Three Effects, One Cause

Item: Harrowing audio (and barely visible video) of Israel's paintball gun assault (what?) on the "Hamasish" flotilla.

Item: Israel's strategy is backfiring, because no matter what the rightness of its cause -- or, frankly, let's not talk about rightness per se, because this is a matter of simple primal survival; when you're talking about pure survival, "rightness" and other moral concerns hardly enter into it -- Israel becomes more isolated every day by a Europe which wants to forget why, precisely, it should be the case tha so many formerly European Jews are now in the State of Israel (hint: 1938-1945), and looks every day for new ways to condemn Israel and thwart its mission of mere survival. And the American President, which mistakes "European" for "sophistication of thought," of course echoes his cousins across the Atlantic.

Item: Italy now pursuing social con reproductive policy through libertarian-friendly means, offering women 4500 Euros to not abort their babies but proceed, as is becoming increasingly rare in Europe, to a live birth. Russia has been attempting the much the same thing for some time now. Video report on Russia's experiment in reversing its trend towards depopulation here.

All these are linked by the same fact: Most nations of the West will be extinct within 50-75 years, for all intents and purposes, as the nations we now know die off due to lack of procreation and Muslims from the Middle East and Asia make up the difference, and then some.

Europe -- and Israel, to some extent, too -- is pursing an accommodationist strategy with what will be, to a mathematical certainty, the ruling population of Europe in 50 years time; what we call "Europeans" today will rely upon the Europeans of tomorrow to treat them fairly and civilly, and not, say, modify the criminal code in practice to permit the raping of Old European girls by New European gangs.

Or to, say, continue paying pensions, health benefits, and other "to grave" sorts of benefits to its graying, dying, and now alien, indigenous population.

Europe, like Israel, is pursing a strategy of simple survival, hoping that some accommodation shown now to its future masters will buy some reciprocal kindness, or at least civility, for its future slaves.

And, as in Israel's case, "rightness" is hardly a factor at all when you're talking about survival.

Whether Europe's gamble will work, I don't know; it's possible that the egregious barbarity of expansionist Islam will ameliorate in the next several decades; the beastly behavior of much of that population may be caused, in part, by a sense of being victims and thus (as the West reinforces their beliefs on this score) that all sorts of hellish behavior are justified when one speaks of "victims;" but, perhaps, in the future, with the confidence that they now will, as Mohammad promised, inherit the whole earth (or at least the majority of the earth, bracketed on one end by India and on the other by California), those tendencies will be eclipsed by a more charitable and ethical code.

Civilization is usually only had by those who can afford civilization, those who have had enough material success to be able to afford charity, those whose confidence in their own future safety and survival is high enough to afford mercy and empathy. A distressingly large fraction of the Muslim world seems to lack this now; but it just might be the case that when Islam is obviously triumphant, civilization will grow as it usually does among those who can afford it.

(George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had something like this in mind for Iraq-- forcing a better path for the Islamic world, one that might be imposed initially by force of arms but would later be emulated by free will because it simply works like hell; whether this expensive experiment in reforming Islam through a "Plymouth: Iraq" strategy will bear fruit, or enough fruit, or will bear fruit soon enough, is anyone's guess.)

On the other hand, human beings are not known for the kindnesses they demonstrate towards "The Other." And it is plain that Islam considers Europe to be very much "The Other." And I don't have great hopes that something so central to Islam's conception of itself will give way to a more civilized ethic.

I never write about this, because accusations of "racism" inevitably follow any discussion of demographic destiny; but mostly because it's so horribly depressing. If you believe Mark Steyn, and I tend to do so, barring some truly massive change in demographic destiny then the world as we know is doomed, to a mathematical certitude, and what battles we fight now are will almost certainly be regarded later as trivial episodes in the much larger and longer view of Islam's demographic energy, and the West's demographic exhaustion.

Anytime I think like this I can only think of Vonnegut's repetitive sigh in Slaugher-House Five: "And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes."

posted by Ace at 03:56 PM

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