AMERICA ALONE
THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT
MARK STEYN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Steyn
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Steyn, Mark.
America alone: the end of the world as we know it / Mark Steyn.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-59698-527-8
1. United States—Foreign relations—2001–2. United States—Civilization—1970–3. Europe—Civilization—1945–4. World politics—1989–5. Islam and politics. 6. Civilization, Western. 7. Twenty-first century—Forecasts. I. Title.
E895.S84 2006
303.48'273017670905—dc22
2006024828
Published in the United States by
Regnery Publishing, Inc.
One Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001
www.regnery.com
Distributed to the trade by
National Book Network
Lanham, MD 20706
Contents
Introduction
Soon to Be Banned in Canada
Prologue
To Be or Not to Be
Part I: The Gelded Age
Chapter One
The Coming of Age:
Births vs. dearths
Chapter Two
Going…Going…Gone:
Demography vs. delusion
Chapter Three
Men Are from Venus: Primary impulses vs. secondary impulses
Part II: Arabian Night
Chapter Four
Flying the Coop: Big Mo vs. Big Mac
Chapter Five
The Anything They’ll Believe In:
Church vs. state
Chapter Six
The Four Horsemen of the Eupocalypse:
Eutopia vs. Eurabia
Part III: The New Dark Ages…And How to Lighten Up
Chapter Seven
The State-of-the-Art Primitive:
The known unknowns vs. the knowingly unknowing
Chapter Eight
The Unipole Apart:
America vs. everyone else
Chapter Nine
The Importance of Being Exceptional:
Citizens vs. dependents
Chapter Ten
The Falling Camel:
Last legs
Acknowledgments
“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.”
OSAMA BIN LADEN
KANDAHAR, NOVEMBER 2001
“If we know anything, it is that weakness is provocative.”
DONALD RUMSFELD
WASHINGTON, OCTOBER 1998
Introduction to the 2008 Paperback Edition
Soon to Be Banned in Canada
What is this book about?
Well, this book is about to be banned in Canada. More on that momentarily, but, aside from that, what’s it about?
Well, it’s about “The End of the World as We Know It.” And that’s really the minimum we’re facing: the end of the post-Second World War order as we’ve understood it these past sixty years, the end of an ever-advancing global prosperity guaranteed and expanded by America and its transatlantic allies. The question is whether that in itself is merely a symptom of a more profound civilizational exhaustion, and collapse—and whether we’re gambling the future on a post-western post-civilization.
So it’s the big picture—or, if you like, the real war, the real battlefield. Not the “war on terror,” which is an insufficient and evasive designation that has long since outlasted what usefulness it may once have had. Not what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are important fronts, but nonetheless only fronts and not typical ones. The real struggle is being waged not over dusty patches of the Sunni Triangle or a few caves in the Hindu Kush, but over far more central terrain—which is to say most of the “Western world,” including Europe, Britain, Australia, Canada, and, ultimately, America, too: the United States will find this a far lonelier planet if it can’t find new allies to replace old ones. Unlike Iraq, with its bloody market and mosque bombings by “insurgents,” the western front appears more placid, although there are occasional explosions—the tanning salon blown up in Copenhagen at the end of February 2008—and there are, with little publicity, horrible fatalities: “honor killings” in Toronto and Dallas; the curious Swedish phenomenon in which young Muslim girls “accidentally” plunge to their deaths from apartment balconies. But, even on quieter days, ground is being ceded, remorselessly. Even if there were no battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, even if no one were flying planes into tall buildings in New York, even if no one were blowing up trains and buses and nightclubs in Madrid and London and Bali; even without all that, we would still be in danger of losing—without a shot being fired.
Why? Well, that’s what I try to explain in the pages that follow. This book appeared in the fall of 2006, and, while it’s true that in the intervening period the world as we know it has not ended, I believe what’s happened in between bolsters my case. When America Alone was first published, I received a gazillion e-mails a day saying: “Well, if the death of Europe is really happening, how come no one else is talking about it except you and a few other fringe whackos?” Actually, quite a few folks are talking about it. For example:
The expected global upheaval is without parallel in human history.
An extravagant bit of scaremongering from page 173 of this book? The late Oriana Fallaci with the swear words cut out? No, it’s the United Nations Population Division discussing in 2007 their latest official figures, and anticipating in the next four decades population change on a scale and speed never before seen. There will be a vast emptying out of Central and Eastern Europe: Germany’s population down 10.3 percent, Poland down 20.5 percent, the Russian Federation down 24.3 percent, Bulgaria down 35.2 percent. And in Western Europe the only population increase will be almost entirely due to the great migration from Africa and Asia.
To repeat: that’s not me, that’s the UN. Being scrupulously multicultural and transnational and non-judgmental, the United Nations Population Division doesn’t consider the geopolitical implications of this “global upheaval.” America Alone does: What does it mean for the United States when the other half of the “transatlantic alliance” enters a demographic death spiral and becomes semi-Muslim in its socio-cultural-political character? With friends like these, America may not need enemies, though even among ancient foes changes are afoot. According to the Toronto Star (which is an impeccably liberal progressive paper, not in the least bit right-wing), by 2015—i.e., the day after tomorrow—the majority of the Russian army will be Muslim, which should add a whole new wrinkle to the Chechen war. If you thought Russia was fun when it was Communist, wait till it’s semi-Islamist.
ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS
When this book came out at the end of 2006, I awaited the great liberal take-down of its central argument—that much of the Western world was engaged in an act of auto-genocide, and that Islam would be the immediate beneficiary. But the New York Times declined to review it, and its Canadian equivalent, the Globe and Mail (which is like the Times but with fewer gags), pronounced magisterially that it was “quite possibly the mos
t crass and vulgar book about the West’s relationship with the Islamic world I have ever encountered.”
Now that’s what they call on Broadway a money quote! William Christian outlined my thesis, sniffed that it was “crass and vulgar,” and left it at that. He recoiled from the vile tome in aesthetic revulsion, but he declined to say what, if anything, was the flaw in the argument. Several critics claimed my demographic figures are exaggerated: why, everybody knows Italy’s fertility rate isn’t 1.2 live births per woman, it’s 1.25; it’s absurd to suggest the Islamification of Europe will happen by 2025 or 2040, when it’ll only start to kick in around…. Well, they don’t often go into that. It’s a curious line of reasoning: yes, we’re heading for the falls but not as fast as Steyn says; the Niagara’s running pretty slowly so there’s nothing to worry about; lie back in the canoe, get your ukulele out and sing “We Are the World” for a couple more decades. This was the line Johann Hari took in the most exhaustive leftie demolition in Britain’s venerable New Statesman:
America Alone is a guidebook to a continent called Eurabia, circa 2020. Its old European shell looks familiar; “most of” the old cathedrals and boulevards “still stand” in Rome, London and Paris. But the Islamic National Republican Coalition has just won the French elections—only the latest nation-sized domino to fall to the Islamists. Alcohol is already banned in the Netherlands and Denmark. The continent’s women are veiled. The gay clubs are long since shut and shuttered, “relocated to San Francisco.”
The “mass evacuations” of white people began five years ago, as the “supposedly Greater France” began “remorselessly evolving month by month into Greater Bosnia.” As they flee, the last Europeans curse the memory of mass immigration and multiculturalism. They now realise that 7/7 and France’s 2006 car-burning banlieues were merely “the first stage of the Eurabian civil war.” The continent that defined modernity is condemned to “societal collapse, fascist revivalism” and a descent into “the long Eurabian night.” America is left alone, the last country to resist being “reprimitivised.”
This is not presented as fanatical fodder for a party political broadcast fronted by Jean-Marie Le Pen. It is the straight-faced prediction of a book that has slithered on to the New York Times bestseller list and captured the imagination of the American right. Mark Steyn, an uneducated former disc jockey turned pundit, is today being greeted as a sage by the likes of Dick Cheney.
Wow. I only hope what follows can live up to the trailer. As it happens, America Alone does not give a date for when Muslims become the “majority” in Europe, because that depends on a combination of factors that only a fool would attempt to predict precisely—not just birthrates, but also conversion, accelerating immigration, and accelerating emigration such as we’re already seeing from France and the Netherlands. However, as I say early on, it is not necessary for Islam to become a statistical majority: Of countries with a Muslim population of 20 to 50 percent, only three are ranked as “free”—Serbia, Suriname, and Benin. So what matters is the point at which mediation between Islam and the rest of the community becomes the dominant political narrative. Mr. Hari evidently thinks predictions of Euro-Muslim electoral success are preposterous, so let’s not predict or project to 2020 or 2030 or 2050 but simply consider the here and now. In 2007, the city of Brussels had a mayor, Freddy Thielemans, who presided over a ruling Socialist Party caucus of seventeen other members. Here they are:
Fatima Abid
Mustafa Amrani
Samira Attalbi
Mohammed Boukantar
Philippe Close
Jean Baptiste de Crée
Ahmed el Ktibi
Julie Fiszman
Faouzia Hariche
Karine Lalieux
Marie-Paule Mathias
Yvan Mayeur
Mounia Mejbar
Mohamed Ouria Ghli
Mahfoudh Romdhani
Sevket Temiz
Freddy Thielemans
Christian Van Der Linden
Ten out of eighteen members of the ruling caucus of Brussels are Muslim, right now. That’s to say, the capital city of the European Union already has a Muslim-majority governing party. In America, political representation is usually a lagging indicator: for example, we think of Vermont as an almost parodically “progressive” stronghold, yet Pat Leahy is the first and only Green Mountain Democrat to be elected to the United States Senate. My mom’s Belgian and, if you’d said to her thirty years ago Brussels would be a Muslim-run city, she’d have said you were crazy. Obviously Muslims are not a homogeneous block. No doubt there are significant differences between Belgian Turks and Belgian Algerians. Nonetheless, Belgium’s ancient quarrels between Dutch-speaking Flemish and French-speaking Walloons are quaintly irrelevant to its future. Insofar as the country will still be riven by sectarian strife in 2100, it seems likely to be between Sunni and Shia.
One can argue about what this transformation means, or even about the rate of transformation, but to deny there’s anything going on involves a profound suspension of disbelief. I see that Johann Hari happens to be gay. Not long after September 11, he wrote a curious column boasting that he’d gone undercover at a radical London mosque and wound up seducing one of the radical young jihadist wannabees. In a sense, his complacency derives from a similar confidence in the seductive powers of society at large. Western consumerist hedonist license is so irresistible eventually even the stern young men of the madrassahs will fall under its spell. Good luck betting the future on that. Bruce Bawer, a gay American who moved to Europe because he found it more “tolerant” than the United States, is not optimistic:
One day last month, I gave a talk in Rome about how the supposedly liberal ideology of multiculturalism has made possible the spread in Europe of the highly illiberal ideology of fundamentalist Islam, with all its brutality and—among other things—violent homophobia. When I returned to my hotel, I phoned my partner back home in Oslo only to learn that moments earlier he had been confronted at a bus stop by two Muslim youths, one of whom had asked if he was gay, started to pull out a knife, then kicked him as he got on the bus, which had pulled up at just the right moment. If the bus hadn’t come when it did, the encounter could have been much worse.
Gay-bashing is on the rise in the most famously “tolerant” cities in Europe. Chris Crain, editor of the gay newspaper the Washington Blade, was beaten up by a gang of Muslim youth while visiting Amsterdam in 2005. As Der Spiegel reported, “With the number of homophobic attacks rising in the Dutch metropolis, Amsterdam officials are commissioning a study to determine why Moroccan men are targeting the city’s gays.”
Gee, whiz. That’s a toughie. Wonder what the reason could be. But don’t worry, the brains trust at the University of Amsterdam is on top of things:
Half of the crimes were committed by men of Moroccan origin and researchers believe they felt stigmatized by society and responded by attacking people they felt were lower on the social ladder. Another working theory is that the attackers may be struggling with their own sexual identity.
Bingo! Telling young Moroccan men they’re closeted gays seems certain to lessen tensions in the city! While you’re at it, a lot of those Turks seem a bit light on their loafers, don’t you think?
So don’t worry, nothing’s happening. Just a few gay Muslims frustrated at the lack of gay Muslim nightclubs. Any alternative explanation would be—what’s the word?—“alarmist.” My book is an “alarmist’s creed,” says The Economist. “Steyn’s argument is indeed alarmist,” says Britain’s Guardian. And, even in my own magazine in Canada, Maclean’s, Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hassan pronounced it—yup—“alarmist.”
Okay, enough already. I get the picture: Alarmist, alarmist, alarmist.
The question then arises: Fair enough, guys, what would it take to alarm you? In February 2008, in a characteristically clotted speech followed by a rather more careless BBC interview, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that it was dangerous to have one law for everyone an
d that the introduction of sharia—Islamic law—to the United Kingdom was “inevitable.” No alarm bells going off yet? Can’t say I blame you. After all, what I call creeping sharia—de facto incremental Islamic law—is well established in the Western world. Within days of His Grace’s remarks, the British and Ontario governments both confirmed that thousands of polygamous men in their jurisdictions receive welfare payments for each of their wives. Still no alarm bells? Even as Her Majesty’s Government in London denounced the Archbishop for his “alarmism,” they simultaneously announced with the pride the introduction of “sharia bonds” that will make London the world capital of Islamic banking. Still can’t hear the ringing? I see British Muslim nurses in public hospitals riddled with Clostridium Difficile are refusing to comply with hygiene procedures on the grounds that scrubbing requires them to bare their arms, which is unIslamic. Would it be alarmist to bring that up—say, the day before your operation?