Next year will mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication of my boffo bestseller on demography and its discontents. Believe me, it's not easy writing a bestseller about demography, especially when all the nuancy boys of the respectable media are condescendingly dismissing it as "alarmist".
Well, whether or not it was "alarmist", it's happened. Which is why, circa 2030, either Shabana Mahmood or Zia Yusuf will be Britain's prime minister. The Economist is still peddling its cobwebbed bollocks, but the late Tariq Fateh, who likewise dismissed me as "alarmist" in my own (then) magazine, lived long enough to acknowledge his error:
Steyn was right and I was wrong.
America Alone did not get everything right. But, if you'd read it more attentively than the nuancy boys did, you'd know its central thesis is now a living reality for most of the west. Thanks for doing nothing, you Economist-reading wankers.
So, as a weekend bonus for Mark Steyn Club members, welcome to a brand new audio adaptation of said bestseller - and the first opportunity to hear me reading it myself. This will be a new weekly feature here at SteynOnline, every Sunday at this time. In our opening episode, I cut - two sod-bollocking decades back - to the chase:
Let me put it in a slightly bigger nutshell:
Much of what we loosely call the western world will not survive the 21st 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 .
That's now obvious to any creature more sentient than an earthworm, but not a lot of people were putting it that bluntly in 2006. Still, you can't say you weren't warned. The last two decades didn't need to happen: it was a conscious choice to impose it on you. To hear me read the first installment of America Alone, Mark Steyn Club members should please click here and log-in.
In case you were wondering, the above-mentioned Hagia Sophia is no longer merely "not a cathedral"; it's now a mosque. So we'll do a bit of annotating and updating as we go along, just to discern the direction of travel. For example:
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.
I lost count of all the people who disputed that "no recovery" assertion, including some prominent so-called right-wingers who flat-out refused to believe that the west's modernity could be reversed by lack of maternity. And yet Greece's fertility rate of 1.3 had fallen by last year to 1.26. Italy's rate of 1.2 was down to 1.18. These societies are halving with each generation.
Oh, but here's the good news! Spain's is UP - from 1.1 to 1.4 babies per couple. Gee, why is that? All these pregnant men one hears about suddenly got broody? Er, no:
Spain's Birth Rate Is Looking Up—Thanks To Immigration
Ah, so the Spaniards' fertility rate hasn't "recovered"; it's just that Spain has gotten considerably more un-Spanish. Look for a lot more similarly "good news" in France and Sweden, England and Ireland.
My publishers didn't really want a thesis on demography; they thought they'd commissioned just another rah-rah book about America, as was the fashion in that brief heyday of "conservative bestsellers", but it was the demographic Big Picture that caused the book to be read by princes, presidents, prime ministers and other persons of power and influence - all of whom summoned me for consultation and then played an exquisite violin obligato of "Diversity is our strength!" while Rome burned.
~If you've yet to read it, personally autographed copies of America Alone are still available from the SteynOnline bookstore.
I hope you'll enjoy this rare non-fiction audio excursion, but, if two decades of civilisational suicide have left you pining for lighter fare, we have plenty of escapist capers for you, including Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, and P G Wodehouse's Psmith, Journalist - oh, and a certain other fellow's The Prisoner of Windsor. Tales for Our Time in all its variety is a welcome detox from the madness of the hour: eight years' worth of my audio adaptations of classic fiction starting with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's cracking tale of an early conflict between jihadists and westerners in The Tragedy of the Korosko. To access them all, please see our easy-to-navigate Netflix-style Tales for Our Time home page. We've introduced a similar tile format for my Sunday Poems and also for our audio and video music specials.
We launched The Mark Steyn Club over eight years ago, and I'm overwhelmed by all those members across the globe who've signed up to be a part of it - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Cook County to the Cook Islands, West Virginia to the West Midlands. As I said at the time, membership isn't for everyone, but it is a way of ensuring that all our content remains available for everyone.
That said, we are offering our Club members a few extras, including our monthly audio adventures by Dickens, Conrad, Kafka, Gogol, H G Wells, Baroness Orczy, Jack London, Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Louis Stevenson - plus a couple of pieces of non-classic fiction by yours truly. You can find them all here. We're very pleased by the response to our Tales - and we even do them live on our annual Mark Steyn Cruise, and sometimes with special guests.
Steyn Club membership is not for everyone, but if you're looking for a present for a fan of classic fiction or video poetry or audio obituaries, I hope you'll consider our special Club Gift Membership. Aside from America Alone, The Mark Steyn Club does come with other benefits:
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
~The chance to engage in live Clubland Q&A sessions with yours truly, such as this coming Wednesday's;
~Transcript and audio versions of The Mark Steyn Show, Mark's Mailbox, and our other video content;
~My video series of classic poetry;
~Booking for special members-only events, such as The Mark Steyn Christmas Show, assuming I'm ever again healthy enough for such events;
~Priority booking for the annual Mark Steyn Cruise;
~Advance booking for my live appearances around the world, assuming I'm live enough to be capable of "live appearances";
~Customised email alerts for new content in your areas of interest;
~and the opportunity to support our print, audio and video ventures as they wing their way around the planet.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to America Alone but to the six dozen yarns gathered together at the Tales for Our Time home page.
One other benefit to membership is our Comment Club privileges. So, if Steyn reading Steyn is like a living death for you, feel free to have at it. And do join us next weekend for Part Two of America Alone.
