The future belongs to Islam- Culture - Books - 0 views
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Likewise, the salient feature of Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia is that they're running out of babies
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the salient feature of Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia is that they're running out of babies.
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Sept. 11, 2001, was not "the day everything changed," but the day that revealed how much had already changed.
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start with demography, because everything does:
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Greece has a fertility rate hovering just below 1.3 births per couple, which is what demographers call the point of "lowest-low" fertility from which no human society has ever recovered. And Greece's fertility is the healthiest in Mediterranean Europe: Italy has a fertility rate of 1.2, Spain 1.1. Insofar as any citizens of the developed world have "big" families these days, it's the anglo democracies: America's fertility rate is 2.1, New Zealand a little below. Hollywood should be making My Big Fat Uptight Protestant Wedding in which some sad Greek only child marries into a big heartwarming New Zealand family where the spouse actually has a sibling.
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this isn't a projection: it's happening now
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Experts talk about root causes. But demography is the most basic root of all.
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Demographic decline and the unsustainability of the social democratic state are closely related.
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Age + Welfare = Disaster for you;Youth + Will = Disaster for whoever gets in your way.
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By "will," I mean the metaphorical spine of a culture.
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Islam has youth and will, Europe has age and welfare.
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We are witnessing the end of the late 20th- century progressive welfare democracy.
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For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs, the question is a simple one: can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old?
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Which brings us to the third factor -- the enervated state of the Western world, the sense of civilizational ennui, of nations too mired in cultural relativism to understand what's at stake.
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But there is a correlation between the structural weaknesses of the social democratic state and the rise of a globalized Islam. The state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood -- health care, child care, care of the elderly -- to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct.
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They corrode the citizen's sense of self-reliance to a potentially fatal degree
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may talk about "winning" the Cold War but the French and the Belgians and Germans and Canadians don't. Very few British do. These are all formal NATO allies -- they were, technically, on the winning side against a horrible tyranny few would wish to live under themselves.
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it's hard to credit the citizens of France or Italy as having made any serious contribution to the defeat of Communism. Au contraire, millions of them voted for it, year in, year out. And, with the end of the Soviet existential threat, the enervation of the West only accelerated.
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Harsh, like Mr. Steyn often is to grab one's attention! But also true!! gfp
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in the old days, the white man settled the Indian territory. Now the followers of the badland's radical imams settle the metropolis.
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Thomas P. M. Barnett's book Blueprint For Action, Robert D. Kaplan, a very shrewd observer of global affairs, is quoted referring to the lawless fringes of the map as "Indian territory."
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In the old days, the Injuns had bows and arrows and the cavalry had rifles. In today's Indian territory, countries that can't feed their own people have nuclear weapons.
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Though Eastern Europe and Latin America and parts of Asia are freer now than they were in the seventies, other swaths of the map have spiralled backwards.
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The enemies we face in the future will look a lot like al-Qaeda: transnational, globalized, locally franchised, extensively outsourced -- but tied together through a powerful identity that leaps frontiers and continents. They won't be nation-states and they'll have no interest in becoming nation-states, though they might use the husks thereof, as they did in Afghanistan and then Somalia. The jihad may be the first, but other transnational deformities will embrace similar techniques. Sept. 10 institutions like the UN and the EU will be unlikely to provide effective responses.
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This is the thesis of what one portion of the U.S. military calls Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) i.e. what unfolded in Iraqafter the Liviatan defeat of Sadam Hussein when the U.S. did not pursue an effective nor efficient strategy of "waging peace" as strategy as argued in Chapter one of Dr Barnett's "Action Plan".
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Four years into the "war on terror," the Bush administration began promoting a new formulation: "the long war."
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Thomas Barnett's thesis in "Blueprint for Action" by the US is that the long war is waged as a "war for peace" fought by a powerful and numerous SysAdmin force of multinationals after the "hot war' is won by the US military 'Liviathan'. Iagrree that makes more sence than a 4GW approach which kees the West always in a "hot war". gfp
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