that prioritizes the secondary impulses of society—rights and entitlements from cradle to grave—over all the primary ones.