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    America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It
    America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It
    America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It
    Ebook341 pages7 hours

    America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It

    By Mark Steyn

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    "Mark Steyn is a human sandblaster. This book provides a powerful, abrasive, high-velocity assault on encrusted layers of sugarcoating and whitewash over the threat of Islamic imperialism. Do we in the West have the will to prevail?" - MICHELLE MALKIN, New York Times bestselling author of Unhinged

    "Mark Steyn is the funniest writer now living. But don't be distracted by the brilliance of his jokes. They are the neon lights advertising a profound and sad insight: America is almost alone in resisting both the suicide of the West and the suicide bombing of radical Islamism." - JOHN O'SULLIVAN, editor at large, National Review

    IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT.....

    Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a muezzin. Europeans already are. And liberals will still tell you that "diversity is our strength"--while Talibanic enforcers cruise Greenwich Village burning books and barber shops, the Supreme Court decides sharia law doesn't violate the "separation of church and state," and the Hollywood Left decides to give up on gay rights in favor of the much safer charms of polygamy. 

    If you think this can't happen, you haven't been paying attention, as the hilarious, provocative, and brilliant Mark Steyn--the most popular conservative columnist in the English-speaking world--shows to devastating effect. The future, as Steyn shows, belongs to the fecund and the confident. And the Islamists are both, while the West is looking ever more like the ruins of a civilization.

     
    But America can survive, prosper, and defend its freedom only if it continues to believe in itself, in the sturdier virtues of self-reliance (not government), in the centrality of family, and in the conviction that our country really is the world's last best hope. Mark Steyn's America Alone is laugh-out-loud funny--but it will also change the way you look at the world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRegnery
    Release dateApr 7, 2008
    ISBN9781596980761
    America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It
    Author

    Mark Steyn

    MARK STEYN is an internationally acclaimed author, writer, journalist, and conservative political commentator. He has written five books, including America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, which was a New York Times bestseller. His commentaries on politics, arts, and culture appear regularly in the National Post, the Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. He guest hosts Rush Limbaugh’s top-rated talk radio program and Hannity on Fox News television.

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    Reviews for America Alone

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    • 5/5
      Mark Steyn's writing is riveting.
    • 5/5
      Required reading. Only Steyn can make a topic so depressing so hilarious. Of the books I've read about the increasing war between Islam and the West this one strikes the nail on the head most directly discussing the West's current lack of both offspring and will.
    • 4/5
      Wow. If one filters out Steyn's sarcasm and politics, this book is still unnerving. Using demographic trends with birthrates across the Western World, Steyn shows the current trends and possible outcome of a world with unchecked Islam. WEstern culture has sold out to political correctness for the sake of being polite and we are turning our governments into welfare states. Thought-provoking.
    • 3/5
      The author is a columnist and this book reads like a collection of his columns. He's very funny and engaging but the book doesn't hang together well. Enjoyable to read in small doses, as if one were reading a newspaper column. He makes the point about the coming Islamist menace in the first few chapters, then proceeds to bludgeon us to death with it for the remainder.
    • 5/5
      Wow, this should be required reading by anyone concerned about the future of the world as we know it. I mentioned the book's subject to a co-worker who is Estonian and she related that when she was a kid the pop was 1.5 million, it's now 1.3 million...she's 26.
    • 5/5
      Bracing, to the point of being frightening. Steyn lays out, using a deft mix of humor and horror, the demographic realities facing Europe in the coming decades, and the potentially disastrous effects this will have on the rest of the world.
    • 5/5
      Showing yet again why he is one of the most widely published columnists in the Anglosphere, Steyn delineates the decline - both demographically, certainly, but of no less importance, in terms of cultural confidence - of the West, and masterfully (and amusingly) lays bare the internal contradictions of multiculturalism. America Alone is timely, perceptive, hilarious, and very, very accessible.
    • 4/5
      Pretty darn good, but it'll bother the bejeebers out of you. I really hadn't given demographics much of a thought with regards to immigration, multiculturism, etc. until reading this book. Its worth your time to read it, I wish a few of our polititcians would do the same.
    • 4/5
      Thought-provoking, attention-getting, and slightly alarmist. Steyn is a master writer with a skillful, post-modern blend of structure, humor, alarmist rant, sobering reality, and calm resolve. Concise and to the point, Steyn presents the facts of our demographically changing world and stands out as a watchman on the times.
    • 2/5
      I think I would have liked this book better if the author hadn't talked so much about the dangers of Islam.
    • 5/5
      I'm cheering Mark Steyn on. It's not that I agree with every conclusion he makes, nor with every idea. But his fundamental thesis, that the western world in the hands of the liberal progressives and the political left cannot survive well in the real global world of ideologies and power, and so will collapse before the advance of any strong ideology that forces it's way, is a good one. We have abandoned truth, common sense, and principles. Without them, the western world will die. Without them, maybe it should. Alarmist? Well what else wakes people up but an alarm?
    • 3/5
      America Alone is a polemic on the problems of aging and diminishing European societies and the expansion of the Islamic world into those societies. It is written by a Belgian-Canadian living in the US who espouses Christian Republican beliefs and for most people this will either be a book you hate or love. What is great about this book is that it lays down the tough issues that we face. What is terrible about this book is that it associates some clear thinking on demographics and religion with utter nonsense about climate change, welfarism, and citizen militia.Mark Steyn deals in issies that most find unpalatable and much of the European world has chosen to ignore. The European approach is disasterous and with the exception of a few in the Netherlands, we just aren't ready to deal with our own decline. Steyn spells it out brutally and while he might be picking and choosing statistics to bolster his case, it is the general thrust of the problem that should worry the western world.The issue that Steyn deals with primarily is demographics - we all know that Europe is in decline but we do nothing about it. We know that our birth rates are too low and that the population count is being artificially inflated by immigration. Immigration is not inherently a bad thing (and Steyn stops short of arguing that it is) but an influx of people who refuse to identify with the host culture is. In the UK, Muslims have overtaken Hindus in population size in the last decade - I'm not sure anyone can recall a single problem within the British Hindu population as it sought to make itself part of the society within which it lived.This is part of the problem that Steyn identifies - a pan-Islamic model is massively more appealing to Muslims than is any national identity. Steyn is absolutely right to say that the exportation of Wahabbism from Saudi Arabia is a direct threat in the same way that Soviet Communism was but it is just a much more effective threat. Islam is not monolithic but you wouldn't know that from the examples such as that Steyn cites in which a European of Bangladeshi descent demands the right to cover herself from view in a burkha - the burkha is a Bedouin garment designed to combat sandstorms in the desert - not very useful in Europe or Bangladesh so not of those cultures. What the example highlights is that it is the assertive Arabian form of the religion that is being embraced.Steyn fronts up on the war that is really being fought between the West and Islam - culture. It is a war being fought on terms that the West will struggle to win. Demographics favour the East. Henlein (Starship Troopers) puts it better than Steyn can - cultures that out-breed others will inevitable dominate them. Steyn illustrates this perfectly with the case of the United Kingdom which dominated more of the world than anyone in history simply by generating a surplus of healthy people combined with technological superiority. Without the surplus, there would have been no British Empire, no exportation of Corinthian values, no end to the slave trade (a worldwide phenomenon), no system of international laws or liberal institutions.We in the West choose to ignore history - we ignore the collapse of the great and enlightened Athenian empire because it's people became too decadent. Steyn makes the point well that it is younger, hungrier societies that win. Europe has pretty much given up. The societies of the Middle East, filled with a surplus of angry young men are more than we are prepared to cope with so we appease them instead.Unfortunately in reading this book, it becomes difficult to associate with it's core argument because the rest is appalling. Steyn does not even feel the need for internal consistency and his arguments disintegrate which makes this a missed opportunity. Steyn discusses the disgraceful transfers of wealth from the West to the House of Saud in return for oil and what that money does in waging cool war against us. Yet he abjectly refuses to acknowledge the root cause in our dependency on fossil fuels. Without Americans driving their gas guzzlers, we wouldn't be funding our own demise.Steyn doesn't understand climate change and bashes Al Gore in mostly humourless fashion. Steyn promotes gun ownership by citing the safety it provides while living in a society with unbelievable homicide rates compared to gentrified Europe. Steyn advocates citizen militia as a more effective form of self-defence and claims that it is the welfare state that has driven Europe into the tailspin. This is so annoying as it could be argued that the welfare state is a symptom of a decadent society but Steyn argues it as the cause - why do those who take stands against our decadent groupthink have to always make such basic errors of logic?This is an irritating book - it deals brilliantly with the core topic and the culture war Europe cannot win on present course - but it associates that argument with specious nonsense that panders to the Redneck convert and makes it difficult for those who can think for themselves to promote the core thesis.
    • 4/5
      One of the more fascinating attempts at explaining the decline of the West is Mark Steyn's "America Alone." Though the main thrust of the book is the threat of Islam, Steyn examines numerous sources of decay in Western society, the upshot being that we are vulnerable to the threat only because of our weakness, confusion, and self-defeating behavior.Steyn offers the reader reams of evidence to back up his assertion that a "significant strain of Islam" (which today happens to be the overwhelmingly dominant one) is wreaking havoc across the planet. Everything from riots in the Parisian banlieue to the massacre of schoolchildren in Beslan to the Palestinian death cult is exposed in all its horror. It is virtually everywhere, and it is constant:"We switch on the news every evening and, though there are many trouble spots around the world, as a general rule it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in 'Palestine,' Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali, Muslims vs. Danish cartoonists in Scandinavia."Instead of confronting the threat, or even acknowledging it for what it is, Western elites drag their populations into an anesthetized state of denial. Discussion of the issue (if it exists at all) is filtered through the layers of the multiculturalist narrative, which leaves it sanitized and devoid of real content. Says Steyn:"Bomb us, and we agonize over the 'root causes.' Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that 'Islam is a religion of peace.' Issue blood-curdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels, and we fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims. Behead sodomites and mutilate female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups can't wait to march alongside you denouncing Bush and Blair. Murder a schoolful of children, and our scholars explain that to the 'vast majority' of Muslims 'jihad' is a harmless concept meaning 'healthy-lifestyle lo-fat granola bar'."As Steyn makes clear, the problem would never have gotten so out of hand were it not for the meltdown of intellect that has occurred among the "educated" portion of the Western world. The jihadis take full advantage of this breach, and they are aided and abetted at every turn by their "progressive" enablers.The West has lost its will to fight. We consistently defeat ourselves. The Islamists"know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western Civilization collapses on itself and Islam inherits by default. An army is only one weapon a civilization wields, and the weapon of last resort, too. But when you add up those elements of national power--military, judicial, diplomatic, economic, informational--it's hard not to conclude that (as was said of the British after the fall of Singapore) at least four of those five guns are pointing in the wrong direction. The point of the media is to speak truth to (domestic) power, the point of transnationalism is to constrain American power, the point of law is to upgrade the defendant--and the upshot of economic power in a time of plenty is that every time you gas up you're funding an enemy who's flusher than he's been since the fall of Constantinople. Meanwhile, we fight the symptoms--the terror plots--but not the cause: the ideology. The self-imposed constraints of this war--legalistic, multilateral, politically correct--are clearer every day."Steyn devotes quite a bit of ink to the issue of demography. The Muslim world, including the recent transplants into Europe, are benefiting from a high birthrate (the "upper reaches of the fertility hit parade") whereas the native populations--especially in Spain, Italy, and Greece--are falling far below replacement rate. The U.S. is chugging along at slightly above replacement level.This phenomenon is of vast historical significance:"In the fourteenth century, the Black Death wiped out a third of the Continent's population; in the twenty-first, a larger proportion will disappear--in effect, by choice. We are living through a rare moment: the self-extinction of the civilization which, for good or ill, shaped the age we live in."Steyn points out that in Europe, the Muslims are young; they are also energetic, confident, aggressive, and ready for sacrifice. The native populations are aging, and they are sluggish, guilt-ridden, fat, and dependent upon the welfare state. It does not take a sophisticated analyst to project scenarios one or two decades into the future. The picture is not pretty.America Alone is a good read. Steyn's wit lies in wait at every turn of the page, and his observations on a wide range of peripheral topics are thought-provoking, to say the least. Take, for example, this perceptive comment on anti-Americanism:"All dominant powers are hated--Britain was, and Rome--but they're usually hated for the right reasons. America is hated for every reason. The fanatical Muslims despise America because it's all lap-dancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it's all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it's controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too godless, America is George Orwell's Room 101: whatever your bugbear you will find it therein, whatever you're against, America is the prime example of it."Which is followed by this marvelous segue:"That's one reason why [America's] disparagers have embraced environmentalism. If Washington were a conventional great power, the intellectual class would be arguing that the United States is a threat to France or India or Gabon or some such. But because it's so obviously not that kind of power, the world has had to concoct a thesis that the hyperpower is a threat not merely to this or that rinky-dink nation state but to the entire planet, if not the entire galaxy. 'We are,' warns Al Gore portentiously, 'altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe.' ... You wouldn't happen to have the statistical evidence for that, would you?"If things continue on their course, predicts Steyn, we may find that"the world will be well on its way to a new Dark Ages. Now, as then, Europe has its do-nothing kings--les rois fainéants--thought these days we call them European commissioners and chancellors and prime ministers. Now, as then, we have a Great Plague--the virus of Islamism--and the great migrations--the continent-wide version of 'white flight' already under way in Holland, as the beleaguered Dutch leave their native land for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Now, as then, we must all bow before the 'edict of toleration'--as laws and customs are rearranged to abase themselves before the gods of boundless multicultural tolerance."A classic case of this abasement is detailed in the recently added introduction, "Soon to be Banned in Canada." When excerpts from the book were published by the news magazine Maclean's, the Canadian Islamic Congress filed a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission. The Muslim group objected to the "flagrant Islamophobia" contained in the book.The Canadian Human Rights Commission has established itself as an extra-judicial star chamber for the enforcement of politically-correct orthodoxy. These little Soviet-style kangaroo courts, staffed by bureaucrats and specializing in "hate speech," have cast serious doubt over the future of Canadian democracy.Discussing the complaint over his "flagrant Islamophobia," and the ensuing witch hunt, Steyn remarks:"The head of the Canadian Islamic Congress is a man called Mohamed Elmasry. In a TV interview in 2004, Dr. Elmasry said it was legitimate to kill any Israeli civilian, male or female, over the age of eighteen. He is, thus, an objective supporter of terrorism. Yet he's accusing me of 'hate speech,' and is apparently the new poster boy for liberal progressive 'human rights' in Canada."And, in a nutshell, that paradox is what this book is about: What happens when a Western world so in thrall to platitudes about boundless 'tolerance' allows the forces of intolerance to carve it out from the inside? In seeking to stifle the arguments of America Alone, the Canadian Islamic Congress is making my point more eloquently than I ever could--that a significant strain of Islam is incompatible with the rough and tumble of a free society."Food for thought.

    Book preview

    America Alone - Mark Steyn

    Part I

    The Gelded Age

    DEMOGRAPHY, DEMOCRACY, DESTINY

    Chapter One

    The Coming of Age

    BIRTHS VS. DEARTHS

    Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.

    ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE, A STUDY OF HISTORY (1934–1961)

    My old—very old—friend George Abbott, the director of On the Town, Damn Yankees, and Pal Joey, died in 1995 at the age of 107 while working on a revival of The Pajama Game. A few years earlier, in his late nineties, he’d given up playing tennis because all his partners had died. That’s the position America is facing in respect to its transnational social life: it’ll be turning up to the G-8, NATO, and the EU-US summit only to find that all its partners have died.

    The single most important fact about the early twenty-first century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States: Canada, Europe, and Japan are getting old fast, older than any functioning society has ever been and faster than any has ever aged. A society ages when its birth rate falls and it finds itself with fewer children and more grandparents. For a stable population—i.e., no growth, no decline, just a million folks in 1950, a million in 1980, a million in 2010—you need a total fertility rate of 2.1 live births per woman. That’s what America has: 2.1, give or take. Canada has 1.48, an all-time low and a more revealing difference between the Great Satan and the Great White North than any of the stuff (socialized health care, fewer handguns, more UN peacekeepers, etc.) that Canucks usually brag about. Europe as a whole has 1.38; Japan, 1.32; Russia, 1.14. These countries—or, more precisely, these people—are going out of business.

    There’s nothing wrong with old folks: speaking for myself, if I’m at some soiree, I’d much rather Doris Day provided the evening’s musical entertainment than the latest caterwauling gangsta rapper; I’d rather date Debbie Reynolds than Angelina Jolie. But even to put it in those terms is to become aware of how our assumptions about a society’s health—about its innovative and creative energies—are based on its youthfulness. Picture the difference between a small northern mill town where the mill’s closed down and the young people have moved away and a growing community in the Sun Belt. Which has the bigger range of stores and restaurants, more work opportunities, better school choice? Which problem would you rather have—managing growth or managing decline?

    So what happens when the whole nation—and in Europe the entire continent—has a profile closer to the decrepit mill town than to the Sun Belt suburb?

    And, if you’re anti-capitalist, don’t console yourself with the thought that you don’t need all those businesses anyway. Big Government depends on bigger population: Americans have a relatively smallish government compared to Canada and Europe, but the U.S. Social Security system assumes a 30 percent population growth between now and 2075 or so and, even then, expects to be running a deficit after 2017. Now imagine you’re Spain and you’ve got even bigger public pensions liabilities and a population that’s going to be halving every thirty-five years. The progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control but not both. That mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse. There is no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital—and that’s before anyone invented unsustainable welfare systems.

    True, birth rates are falling all over the world, and it may be that eventually every couple on the planet decides to opt for the Western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of thirty-nine. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage—and those societies with expensive social programs dependent on mass immigration will be in the worst predicament. It’s no consolation for the European Union, with its deathbed birth statistics, if the Third World’s demographics are also falling: they’re your nursery, they’re the babies you couldn’t be bothered to have; if their fertility rate goes the same way yours has, that will be a problem for you long before it’s a problem for them. Unless it corrects course within the next five to ten years, Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: the grand buildings will still be standing but the people who built them will be gone. By the next century, German will be spoken only at Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goering’s Monday night poker game in Hell. And long before the Maldive Islands are submerged by rising sea levels every Spaniard and Italian will be six feet under. But sure, go ahead and worry about climate change.

    More immediately, Europe will be semi-Islamic in its politico-cultural character within a generation.

    In the fourteenth century, the Black Death wiped out a third of the Continent’s population; in the twenty-first, a larger proportion will disappear—in effect, by choice. We are living through a rare moment: the self-extinction of the civilization which, for good or ill, shaped the age we live in. One can cite examples of remote backward tribes who expire upon contact with the modern world, but for the modern world to expire in favor of the backward tribes is a turn of events future anthropologists will ponder, as we do the fall of Rome.

    008

    THE MATH OF THE MAP

    My interest in demography dates back to September 11, 2001, when a demographic group I hadn’t given much thought to managed to get my attention. I don’t mean the, ah, unfortunate business with the planes and buildings and so forth, but the open cheering of the attacks by their co-religionists in Montreal, Yorkshire, Copenhagen, and elsewhere. How many of us knew there were quickly growing and culturally confident Muslim populations in

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