CAPITOL IDEAS: Our Self Inflicted Wounds
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS TOM BETHELL Our Self-Inflicted Wounds ERB MEYER TELLS ME THAT HIS VIDEO, "The Siege of Western Civilization," sold out three times in the last two months and now has national...
...The hostility to the West can best be appreciated if we note the attitude of many of our intellectuals...
...CAPITOL IDEAS TOM BETHELL Our Self-Inflicted Wounds ERB MEYER TELLS ME THAT HIS VIDEO, "The Siege of Western Civilization," sold out three times in the last two months and now has national distribution...
...Russia 1.3...
...Is it on tape...
...But it really does seem to be true...
...has changed...
...But the numbers hide another, even more discouraging story, Wattenberg says...
...Italy:1.2...
...Europe will "fall by the wayside unless they take in vast numbers of Muslim immigrants...
...People like Wattenberg and Meyer will now be able to say that "according to current U.N...
...Until recently, if the fertility rate of a country fell below 2.1, the U.N...
...But after talks to college students and business groups, people would come up and ask: "Where can we get it...
...projections" populations around the world will soon start declining...
...Wattenberg tends to focus on the geopolitical implications, which may be summarized as America up, Europe down...
...The key number here is 2.1—that is the replacement fertility rate...
...The argument is that the Philippines have lots of low-wage people to take care of the elderly...
...South Korea just came in with a fertility rate of 1.14, which is down below the Italians," Wattenberg said...
...At least the new methodology will expose the scare stories of "population explosion" for the lies that they are...
...Yemen, 6.7...
...People want to be talked to seriously about the serious issues we confront," he said, emphasizing every word...
...II ERE ARE A FEW of the most recent numbers...
...2001...
...Like the United States, France does not consider religion in collecting information about births...
...And politicians don't want to reduce benefits because old people vote heavily...
...Taxes can hardly be raised any higher...
...And he wasn't kidding," Meyer said...
...That's not clear...
...Spain 1.2...
...Local government will soon be theirs...
...Jordan, 3.7...
...The Muslims have seen the self-destructive tendencies of the West, gained courage from it, and now have launched their own assault...
...It sounded exaggerated then...
...One good thing is that the U.N...
...Pressure on governments to keep funding birth control and abortion will be harder to sustain...
...Meyer never planned to do the Western civilization video, he told me...
...It seems likely, then, that the reason why its fertility rate is still relatively high (for Europe) is that its Muslims are having the children...
...The rule of thumb for the next 50 years is that Europe goes down by a hundred million while America goes up a hundred million," he said...
...OCTOBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 45 the Once quintessentially British cities like Leicester and Bradford now have Muslim quarters that have proliferated within a single generation...
...In Europe, France has one of the highest fertility rates: 1.8...
...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2004 Meyer is right that the war we are in should be identified as a war on Western civilization—perhaps on civilization itself...
...The internal nature of the assault is most evident with the population crisis that Meyer is right to emphasize...
...They see population decline not as a problem, but as a goal...
...Here's what the U.N...
...It is three years since I spoke to him about these issues ("The Coming Crisis of Underpopulation," TAS, Sept...
...But no one is sure...
...They are taking flak from the green people," Wattenberg said...
...There is no known precedent for self-immolation on this scale...
...has at last changed its projections...
...The Japanese had a psychological threshold of 1.3 and it just came in at 1.29...
...So the problem will not be solved that way...
...According to Meyer, Japanese minister of finance recently said that the time is coming when "every Japanese citizen at the age of 65 should be shipped permanently to the Philippines...
...projected that it would go back up to 2.1 in the years ahead...
...Meanwhile, the U.S...
...To a lesser extent, the same applies to Britain...
...We've forgotten what Western civilization is," Meyer told NewsMax...
...Cataclysmic...
...He has a new book, just out: Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future...
...They don't know about it...
...In some countries that's already happening...
...The video was the response...
...As to Europe, both Meyer and Wattenberg are dumbfounded...
...Western progressives have a death wish, he used to say...
...What it means is that we're going to be putting a greater and greater tax burden on our young people...
...Britain, great no longer, is down to 1.6...
...The Islamic threat does make it look like a siege (the planes flying into the Twin Towers...
...The whole thing is completely mad, and it is actually a relief to realize that it is unsustainable...
...Syria, 4.7...
...As it happens, France has the highest percentage of Muslims in Europe...
...Meyer is an original and, as they used to say, a self-starter...
...That may still be too optimistic...
...And if they did, would they assimilate...
...Which they don't want to do...
...Now he lives in the San Juan Islands, home to the Orca whales, in Washington state...
...If you come to the schools where I live and ask a group of high school students, 'What is Western Civilization?' they'll tell you it's slavery, the oppression of women and we don't recycle...
...Germany 1.4...
...The numbers keep going down," he told me...
...remains at close to replacement, doing better than Europe mostly because recent immigrants (Latinos, mainly) have more children...
...It's the population issue that is the stunner for people in the audience," Meyer told me...
...But overwhelmingly, I believe, it is an assault from within...
...We no longer teach it in the schools...
...I wanted to know the latest figures from the Population Division of the United Nations, and I knew that Wattenberg keeps a close eye on them...
...No one would touch it, so he published it himself, Ronald Reagan read it, and he went to work for Bill Casey's CIA...
...and the population crisis—the real one, the crisis of under-population...
...NI Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...And this will only drive the birth rate down further...
...Future projections for below-replacement countries have been changed from 2.1 to 1.85...
...It is a wound that the West is inflicting on itself...
...He once worked for Fortune and then wrote a book called The War Against Progress...
...Refugees and immigrants are politically unpopular precisely because they qualify for welfare benefits...
...Iraq, unavailable...
...Welfare programs—which consist largely of transfers from workers to retirees—will not be sustainable...
...Where can we read it...
...But they have sensed it...
...Why so...
...Greece 1.3...
...The American writer who has probably paid most attention to the population question is Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute...
...The story is still not being told in major newspapers like the New York Times...
...If mentioned at all, it is likely to be in a negative way: something to be disparaged...
...I don't know how they get out of it," Meyer said...
...He identifies three main threats: radical Islam...
...Oh, I nearly forgot...
...The very idea that there is such a thing as Western civilization is slipping out of public consciousness...
...Liberalism has turned out to be its own undoing...
...Storm King Press is his publishing company, and How To Write, a more recent book co-authored with his wife, has sold 200,000 copies...
...Immigrants would mostly be Muslim...
...That "replacement" scenario has now been changed to one that is more realistic...
...The "melting pot" is just one of the civilizing aspects of the West that the liberals have worked with all their might to destroy...
...Some fertility rates from the Arab world: Egypt, 3.6...
...And that's what we set out to do...
...It is precisely what they have been striving for...
...I keep thinking of Malcolm Muggeridge's diagnosis back in the 1970s...
...Saudi Arabia, 6.0...
...So the crunch looks unavoidable...
...the "second civil war in the U.S.," between those who attempt to uphold the traditions of family and culture and those who oppose them...
...Once quintessentially British cities like Leicester and Bradford now have Muslim quarters that have proliferated within a single generation...
...Two TO B E T H E L L children replace the parents, and a bit more is needed because some girls die before childbearing age...
...If all women had 2.1 children on average, a population would be stable...
Vol. 37 • October 2004 • No. 8
