Death of the Weast
'Death of the West': Where Have All the Children Gone?
Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2002
Editor's note: This is part two in a series on Patrick J. Buchanan’s book "The Death of the West.” See part one, Buchanan: Western Civilization Is on the Way Out.
WASHINGTON – By 2050, it is calculated that the United States will have the dubious honor of being the first Western nation to turn its dominant culture into a minority.
Bill Clinton has hailed this as a good thing. The disgraced former president, it will be remembered, is a product of the 1960s counterculture that is playing no small part in what author Patrick J. Buchanan’s new book calls "The Death of the West.”
While some of this trend of de-Westernizing America can be traced to our lax immigration laws and the even more lackadaisical enforcement of them (a subject NewsMax.com will examine in a future installment in this series), part of it can be attributed to lower birth rates.
The world population has doubled to 6 billion in 40 years. At the same time, Buchanan says, European people – including Americans, Australians, and Canadians – have "stopped reproducing. Their populations had begun to stagnate in many countries.”
Not a single European country, except for Muslim Albania, has a birth rate that will enable it to survive in its present form through this century. By 2050, the author warns, only one tenth of the world’s people will be of European descent, and it will be the oldest tenth on Earth with a median age of almost 50.
"The people of the west,” the former presidential speechwriter declares, "have begun to fade away.”
The population of Europe’s 47 nations from Iceland to Russia in 2000 was 728 million. At present birthrates, without immigration, that is expected to come crashing to 600 million by 2050. That forecast comes from a study by the United Nations. Still another analysis, reported by the London Times, has Europe’s population plummeting to 556 million by mid-century, a dive not seen since the Black Plague of 1347-52.
"The Death of the West” quotes Jacqueline Kasun of California’s Humboldt University as noting:
"A couple still has parents and grandparents to support, directly or through their taxes. Since they’ve got fewer or no siblings to share that burden, having children seems even more unaffordable. So how do you dig your way out of a hole like a shrinking population?”
Excellent question, says Buchanan, "and if Europe does not find the answer soon, Europe dies.” Americans in NATO, he adds, "will soon be defending a vast Leisure World.”
The author lays part of the blame on European socialism.
Quoting Dr. John Wallace of Johns Hopkins University: "If everyone has the promise of a state pension, children are no longer a vital insurance policy against want in old age.”
Wallace completes the circle of consequences: "If women can earn more than enough to be financially independent, a husband is no longer essential. And if you can also have sex and not babies – and this seems to be true now of Catholic Italy as it is of secular Britain – why marry?”
Socialists Make Families, and Europe, Obsolete
Thus Buchanan notes: "By freeing husbands, wives and children of family responsibilities, European socialists have eliminated the need for families. Consequently, families have begun to disappear. When they are gone, Europe goes with them.”
And while this trend continues, the Third World adds 100 million people – the equivalent of one new Mexico every 15 months.
Here are some of the highlighted facts and figures:
By 2050, "23 million Germans will have disappeared” from today’s 82 million to 59 million.
Halfway through the 21st century, according to University of Rome demographer Antonio Colini, Italy, which is already dependent on immigrants to bear the load of its deeply indebted pension system, "will no longer be Italian.” Fifty-two percent of Italian women between 16 and 24 planned to have no children.
Russia’s 147 million people will fall to 114 by 2050, with a population loss of 22 million in just 15 years, warns President Vladimir Putin. That is greater than all the Soviet Union’s losses in the Hitler-Stalin war, Buchanan observes.
Muslims, China to Carve Russia?
It is calculated that Russia, already in a terminal population crisis, will, by 2050, be driven out of Central Asia by Islamic invaders and lose huge slices of its Far East to China, 15 times as populous. That would push Russia back over the Urals to its European borders and fulfill Putin’s warning of "a threat to the survival of the nation.”
Demographers have calculated that by the end of this century, the British people will be a minority in their homeland. With fertility rates down in England and Wales and ethnic minorities constituting 40 percent of London’s population, U.K. whites will soon be in the minority.
The trend is seen in Japan, the first Asian nation to enter the modern era. Of the 190 nations on earth, Japan is the oldest, with a median age of 41. Politicians there have begged women to have babies.
As for the United States, only once before had the birthrate fallen below population replacement. That was during the Great Depression, when a fourth of America’s breadwinners were out of work.
Millions Lost to Abortion
There was the great upswing with the surge of birth in the Baby Boom generation of 1946-1964. Then came Roe vs. Wade, creating the legal green light to the 40 million abortions that have since been performed in the U.S.
In 2000, the FDA approved RU-486, a do-it-yourself abortion drug. No U.S. company wanted to be associated with any public relations flak or lawsuit threat that would accompany manufacture of the pill. A Chinese company filled the gap. China’s own policies of one child per couple and forced abortion, accompanied by its communist dictatorship, meant that public relations would not be an impediment.
China Helps U.S. Commit Suicide
"Cynics might characterize China’s role in producing RU-486 for America as an act of assisted suicide for the one nation blocking its path to Asian hegemony and world power,” says Buchanan.
The author cites Dutch demographer Dirk van de Kaa, who traces the birthrate decline in the Western world to:
A shift from the golden age of marriage to a new age of cohabitation.
A shift from a time of "king child” with parents to "king-parents” with one child.
A shift from preventive contraception, benefiting early children, to self-fulfilling contraception.
A shift from a uniform system of families and households, including single-parent families.
Bottom line, says Buchanan: The decisions women are making today "will determine if Western nations will even be around in a century, and western women are voting no.”
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Originally Posted by Suetonius
