EMPTY CRADLES, DEMOGRAPHIC DESTINY & THE DEATH OF THE WEST

(Analyst's note: These facts are more than a little troubling. Our radical Islamic enemy will soon simply over-run us, if these trends continue. History shows this to be a very hard lesson indeed.)

By Selwyn Duke

While the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding was good cinema, it was also a big fat Hollywood fiction. With Greece’s fertility rate of 1.36 children per woman — well below the replacement level of 2.1 — “big” is not a modifier demographers would associate with today’s Greek families. In fact, a more accurate film might be called My Big Fat Muslim Wedding.

Worse still, Greece is no anomaly. Long ago the cradle of Western civilization and more recently one of its backwaters, it’s now part of a phalanx of Western demographic failures. In fact, while it may seem counterintuitive to those weaned on the stuff of Malthusian nightmares, the West is facing a population implosion of historic proportions. And the statistics are staggering. As I wrote when reviewing the documentary Demographic Winter last year:

. . . the number of children in the world is already declining . . . . Birthrates are now below replacement level . . . in approximately 70 countries; in Western Europe, the figure is 1.38, and in northern Italy and parts of Spain it is below 1. As a result, Europe's 65-year-olds now outnumber her 14-year-olds, and one German province had to close 220 schools in 2006. Children were present in 80 percent of U.S. households a century ago; that number is now 32 percent.

Although pondering demographic malaise conjures up the image of sterile Western swingers, note that this phenomenon is, in a measure, manifesting itself worldwide. Take Eastern Europe, for example. Russia, with its birthrate of 1.4 children per woman, is experiencing a population decrease of 700,000 a year. With an even lower birthrate of 1.22, some Lithuanian officials are concerned about the eventual disappearance of their population. And this is mirrored in other Eastern European nations; Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Czech Republic and the rest are all turning in similar numbers. ....

.... When I ponder our materialism, promiscuity, frivolity and selfishness, our abortion-mill archipelago that churns with Nazi-like efficiency, it occurs to me that perhaps the leftists are right — just not for the reasons they think. It’s not sins of our past that haunt us but those of our present, and maybe the euthanizing of Western civilization is, after all, our comeuppance.