“Population decline is the elephant in the world’s living room. As a matter of arithmetic, we know that the social life of most developed countries will break down within two generations. Two out of three Italians and three of four Japanese will be elderly dependents by 2050. If present fertility rates hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98 percent over the next two centuries. No pension and health care system can support such an inverted population pyramid. Nor is the problem limited to the industrial nations. Fertility is falling at even faster rates—indeed, at rates never before registered anywhere—in the Muslim world. The world’s population will fall by as much as a fifth between the middle and the end of the twenty-first century, by far the worst decline in human history.” [1]

So writes David P. Goldman in the introduction to his recent book, How Civilisations Die (and Why Islam is Dying Too).

Goldman observes that the economic crisis in Europe is at root a demographic crisis, and the demographic crisis is a crisis of faith.

In the absence of religious faith, if our culture dies, our hope of transcending mere physical existence dies with it. Individuals trapped in a dying culture live in a twilight world. They embrace death through infertility, concupiscence and war. A dog will crawl into a hole to die. The members of sick cultures do not do anything quite so dramatic, but they cease to have children, dull their senses with alcohol and drugs, become despondent, and too frequently do away with themselves. Or they may make war on the perceived source of their humiliation. [2]

The secularization of Europe is tragic, but the loss of faith and subsequent demographic decline in the Muslim world is news to me. What’s interesting is that not only have the birthrates among Muslim immigrants in European countries (except Great Britain) fallen to current European levels within one or two generations, the birthrates in Muslim states are also falling dramatically.

Islam is a pagan parody of Judeo-Christian religion, says Franz Rozenzweig. But how does Islam respond to the encroachment of the modern world?

In Europe, a decline in religious faith underlies its demographic decline… In the footsteps of Western Europe, Islam also faces a crisis of faith that will bring about a demographic catastrophe in the middle of the present century. Given the prominence of what Westerners call “Islamic fundamentalism,” it seems odd to speak of a crisis of faith in the Islamic world. Striking statistical evidence supports this conclusion…

Although the Muslim birthrate today is the world’s second highest (after sub-Saharan Africa), it is falling faster than the birthrate of any other culture… The demographic position of the Islamic world has set a catastrophe in motion. It is hard enough for rich nations to care for a growing elderly population, but it is impossible for poor nations to do so. If America faces discomfort, and Europe faces crisis, Muslim countries face breakdown. [3]

Demographic decline due to literacy and modernity is not really news, even in Muslim nations. What is news is that this process is occurring in Islamic nations at a rate that is dumbfounding the experts. Muslim nations currently have a relatively young population, but that population is not having children. In response to the onslaught of modernity, this “suicide of Islam” is a titanic version of the self-immolation of an endangered tribe.

If demographic winter is encroaching slowly on the West, a snap frost has overtaken the Muslim world. Europe has had two hundred years to make the transition from the high fertility rates of rural life to the low fertility rates of the industrial world. Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria are attempting it in twenty. The graying of the Muslim world in lapsed time, as it were, can have only tragic consequences. [4]

The political and religious leaders of these Muslim states are aware of the problem. Where the West is pessimistic, these nations are panicking. Faced with poverty and, in some cases, starvation, it is likely they will become not less dangerous but more so. Goldman’s take on the recent Arab revolutions is eye-opening.

Despite the desperate efforts of political and religious leaders, Islam’s response to modernity has been not only a sudden demographic decline, but in many cases a descent into self-destructive behavior.

The underside of Islam’s demographic freeze is an appalling breakdown of traditional mores… Under the facade of radical Islam, Iran suffers from an eruption of social pathologies such as drug addiction and prostitution on a scale much worse than anything observed in the West. It appears than Islamic theocracy promotes rather than represses social decay. A spiritual malaise has overcome Iran despite the best efforts of the totalitarian Islamists. Popular morale has deteriorated much faster than in the “decadent” West against which the Khomeini revolution was directed. [5]

This statement is shocking enough, but Goldman’s evidence and breakdown of the problem is not only heart-rending, it exposes the Islamic hypocrisy for what it is — an impotent Phariseeism.

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[1] How Civilisations Die, p. ix
[2] How Civilisations Die, p. xxii
[3] David P. Goldman, It’s Not the End of the World, It’s Just the End of You: The Great Extinction of the Nations, pp. 280-284.
[4] How Civilisations Die, p. 1
[5] How Civilisations Die, p. 45-46.

“One of the most ominous events of modern history is quietly unfolding. Social science and economics come together to declare a looming demographic winter which threatens to have catastrophic social and economic consequences.”

If the data this documentary presents holds up, most of Obama’s “change” is based on hysteria that is between 1 and 3 decades old and totally debunked. The only thing going for these suicidal policies is political correctness. A good example is a recent Outloud Opinion podcast which covered the baseless ideology behind Obama’s aggressive pro-abortion policy, highlighting just one of the nutcase extremists the President continues to surround himself with.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius tried to reassure citizens in New Orleans this week that Obamacare bureaucrats will make sound medical decisions for all Americans. She failed. Under the government-run plan, she promised, a team of health care experts will recommend what should be covered: “I think it would be wise to let science guide what the best health care package is.”

Gulp. It’s the Obama administration’s view of sound “science” that should send chills down patients’ spines. Case in point: The president’s prestigious science czar, John Holdren, refuses to answer questions about his radical published work on population control over the last 30 years.

Last week, I called the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to press Holdren on his views about forced abortions and mass sterilizations; his purported disavowal of “Ecoscience,” the 1977 book he co-authored with population control zealots Paul and Anne Ehrlich; and his continued embrace of forced-abortion advocate and eugenics guru Harrison Brown, whom he credits with inspiring him to become a scientist.

After investigative bloggers and this column reprinted extensive excerpts from “Ecoscience,” which mused openly about putting sterilants in the water supply to make women infertile and engineering society by taking away babies from undesirables and subjecting them to government-mandated abortions, the White House issued a statement from Holdren last week denying he embraced those proposals. The Ehrlichs challenged critics to read their and Holdren’s more recent research and works.

Well, I did read one of Holdren’s recent works. It revealed his clingy reverence for, and allegiance to, the gurus of population control authoritarianism. He’s just gotten smarter about cloaking it behind global warming hysteria… [1]

It seems Marxism is not the only clapped-out, historically and empirically unsupportable leftist ideology that has taken over the White House.

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[1] Michelle Malkin, Ghoulish Science Plus Obamacare Equals Health Hazard.