Next year will mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication of my boffo bestseller on demography and its discontents. As I said last week, 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, it wasn't. Which is why yesterday a huge swarm of flag-wavers - Union Jack plus St George's cross, St Andrew's saltire, the Welsh dragon, the Ulster banner and the Irish tricolour - took to the streets of London to reclaim their ancestral lands. Lots of old friends there - Sammy Woodhouse, Katie Hopkins, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, Kathy Gyngell, Mr and Mrs Laurence Fox, many Mark Steyn Club members and Steyn Cruisers. I wish I could have been there, but I intend to be well enough for the next one. We shall discuss the event tomorrow, but all congratulations to Tommy Robinson for pulling it off in the face of multiple sabotage attempts by the authorities - including an early closedown of the rally, before all the invited speakers had spoken. Whatever contempt you have for the British state isn't enough.
What is now a dramatic and accelerating existential crisis for western Europe was foreseen in America Alone. However, in today's episode, I try to look on, er, the bright side. Me in 2006:
Perhaps the differences will be minimal. In France, the Catholic churches will become mosques; in England, the village pubs will cease serving alcohol; in the Netherlands, the gay nightclubs will close up shop and relocate to San Francisco. But otherwise life will go on much as before. The new Europeans will be observant Muslims instead of post-Christian secularists but they will still be recognizably European. It will be like Cats after a cast change: same long-running show, new actors. Or maybe the all-black Broadway production of Hello, Dolly! is a better comparison: Pearl Bailey instead of Carol Channing, but the plot, the music, the sets are all the same. The animating principles of advanced societies are so strong that they will thrive whoever's at the switch .
But what if it doesn't work out like that?
Well, predictably enough, it hasn't worked out like that.
To hear me read Part Two of America Alone, Mark Steyn Club members should please click here and log-in.
So how, twenty years on, are those hypotheticals I offered?
*In France it's more difficult than in Newfoundland (see below) for a Catholic church to become a mosque because the buildings are owned by the state. Nevertheless, just a decade after I wrote the above:
The French government opened talks with 'loyal' Muslim leaders on Monday with one of the main topics up for discussion being the shortage of mosques in France.
So what's the solution to that?
[Dalil] Boubakeur [Rector of the Grand Mosque in Paris] says the answer lies in France's declining Catholic population.
He told Europe 1 radio that the country's empty churches could make ideal locations for mosques.
"It's a delicate issue, but why not?" Boubakeur told Europe 1 radio.
In the absence of repurposing the surplus edifices, France has instead the highest rate of church-desecration in Europe.
*English pubs? They're not going non-alcoholic, because, even if they were, the new self-segregating tribalised Britons have no desire to pass their evenings in the same room as you filthy infidels. So, instead, shisha bars are thriving and the pubs are vanishing. In 2000 the UK as a whole had nearly 61,000 public houses. By last year, they were down to 45,000.
In France, wine consumption has fallen massively among the young, to the universal bafflement of experts. Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé! But no one wants it.
I am always interested in the moment when common vernacular expressions become obsolete. Have you noticed that no one says "Well, it's a free country" or "You're entitled to your opinion" anymore? Likewise, humdrum reality has crushed the metaphorical power of "last orders in the saloons of the west". We're now approaching the point at which it will be too late for a last shout.
*What was my last example? Oh, yeah. Gay bars?
As gay bars closed through the 2010s, Amsterdam decided to flip the script on how we think about nightlife and appoint a night mayor. It was the first city in the world to do so. London soon followed suit, as did New York City.
Good luck with that. How many ambitious bureaucrats of the late 2020s are going to see Commissar of Gay Bars as a resumé-enhancer? Gee, it's almost like you can have godless sodomites or observant Mohammedans, but not both. Who knew?
Oh, okay: any creature more sentient than an amoeba knew.
One more thought of mine from 2006:
The basic demography explains, for example, the critical difference between the 'war on terror' for Americans and Europeans: In the US, the war is something to be fought in the treacherous sands of the Sunni Triangle and the caves of the Hindu Kush; you go to faraway places and kill foreigners. But,in Europe, it's a civil war. Neville Chamberlain dismissed Czechoslovakia as 'a faraway country of which we know little'. This time round, for much of western Europe it turned out the faraway country of which they knew little was their own.
This was the fundamental flaw of Bush's "war on terror" framing. So brave men spent twenty years running around the barren sod of some of the most worthless real estate on the planet - Jalalabad, Benghazi - while their political masters surrendered some of the most valuable turf in the world: Marseille, Molenbeek, Munich, Malmö, Manchester ...and even Michigan. Imagine if we'd spent the last two decades fighting as hard for Lewiston-Auburn as we did for Lashkargah.
~Thank you for all your kind comments on our first episode. Joe Cressotti, a First Week Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club, says:
I'm very excited to listen to this, read in Mark's own voice. I have to say the choice of music is inspired. It captures the mood so perfectly. I would love to hear Mark expand upon it. I almost wonder if it was dancing in his head when he wrote the book.
Well, I'd be surprised if I was thinking about this particular three-quarter-time tune, but there is a passage later on in the book where I compare what's going on to a lop-sided waltz ...because total civilisational collapse can't occur without a depraved political class smugly assuming they're the nimblest dancers on the floor.
Todd Hynes recounts his own community's journey these last two decades:
I've been meaning to take down my copy of America Alone for a re-read, but this is outstanding. Thank you Mark! We've all seen this coming for years, with many thanks to Mark for opening our eyes and then keeping them open.
Nineteen years ago this month, around the time I was reading America Alone for the first time, my wife and I were married in our Catholic Church back in Newfoundland. Over the next few years we baptized our children and laid her father to rest there, not knowing or thinking that our Church would be sold to Muslims and today converted into a mosque... a smaller scale and non-violent repeat of the Hagia Sofia, except these guys didn't keep the name... it's now called something something al-Noor.
People don't think of Newfoundland as the sort of place that's Islamising - in part because it's embedded in the mythology of 9/11, as the place where, at no notice, small-town Canadians opened their homes to take in stranded US passengers whose inbound flights had been diverted to Gander and St John's. They made a musical about it.
Since joining Canada in 1949, Newfoundland has always been the second smallest province by population (after Prince Edward Island). Between 9/11 and the 2021 census, the Christian population fell from 97 per cent to 82 per cent: that's why Todd's church closed. On the other hand, the Muslim population rose from 600 to 4,000 - a seven-fold increase in twenty years: that's why Todd's church is now a mosque.
That's in Newfoundland. If you're planning on outrunning this thing, unless you're a centenarian in the latter stages of Monkeypox, that ain't gonna work. That's why Eva's "Generation Remigration" is a better bet than Robert Tombs's boomer-wanker loser-fatalism. Eva wants to take back her country, because taking it back is now the only option. So the least Tombs could do is get out of the sod-bollocking way.
As I always say, 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 tosspots.
However, as a weekend bonus for Mark Steyn Club members, this brand new audio adaptation is the first opportunity to hear the author narrating it himself. This is a new weekly feature here at SteynOnline, every Sunday at this time.
~If you've yet to read it, personally autographed copies of America Alone are 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 truly grateful to 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. If you've enjoyed our monthly Steyn Club audio adventures and you're looking for a present for a fellow fan of classic fiction, I hope you'll consider our special Club Gift Membership. Aside from Tales for Our Time, The Mark Steyn Club does come with other benefits:
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