Fjordman finds the picture is more complicated than may first appear.

See also my previous posts on the demographics decline of the West and Europe in particular, and where it is leading.

And another great essay from Fjordman:

[..] Sweden is a great example of why we need limited government, a state that only upholds law and order and does not concern itself with pushing a particular ideology on its people.

Why does the government dispense with the social contract and attack its own people? Well, for starters, because it can. The state has become so large and powerful that is has become an autonomous organism with a will of its own. The people are there to serve the state, not vice versa. And because state power penetrates every single corner of society, there are no places left to mount a defense if the state decides to attack you. Its representatives are no longer leaders of a specific people, but caretakers preoccupied only with advancing their own careers through oiling and upholding, and if possible expanding, the bureaucratic machinery.

[..] A characteristic of the situation in Western Europe is that we have more and more laws, yet at the same time more and more lawlessness. The German journalist Jens Jessen claims that his country has been gripped by a “prohibition orgy” regarding tobacco, cars, cheap holidays and computer games, television and fast food. The process is “disconcerting and almost grotesque in its systematization.” He believes there is some level of compensation going on for the powerlessness of politicians.

Parallel with an explosion in street crime, the state turns on its law-abiding citizens with a proliferation of regulations and an inflation of laws. The less control the state has over the the most important tasks of society, the stronger its desire to assert its power over the tiniest details becomes. Or is it a subtle show of force, a constant reminder to the average citizen of who’s boss, a sign that resistance to state policies is feared?

As Jessen points out, the dangerous thing about this spirit of prohibition is that “once it’s out of the bottle, it spreads like an infection” whose first casualty is tolerance: “The fettered citizens are going to loll in security; the more unbearable the state regulations, the more relaxed they will feel. But such a society, one that makes the individual citizen and he alone responsible for all possible environmental sins, can easily become the blind accomplice to the worst catastrophes on the international stage.”

[..]When does the rule of law break down? It breaks down when laws are no longer passed with the consent of free people, when citizens no longer feel that the law is just, when regulations become so numerous that it is virtually impossible even for decent individuals not to break the law on a regular basis and when the authorities are incapable of protecting their country’s borders while criminals rule the streets. It breaks down when the law appears increasingly arbitrary, when it invades the most intimate details of the life of law-abiding citizens while it allows great freedom to criminals. In short, it breaks down when it no longer corresponds to reality and to the sense of justice experienced by ordinary people.

Unless current trends are changed, I fear parts of Western Europe could reach critical mass soon.

Do read the whole thing.

Extracts from a new essay by Fjordman:

[..] I have heard individuals state point blank that even if Muslims become the majority in our countries in the future, this doesn’t matter because all people are equal and all cultures are just a mix of everything else, anyway. And since religions are just fairy-tales, replacing one fairy-tale, Christianity, with another fairy-tale, Islam, won’t make a big difference. All religions basically say that the same things in different ways. However, not one of them would ever dream of saying that all political ideologies “basically mean the same thing.” They simply don’t view religious or cultural ideas as significant, and thus won’t spend time on studying the largely unimportant details of each specific creed. This is Marxist materialism.

The unstated premise behind this is that the age of distinct cultures is over. All peoples around the world will gradually blend into one another. Ethnic, religious and racial tensions will disappear, because mankind will be one and equal. It’s cultural and genetic Communism. Nation states who create their own laws and uphold their own borders constitute “discrimination” and an obstacle to this new Utopia, and will gradually have to be dismantled, starting with Western nations of course, replaced by a world where everybody has the right to move wherever they want to and where international legislation and human rights resolutions define the law, upheld by an elite of — supposedly well-meaning — transnational bureaucrats managing our lives.

What the proponents of this ideology don’t say is that even if it were possible to melt all human beings into one people, which is in my view neither possible nor desirable, this project would take generations or centuries, and in the intervening time there would be numerous wars and enormous suffering caused by the fact that not everybody would quietly allow themselves to be eradicated.

[..]

The extreme Left didn’t succeed in staging a violent revolution in the West, so they decided to go for a permanent, structural revolution instead. They now hope that immigrants can provide raw material for a violent rebellion, especially since many of them are Muslims who have displayed such a wonderful talent for violence and destruction. The Western Left are importing a new proletariat, since the previous one disappointed them.

A poll carried out on behalf of the Organization for Information on Communism found that 90 percent of Swedes between the ages of 15 and 20 had never heard of the Gulag, although 95 percent knew of Auschwitz. “Unfortunately we were not at all surprised by the findings,” Ander Hjemdahl, the founder of UOK, told website The Local. In the nationwide poll, 43 percent believed that Communist regimes had claimed less than one million lives. The actual figure is estimated at 100 million. 40 percent believed that Communism had contributed to increased prosperity in the world. Mr. Hjemdahl states several reasons for this massive ignorance, among them that “a large majority of Swedish journalists are left-wingers, many of them quite far left.”

I have personally read statements by leading media figures not just in Sweden, but all over Western Europe, who openly brag about censoring coverage of issues related to mass immigration and the Multicultural society.

[..]

Ideas about Multiculturalism and de-facto open borders have achieved a virtual hegemony in public discourse. By hiding behind labels such as “anti-racism” and “tolerance,” Leftists have achieved a degree of censorship they could never have achieved had they openly stated that their intention was to radically transform Western civilization and destroy its foundations.

According to the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, “the lofty idea of ‘the war on racism’ is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology. And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what Communism was for the 20th century: A source of violence.”

[..]

Many Marxist ideas have been allowed to endure and mutate, such as the notion that culture is unimportant or that it is OK to stage massive social experiments on hundreds of millions of people. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has stated that had the Soviet Union managed to create a functioning Socialist society, tens of millions of deaths would have been a worthwhile price to pay. But Marxist ideals of forced equality can only be enforced by a government with totalitarian powers, and will thus inevitably lead to a totalitarian society. There is no “enlightened Marxism,” and the idea that there is has ruined more lives than probably and other ideology in modern history.

Marxism is an organized crime against humanity.

[..]

Ideas matter. Individuals matter. Cultures matter. Truth matters, and truth exists. We used to know that. It’s time we get to know it again, and reject false ideas about the irrelevance of culture. We are not racists for desiring to pass on our heritage to future generations, nor are we evil for resisting to be treated as lab rats in social experiments on a horrific scale. We must nip the ideology of transnational Multiculturalism and unlimited mass migration in the bud by exposing it for what it is: A Communism for the 21st century.

A new paper published today, by the now infamous Raphael Israeli:

• The aftermath of World War II brought about an acute shortage of manpower in Europe. Former colonies, where manpower was available that required relatively limited cultural adaptation, became the plentiful sources for unskilled laborers who would replenish the dwindling pool of workers in Europe.
• These workers constructed Muslim communities in certain localities throughout Europe, where their numbers created local majorities that no candidate for elective office could ignore. The growth of these communities required the construction of mosques and Muslim cultural centers, some of which grew into secret lodges of subversion, incitement, and recruitment of radical youth.
• Muslim communities have imported the Middle Eastern conflict into their host countries, with attending acts of violence and unbridled anti-Semitism toward local Jewish communities which had otherwise lived peacefully except during the Holocaust interregnum.
• Some European Muslim leaders make no secret of their intent to change Europe to their tune, not to adapt to it. They demand their own school systems, in their own native languages, financed by the host state and, in the long run, to its own detriment.
• European countries have adopted multiculturalism, and increasingly multilingualism, as an imposed reality whereby they have abdicated their role to absorb the newcomers and integrate them into the existing systems, and instead let the immigrants dictate their own visions of “integration,” which means in effect separatism, secession, or an eventual takeover when demography had run its course.
• There are already areas in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Britain where Muslim children constitute the majority of the school population. In addition, there are a growing numbers of converts to Islam in major European countries such as France and Britain – 50,000 in each in the past decade.

Read the whole thing.

In other absolutely random Swedish news:

“TV4 in trouble for vagina dialogues”:

Baffled, the woman replied that she had never had any reason to believe she would gain financially from the vocal vaginas.

“Woman stabs boyfriend after disappointing sex”:

A 40-year-old man from Luleå received life-threatening injuries after being stabbed in the lung by his 28-year-old Russian girlfriend. The pair were staying at the man’s apartment in the northern Swedish town when they got into a heated argument about their relationship.

The 40-year-old says that his girlfriend was disappointed with the quality of their sex that evening.

I believe she was a victim of false advertising.

Drunken school teachers ruins an otherwise pleasant evening for Swedish heavy metal band:

A Swedish school teacher was treated for concussion at a Warsaw hospital at the weekend after getting into a drunken hotel room brawl with a Swedish heavy metal band.

[..] Up in the hotel room the teacher and the band shared a few beers and listened to some music.

“It was very pleasant,” said a band member.

But soon the night took a turn for the worse when the teacher had a few too many and began insulting the band. After he had managed to upset a few people the teacher was asked to leave the room.

Had he not begun banging on the band’s door a simple hangover might have been the only consequence of his wild night…

Having recently watched the documentary “Metallica: Some kind of Monster” I understand just how sensitive heavy metal bands can be. (Although I am not quite sure why it was on the World Movies channel.)

Or Creating Ghettos for Dummies.

Pure comedy gold this article is, start to finish:

[..] But the country’s real building boom began in the 60s. The year was 1964 and a general election was looming. Housing remained a hot topic; the economy was good, people were moving from the countryside to the city and local authorities desperately wanted more homes to attract new industry.

In their manifesto, the Social Democrats vowed to build 100,000 new homes every year for ten years – the foundations for the Million Homes Programme were laid.

“In 1962 and 1963, almost 100,000 apartments were built each year,” [Lisbeth Söderqvist, a Stockholm University researcher and expert on the Million Homes Programme.] says. [..] new towns were being manufactured across the country, with concentrations largely in big city outskirts. New, modern living for good democratic citizens was the message. “These homes were built for everyone, not just poor people,” says Söderqvist.

“There were apartments, family dwellings and terraced houses and the idea was to blend different people from different backgrounds. By doing so you would have a society that was stable and a society without conflict.”

Integration was key, and this was to be achieved by including a good range of local services in the planning – transport, schools, nurseries, community centres, libraries and public space.

“People started to move and everyone was happy,” Söderqvist says. “It was an expression of the welfare state that people had a modern functional home, with three rooms and a kitchen.”

But the bubble soon burst when academics unexpectedly started to point to the problems they saw. The press and politicians soon jumped on the bandwagon. A big new shopping centre in Skärholmen in 1968 caused unprecedented uprising.

“For the left-wing commentators, this kind of commercialism was a disaster,” Söderqvist says. “It was said there was nothing to do in Skärholmen but shopping.”

Hey, I can imagine their horror. Good democratic citizens should be busy integrating, not shopping. What kind of a monster have you created here?!

Oh, it gets better:

The end of the honeymoon

The Skärholmen debate opened the floodgates for further criticism of the Million Homes Programme. In the seventies, liberal thinkers poured their scorn and the right-wing press took up the campaign, portraying the areas with disturbing images of social deprivation. The suburbs’ reputations declined as a result and residents started packing their boxes. [Leaving Paradise on account of a right-wing smeer campaign? Must be a social status thing.]

But the political and media crusades weren’t the only cause of decline, Söderqvist says:

“In the early 70s there was a change in the tax system, making it much cheaper to buy a house.” Private developers were rubbing their hands and the exodus began. [Hey, I could have warned you - the way towards a Socialist utopia does not lie through the Valley of Low Taxes. ]

“At the same time there was an influx of immigrants coming here,” Söderqvist adds. “They moved into the newly-emptied apartments and even more Swedes started to move out.”
[The "good democratic citizens" lost their zest for integration after their descent into bourgeois shopping mall hell, no doubt.]

Nowadays, these places are largely viewed as immigrant ghettos. “What is tragic is they are used as a symbol in the segregation debate in Sweden,” Söderqvist says. Ironically, it seems, the once celebrated housing project, which aimed to integrate the nation, has only served to fuel a divided society.

The extent of the decline in these areas became a political embarrassment during the 90s, with employment rates going down and criminality and drug use on the up. It was time for the Social Democrats to renew their promises.

The answer was to pour more money into areas in bad repair, with the intention of improving not just the physical but also the social fabric of the estates. The two billion kronor Metropolitan Development Initiative (Storstadssatsningen) began in 1998, aiming to improve educational standards and reduce unemployment among immigrants. By doing so, the state believed social segregation could be better fought.

[..]

Can you possibly guess whatever happened next?

Many of the programme’s successes turned out to be double-edged swords: the majority of those who did manage to gain employment moved out, only to be replaced by a new wave of immigrants.

Let me guess – another right-wing smeer compaign to damage the reputation of this Glorious Oasis of the Proletariat? And just when you thought that this couldn’t get any better:

Another of the programme’s aims was to make these urban concrete jungles more aesthetically pleasing with a lick of paint, new plants and playgrounds. Planners also made some interesting architectural modifications, says Lisbeth Söderqvist.

“Instead of having a straight path, they made it curvy,” she says. “It looks nice of course but it won’t break segregation. No Swedish family will move in just because there’s a curvy path.”

Yep, its one of “dont-know-whether-to-laugh-or-to-cry” articles. And on and on it goes, in complete Pleasantville seriousness, thick with unintended irony.

Absolutely oblivious to reality and in complete denial of what is going on in their country the Swedes march on down the path towards extinction. But hey, at least the path is curvy!

Melanie Phillips expressed her view this week that re-Christianisation is vital for Europe if it is to defend its Western values against Islamisation, an opinion I happen to agree with (h/t Saint):

The crucial insight here is that only a strong indigenous faith has the capacity to resist Islamisation. That is why the collapse of Christianity in Britain and Europe and its steady replacement by secularisation is so catastrophic for the defence of the west. The useful idiots who believe that only a secular society can hold off the forces of irrational belief at the heart of the Islamic jihad have got this diametrically the wrong way round. Secularisation produces cultural enfeeblement, because the pursuit of personal happiness trumps absolutely everything else. The here and now is all that matters. Dying for a cause, however noble, becomes an absolute no-no. It’s better to be dhimmi than dead – the view that has now effectively prevailed in Britain and Europe.

[..] Although the US is the high temple of consumerism, it is still a country with a very strong sense of its Christian faith. That fact is key to its robust sense of national identity, confidence and pride; and because it has such a strong sense of itself as a nation, it is prepared to fight to defend itself – the one bit of the analysis that the Islamists got wrong (although there are now deeply disturbing signs that the west’s cultural enfeeblement is beginning to erode American resolve too, at least around the edges).

That is why the cultural cringe of the Church of England before the advance of both secularism and Islamism is such unmitigated disaster, and why the Pope’s recent intervention was so significant. That is why those who sneer at President Bush’s strong Christian faith are cultural lemmings. And that is why I, a British Jew, argue that it is vital that Britain and Europe re-Christianise if they are to have any chance of defending western values.

She has drawn sharp criticism for this statement firstly because she does not herself subscribe to the belief system she is laying her hopes on and secondly because a re-Christianised Europe seems like a wild fantasy to some considering its current state. Writes Norman Geras:

A more serious problem still is that the re-Christianization of Britain and Europe just isn’t, as things currently stand, a credible societal project. Christians have been doing their bit to spread the Christian word for a very long time now. What is suddenly going to make the difference and bring new adherents flooding in, or ‘activate’ hitherto passive or lapsed believers?

Well, I can list several factors, that may not mean much when taken alone, but in combination may do just that.

1. Hundreds of thousands of Catholic Polish migrants have moved West since the 2004 EU enlargement round – about 300,000 to Britain alone. In Poland over half the population attends mass weekly, compared to under 20% in France or Italy. Poland accounts for about a quarter of Europe’s seminarians and thousands are migrating westward. Said Father Jan-Marie Szewek: “We Franciscans want to join in the rechristianization of Europe”.

Call it the Polish pastor effect.

2.According to some estimates the world’s fastest growing religion is not Islam but Christianity. Its just that most of the growth is happening in the Third World now and it is the Pentecostal Churches that are gaining the numbers. The Catholic Church is also experiencing strong growth. And this revitalised Christianity is starting to spill over back into the West. Says a Kenyan pastor in one of the largest churches in London: “I am in this country, believing that God sent me here in Great Britain to make a voice on His behalf to let them know that they need to repent and come back to God.”
Sociologist of religion Philip Jenkins, in his book “The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity”, argues that “within the next 25 years the population of the world’s Christians is expected to grow to 2.6 billion (making Christianity by far the world’s largest faith)”. An increased percentage of Christian migrants to Europe is likely, as European politics continue to shift towards the anti-Islamic immigration right. And the Pentecostal Churches have been growing rapidly in Australia even without a significant contribution from migrants. It won’t be too big of a surprise if its takes off in Europe too. Even the presence of a large Muslim population itself may contribute to a resurgence of religiosity amongst the secular Europeans, finding themselves inspired to seek their own Christian roots, much like European secularism draws many Muslim migrants towards secularism and more liberal interpretations of Islam. By the way, according to Wikipedia (edit: which quotes bible.ca) Christianity gets 2,500,000 converts per year, compared to Islam’s 865,000. Majority Muslim nations have higher birth rates, but that advantage is dimishing – birth rates are falling in Muslim majority nations, while Christianity is gaining in other countries with high birth rates.

3. Melanie Phillips is far from being the only non-Christian in Europe who holds to the above view. Said Oriana about Pope Benedict XVI: “I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It’s that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion.” Upon her death Oriana left all her books and papers to Pope Benedict. She had a private audience with him last year and considered him “an ally in her campaign to rally Christians in Europe against what she saw as a Muslim crusade against the West.” This emerging alliance between the anti-Islamisation secularists and conservative Christians is as natural, even as it is as odd, as the alliance between the Islamists and the far Left. And even religion needs good publicity. Don’t also underestimate the ability of Pope Benedict himself to pump some life back into European Christianity. And by the way, why did he chose the name Benedict? Here’s why:

He was thinking of not one, but two previous Benedicts.

Saint Benedict, Benedict XVIThe first was not even a Pope. In fact, he was just a simple monk who desired nothing more than to live a quiet life of prayer and work and lead others to do the same. This Benedict, born in the 5th century in Nursia, an area of Italy, fled the decadent urban life of Rome to seek a life of solitude in the country. Monastic life was chaotic and unregulated at that time, and so this young man gathered a band of monks around him and formed a community, writing a rule of life that was so practical that it became the pattern for thousands of monks and monasteries all over the world. These monks who followed this rule ultimately were the ones who evangelized and educated Europe during the “dark ages” and are still doing the work of evangelization and education today.

It is clear that Pope Benedict XVI is dedicated to gathering around himself a band of disciples who, through prayer and hard work, will lead to the re-Christianization of Europe and to the carrying of the gospel to lands that have not yet heard it.

4. In times of trouble and hardship people turn back to religion. It is as simple as that. As conditions in Europe worsen, with the aging of the population, faultering economies and problems that have come with over-immigration, and the going gets tough, the tough, and especially the weak, will get going to church.

5. Its the demographics, stupid. From the cover story of Prospect magazine, “God returns to Europe”, by Eric Kaufmann:

Europe—especially western Europe—is seen as the world leader in secular modernisation, and is used as the model by Norris and Inglehart for their theory of secularisation. But if western Europe really is the trend-setter for secularism, there is a problem: secularisation appears to be losing force in its own backyard. Western Europe can broadly be divided in two. On the one hand are Catholic countries like Spain or Ireland, where religiosity is still high—around 60 per cent of the Irish population regularly attend church—and secularisation arrived only in the second half of the 20th century. On the other are the largely Protestant nations (including Britain) and Catholic France, which secularised earlier. But survey data from 1981-2004 show that in these latter nations, on average, postwar generations are no longer becoming more secular. It seems as though western Europe, with the possible exception of Italy, will converge towards a church attendance rate of little more than 5 per cent. However this will mask a much larger proportion—around half—who continue to describe themselves as religious and affiliate with a religious denomination.

These people, described by Grace Davie as “believing without belonging,” are seen by some as carriers of a flimsy faith which will soon disappear, and which doesn’t affect behaviour or attitudes. But if this is the case, how do we explain the fact that the fertility of these non-attending believers is much closer to church attenders than to non-believers? The non-attending religious are also significantly more likely than non-believers to identify themselves as ideologically conservative, even when controlling for education, wealth, age and generation. And the religious population has two demographic advantages over its non-believing counterpart. First, it maintains a 15-20 per cent fertility lead over the non-religious. Second, religious people in the childbearing 18-45 age range are disproportionately female. Offset against this is the much younger age structure of secularists.

The pivotal question is where the balance lies between religious fertility and religious abandonment in the secular cutting-edge societies of France and Protestant Europe. The population balance in these countries stands at roughly 53 per cent non-religious to 47 per cent religious. My projections, based on demographic differences between the populations and current patterns of religious abandonment, suggest that the secular population will continue to grow at a decelerating rate for three or four more decades, to peak at around 55 per cent. The proportion of secular people will then begin to decline between 2035 and 2045. The momentum behind secularisation in the most secular countries is a reflection of the religious abandonment of the pre-1945 generations, which overwhelmed the fertility advantage of the faithful. The end of apostasy in more recent generations means a population more religious at the end of the 21st century than at its beginning. As in the case of the Mormons or early Christians, demography rather than mass conversion will be the main agent of change.

He then adds the compounding significance of immigration to the equation:

This slow shift against secularisation would have only a gradual impact on the spirit of European society were it not for immigration. Immigration from Latin America has enabled American Catholics to grow despite losing far more believers to other denominations than they get in return. In Europe, immigration will similarly drive the rise of the religious population, especially its Islamic part.

However, due to factors I have already mentioned above, Islam’s immigration advantage is likely to diminish while that of Christianity is likely to grow.

So lets not write off European Christianity just yet.

UPDATE: Michael Burleigh with a couple more possibilities in the Telegraph, Nov 7:

What he [Nick Spencer of the Theos think tank in Britain] describes as a new, diffuse concern with “wellbeing” will inevitably make religion more important to politics, in that politicians will have to address an essentially religious agenda, based on values and ultimate meanings, of the sort with which Senator McCain electrified the Conservatives when he addressed their party conference.

It is also probable that infantile Islamic enragement, and the sillier provocations of “diversity” officers in local government, will sooner rather than later trigger a much broader revival of cultural Christianity, as people balk at the insensitive disregard of this country’s two-millennia-old religious traditions, which are far from defunct in the moral imaginations of many.

Now about that Mark Steyn book. If, like myself, you haven’t gotten around to ordering it yet, here are some extracts and reviews for your smirking pleasure. Continueing on exactly where the previous post left off, in fact.

EXTRACTS:

“A Dark Globalism: How Islamist terror spread its tentacles worldwide” (NY Post)

THE dragons are no longer on the edge of the map: That’s the lesson of 9/11.

When you look at it that way, the biggest globali zation success story of recent years is not McDonald’s or Microsoft but Islamism. The Saudis took what was not so long ago a severe but peripheral strain of Islam – practiced by Bedouins in the middle of a desert miles from anywhere – and successfully exported it to Jakarta and Singapore and Alma-Ata and Grozny and Sarajevo and Lyons and Bergen and Manchester and Ottawa and Dearborn and Falls Church. It was a strictly local virus, but the bird flew the coop.

And now, instead of the quaintly parochial terrorist movements of yore, we have the first globalized insurgency.

[..]

“THE COMING OF AGE: Births vs dearths” (marksteyn.com)

The single most important fact about the early 21st century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States: Canada, Europe and Japan are getting old fast, older than any functioning society has ever been and faster than any has ever aged. A society ages when its birth rate falls and it finds itself with fewer children and more grandparents. For a stable population – ie, no growth, no decline; just a million folks in 1950, a million in 1980, a million in 2010 – you need a Total Fertility Rate of 2.1 live births per woman. That’s what America has: 2.1, give or take. Canada has 1.48, an all-time low and a more revealing difference between the Great Satan and the Great White North than any of the stuff (socialized health care, fewer handguns, more UN peacekeepers, etc) that Canucks usually brag about. Europe as a whole has 1.38, Japan 1.32, Russia 1.14. These countries – or, more precisely, these people – are going out of business.

[..]

Added 25/10: “The future belongs to Islam”

The Muslim world has youth, numbers and global ambitions. The West is growing old and enfeebled, and lacks the will to rebuff those who would supplant it. It’s the end of the world as we’ve known it. An excerpt from ‘America Alone’.

Sept. 11, 2001, was not “the day everything changed,” but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On Sept. 10, how many journalists had the Council of 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 offence to Muslims would be the early 21st 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 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. The key factors are: demographic decline; the unsustainability of the social democratic state; and civilizational exhaustion.

[..]

REVIEWS:

Austin Bay today on Townhall.com:

Europeans are reproducing below the “replacement rate” — thus the average age of their populations is increasing sharply. If current trends continue, by 2050 one in three Germans and Italians will be over 65 years old. In the United States, only one in five will be so gray.

As a result, the Europe of the European Union (Steyn disdainfully calls it “Eutopia”) faces economic decline and risks systemic change. Steyn writes: “Tax revenues that support the ever growing numbers of the elderly and retired have to be paid by equally growing numbers of the young and working. The design flaw of the radically secularist Eutopia is that it depend on a religious-society birth rate.”

Japan faces the same “gray threat.” Even China has a birthrate below the demographic replacement rate. Among the modern industrial nations, only the United States (and possibly India) has the knack for reproduction.
..
Europe’s Muslims, however, are multiplying — but they are not integrating culturally. Steyn argues that if European nations fail to culturally integrate Muslims, Europe faces profound political changes.

“As fertility dries up,” he writes, “so do societies. Demography is the most obvious symptom of civilizational exhaustion, and the clearest indicator of where we’re headed.”

Mona Charen in the National Review: “Steyn at the Bridge” Read this book

I’ve never read such an amusing book about such a grim subject. Mark Steyn’s America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It is in deadly earnest — our civilization is facing a crisis of confidence and demographic vigor just at the moment when a jihadi world movement stands poised to upend us. And yet Steyn’s inimitable wit enlivens every page. As NR readers already know, he is the Errol Flynn of commentators, finishing off opponents with a single flick of his rapier. Whether that rapier will finally be silenced by a scimitar is the story of this book.

Steyn is not the first to tackle the theme of Western pusillanimity in the face of Islamic barbarism — While Europe Slept, Londonistan, Eurabia, and others have plumbed similar themes — but he is undoubtedly the most stylish. Here is his rejoinder to an Episcopal priest who told his congregation after the London bombings “There are no Muslim terrorists. There are terrorists.”

“It’s not the perfect fatuousness of the assertion so much as the meta-message it conveys: we’re the defeatist wimps; bomb us and we’ll apologize to you.” Later, he warms to the subject: “Most mainline Protestant churches are, to one degree or another, post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbelieving to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left political clichés, on the grounds that if Jesus were alive today he’d most likely be a gay Anglican bishop in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally friendly car with an ‘Arms Are for Hugging’ sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams.”

[..]

Mac Johnson, on humanevents.com: “Western Culture Must Regain Its Will to Survive”

With its elites adrift in a philosophy of self-loathing, post-Christian multiculturalism and its citizenry numbed by the narcotics of hedonism, entitlement and perpetual adolescence, the West has every means to fight back—and even conquer—but lacks the will to do so. Who will defend societies, he asks, run by those who detest their own cultural inheritance and peopled by those who believe their culture consists primarily of the right to “free” stuff from the government and the freedom to engage in personal consumption unmolested by the grand forces of history? No one, it would seem.

Apparently, Hottentot history month, paid leave, prescription drug benefits, gay marriage and Coldplay haven’t nearly the power to inspire men to take up arms and risk death as does belief in things as passé and primitive as God and Country and a conviction in the superiority of one’s own culture.

Only in America (within the West) does any sizeable portion of the population still believe in such things—albeit a declining portion. America alone then, Steyn posits, has any real potential to emerge intact from the current century. The other nations will succumb to their internal pathologies and be assimilated into more confident cultures, primarily globalized Islam.

Steyn argues that this process of Islamic assimilation will be aided above all by demographic forces, especially the modern collapse of European birth rates. This factor is not unrelated to the collapse of cultural confidence. Declining birth rates (and the concomitant dependence on large scale immigration), Steyn proposes, are merely symptoms of the loss of will brought on by anti-nationalism and the eternal childhood of life in the welfare state.

Added 25/10:
Random Jottings blog: “Obsessing over Global Warming is a way to avoid facing the big problems…”

Added 25/10:
David M. Kinchen for Huntington News:
Witty, Pun- Filled Look at Why Canadian Mark Steyn Believes U.S. is World’s Last Best Hope Before a New Dark Age of Repression

INTERVIEWS:

Kathryn Lopez for National Review: “Mark this down”

Linda Frum for Canada’s National Post: “The man who likes to poke the world in the eye”

Go ahead, jog your memory. I insist.

Hope (Reza Aslan):

The struggle to define religious faith, as we know from Christian history, can be a chaotic and bloody affair. And the Islamic Reformation has some way to go before it is resolved. It may be too early to speculate how much bin Laden’s radical individualism will influence Islam in the coming years. But it is important to note that bin Laden’s voice is but one among the chorus of voices clamoring to define the Islamic Reformation.

There are millions of individuals who, by seizing powers of interpretation for themselves, are developing new and innovative interpretations of Islam: some promoting peace and tolerance, others promoting bigotry and puritanism. Who will win this war for the future of the Islamic faith remains to be seen. But once begun, the struggle cannot be stopped.

And caution (Fjordman):

According to Dr. Daniel Pipes, Omar Ahmad, the long-serving chairman of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, reportedly told a crowd of California Muslims in July 1998, “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran … should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”

..

Meanwhile, a survey revealed that 81% of Detroit Muslims wanted sharia in Muslim countries. Yehudit Barsky, an expert on terrorism at the American Jewish Committee, warned that mainstream US Muslim organizations are heavily influenced by Saudi-funded extremists. These “extremist organizations continue to claim the mantle of leadership” over American Islam. Over 80 percent of the mosques in the United States “have been radicalized by Saudi money and influence,” Barsky said.

The northern Virginia-based Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) might easily be taken for a benign student religious group. At a meeting in Queensborough Community College in New York in March 2003, a guest speaker named Faheed declared, “We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order. Don’t lobby Congress or protest because we don’t recognize Congress. The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it … Eventually there will be a Muslim in the White House dictating the laws of Shariah.”

..

Imam Siraj Wahaj is in great demand as a speaker. In 1991, he even became the first Muslim to give an invocation to the U.S. Congress.

However, he has also warned that the United States will fall unless it “accepts the Islamic agenda.” He has lamented that “if only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.” In the early 1990s he sponsored talks by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman in mosques in New York City and New Jersey; Rahman was later convicted for conspiring to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, and Wahaj was designated a “potential unindicted co-conspirator.”

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The above is from the latest of a series of essay Fjordman is in the process of writing on the topic of “why I find a Reformation of Islam unlikely to happen, why the work of many self-appointed Muslim reformists is inadequate, why Islam probably cannot be reconciled with democracy and how the West should deal with these facts.” It is titled “Why we cannot rely on moderate Muslims”.