Demography Is Destiny

I get bored with writing about race and demography. I get cheesed when those who don't like black or Asian people assume that I agree with them. I worry that some of the remarks in the comments threads will put off the people I want to attract to the blog - lefties who've got the odd niggling doubt as to whether all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, and who might be prepared to look at evidence to the contrary. I worry that this blog's getting a bit monochrome in its choice of subjects. As an ex-lefty, I look with my old eyes and see a swivel-eyed single-issue merchant.

But I'll carry on - because I see it as the most important issue facing Britain, and the one with the greatest possibilities for danger. Continuing to import large numbers of peoples and cultures into Britain - mostly into England - while making no attempt to integrate them (indeed, no longer having a strong culture to integrate to) seems to me, no matter how pleasant individual members of those cultures may be, to be asking for trouble. When at the same time the native population is in demographic decline, unlike the fecund newcomers, phrases like 'busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre' seem apposite.

I'm pleased to see that Christopher Hitchens understands.

The most alarming sentences that I have read in a long time came from the pen of my fellow atheist Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, at the end of a September Los Angeles Times column upbraiding American liberals for their masochistic attitude toward Islamist totalitarianism. Harris concluded:

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

As Martin Amis said in the essay that prompted Steyn’s contempt: “What is one to do with thoughts like these?” How does one respond, in other words, when an enemy challenges not just your cherished values but additionally forces you to examine the very assumptions that have heretofore seemed to underpin those values?

Two things, in my experience, disable many liberals at the onset of this conversation. First, they cannot shake their subliminal identification of the Muslim religion with the wretched of the earth: the black- and brown-skinned denizens of what we once called the “Third World.” You can see this identification in the way that the Palestinians (about 20 percent of whom were Christian until their numbers began to decline) have become an “Islamic” cause and in the amazing ignorance that most leftists display about India, a multiethnic secular democracy under attack from al-Qaida and its surrogates long before the United States was. And you can see it, too, in the stupid neologism “Islamophobia,” which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.

The second liberal disability concerns numbers. Any emphasis on the relative birthrates of Muslim and non-Muslim populations falls on the liberal ear like an echo of eugenics. It also upsets one of the most valued achievements of the liberal consensus: the right if not indeed the duty to limit family size to (at most) two children. It was all very well, from this fatuously self-satisfied perspective, for Paul Ehrlich to warn about the human “population bomb” as a whole, just as it is all very well for some “Green” forces to take a neo-Malthusian attitude toward human reproduction in general. But in the liberal mind, to concentrate on the fertility of any one group is to flirt with Nuremberg laws. The same goes for “racial profiling,” even when it’s directed at the adherents of an often ideological religion rather than an ethnic group. The Islamists, meanwhile, have staked everything on fecundity.

RTWT