Next year will mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication of my boffo bestseller on demography and its discontents. As I always say, 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. In today's episode, I discuss the rapidly ageing, increasingly barren populations of western nations and their disastrous decision to square the circle of the post-war welfare state to import immigrants to be the children they couldn't be bothered having themselves. Me in 2006:
True, birth rates are falling all over the world, and it may be that eventually every couple on the planet decides to opt for the western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of thirty-nine. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage - and those societies with expensive social programs dependent on mass immigration will be in the worst predicament. It's no consolation for the European Union with its deathbed birth statistics if the Third World's demographics are also falling: they're your nursery, they're the babies you couldn't be bothered having; if their fertility rate goes the same way yours has, that will be a problem for you long before it's a problem for them. Unless it corrects course within the next five to ten years, Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: the grand buildings will still be standing but the people who built them will be gone. By the next century, German will be spoken only at Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goering's Monday night poker game in Hell. And long before the Maldive Islands are submerged by 'rising sea levels' every Spaniard and Italian will be six foot under. But sure, go ahead: worry about 'climate change'.
More immediately, Europe will be semi-Islamic in its politico-cultural character within a generation.
In the fourteenth century, the Black Death wiped out a third of the Continent's population; in the twenty-first, a larger proportion will disappear – in effect, by choice. We are living through a rare moment: the self - extinction of the civilization which, for good or ill, shaped the age we live in.
And here we are two decades later.
To hear me read Part Three of America Alone, Mark Steyn Club members should please click here and log-in.
I said before Part One that we'd update and annotate as we went along. Twenty years ago, one could still startle one's readers by citing the newborn stats in mere cities: Number One baby name in Amsterdam? Mohammed! Malmö? Mohammed! Now it's top of the hit parade in entire countries: The Number One baby boy's name of 2024 in England? Mohammed.
Ah, but relax, Mo's only Number Two in Scotland...
Again, me in 2006:
There are twenty million Muslims in Europe – officially. That's the equivalent of the Danes plus the Irish plus the Belgians plus the Estonians. You do the math.
But nobody did. So, two decades on, there are now calculated to be forty-six million Muslims in Europe. Our rulers were not "fiddling while Rome burns"; Merkel, Johnson and the other treacherous arses of a diseased political class decided to more than double the logs on the fire. Moreover, Continent-wide statistics inevitably understate what's happening - because Poland, Romania and Lithuania (despite not so subtle strongarming by Brussels) have an Islamic population of nought-point-whatever ...while Europe's three most Muslim nations are its two nuclear Security Council members plus its post-war economic powerhouse.
The papers now note - as a fait accompli - that Anglo-Celts will become a minority in the United Kingdom by 2063 (and in England rather sooner), and that ethnic French births will be outnumbered by Muslim births in the 2050s.
Since my book was published, the three men principally responsible for going full steam ahead with the dispossession of the native peoples of the British Isles have been Blair, Cameron and Johnson. And yet all three are able to stroll down the street - and the increasingly absurd Fleet Street papers are still full of bollocks about whether Johnson will unite the "right" by joining "Reform". Truly, I have lived entirely in vain. The then candidate for Philadelphia's mayor, Frank Rizzo, famously boasted during his campaign that he would make Attila the Hun look like a faggot. And he was a Democrat. European "conservatives" such as Merkel and Johnson, facing the extinction of their ancient homelands, were faggots being passed off as Attila the Hun.
At the present rate of net 1.5 million immigrants a year, which has been the average under the past five presidencies, the U.S. population will balloon from 340 million today to 431.5 million in 2100—an increase of nearly 100 million "newcomers" who are less educated on average and more dependent on welfare and have higher poverty rates than native-born Americans. These newcomers would enter an economy with slow productivity growth by historic standards, in which reading and math scores are declining, rates of unwed motherhood are among the highest in the world, and ever-fewer citizens can afford a traditional middle-class lifestyle.
No advanced society needs mass migration.
~Thank you for all your kind comments on our first two episodes. Sal Tessio, a New Jersey member of The Mark Steyn Club, says:
Thank you Mark for putting together this audio version of America Alone. So far it's a great listen, though that's not a surprise!
Steve, a First Month Founding Member from Manhattan, notices the "mainstream" media playing catch up:
THIS JUST IN: The Daily Telegraph has a new article entitled 'Europe is doomed. This chart shows why.' The breaking news is that the decline in births in the EU is such that—even with 110 million more inhabitants than the US—for 'the first time in history' the EU had fewer births (3.5 million) than the US (3.6 million). No mention of what first names the EU babies are getting. And of course no reference by the Telegraph writer, Francois Valentin, to the fact that you could have read about all this twenty years ago if you'd read Mark Steyn rather than the legacy media.
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 Telegraph 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.
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