Free Republic

This Labour Day, I thought about the working class, the masses. No, honestly, I did. Okay, I was on the beach, but the folks around me lying on the sand had jobs they'll be getting back to this morning. They worked. They would be classed as workers. But they're not a homogeneous "working class," they're not conscripts in Karl Marx's "masses." The transformation of Labour Day, from a celebration of workers' solidarity to a cook-out, is the perfect precis of the history of Anglo-American capitalism. If you want to see what "the masses" are meant to look like, buy a...

Birth rate hits 15-year high in Russia RBC, 03.09.2007, Moscow 17:19:29.The birth rate reached a 15-year high in Russia in the first six months of 2007, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev stated at a traditional Monday meeting of Russian President Vladimir Putin with government officials. According to Medvedev, 142,000 babies were born between January and June 2007, a record number since the collapse of the USSR, the radio station Mayak reported. The number of childbirths increased 6.5 percent in the first half of 2007, compared to the same period a year earlier, while the death rate decreased by the...

Demographers have long acknowledged that the Malthusian population explosion is a myth. The threat of a skyrocketing population eventually sucking up all Earth's resources, leading to rampant starvation and disease is simply junk science. With the modernization of the global economy, worldwide fertility rates have been falling for decades. A more realistic concern is actually the extent to which birth rates have fallen, and may continue to fall. Today in most European and many East Asian countries fertility has sunken perilously low. Economies are bogged down as more retirees depend on fewer workers, as the article acknowledges. At least as...

Mark Steyn earned his place in the pantheon of magnificent conservative writers due to his personal ability, skill, and God-given wit -- which turns out to be a highly unusual method for establishing oneself nowadays. After beginning as a theatre and film critic, he progressed to political commentary where he has become among the liveliest, most irreverent, and original of conservative voices. A former "Culture Vultures" columnist for The American Spectator and North American correspondent (and movie reviewer) for the Spectator of London, he now writes regularly for the Chicago Sun-Times and National Review. His books include the brilliantly original...

An article in The Wall Street Journal (April 12) breathlessly informs us of the latest fad on the Incredible Shrinking Continent -- "As Religious Strife Grows, Europe's Atheists Seize Pulpit: Islam's Rise Gives Boost To Militant Unbelievers; The Celebrity Hedonist," the headline teases. The "Celebrity Hedonist," isn't geriatric frat-boy Hugh Hefner, but Michel Onfray, a 48-year-old author dubbed "France's high-priest of atheism" in the Journal piece. Reporter Andrew Higgins describes the doyen of disbelief -- commander of the faith-less -- strutting onto the stage of Caen's 500-seat Alexis de Tocqueville auditorium, dressed in black from head to toe, to deliver...

Hi-Tech mogul Benny Landa calls on leaders to 'act responsibly' and take measures to bring down Israeli birth rates as these are becoming a 'burden on the economy' Tani Goldstein Published: 01.24.07, 09:32 Israel should work to lower the birth rate in the country, millionaire Benny Landa, founder of Indigo, a market leader in digital color printing systems, said Tuesday. Landa was speaking at the Herzliya Conference held by the Institue for Policy and Strategy at Interdisciplinary Center. Landa advocated lowering the Israeli birthrate to salvage the economy. “We are quickly marching towards becoming a third world country. Children under...

Pelosi a rare example of a woman who 'has it all' January 14, 2007 BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist I don't know where they stand on apple pie, but the Democrats have come out for motherhood in a big way. In fact, who needs apple pie when you've got the extra-sugary content of the Washington Post? Last Wednesday, the capital's newspaper of record (now available in print, online and in granulated form) published a column headlined ''Grandma With A Gavel.'' Can you guess which grandma it was, boys and girls? Yes, it was Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has single-handedly, as...

If you ever wanted to see Paris or Rome before you die, but haven't had a chance to do so, you might want to hurry. Soon enough, most of what we now think of as Western Europe will be transformed into a branch of the Muslim world, which is sure to make it an even less welcoming place for Americans, Israelis and for Jews. That, at least, is the unpleasant, yet entirely unavoidable conclusion to be drawn from Europe's headlong demographic drive toward oblivion. Think I'm exaggerating? Consider a few cold hard facts. According to a recent report by the...

Suppose for a moment that the birth in Bethlehem that Christians celebrate this week never happened --that it is, as the secularists would have it, mere mumbo jumbo, superstition, a myth. In other words, consider it not as an event but as a narrative. You want to launch a big new global movement from scratch. So what do you use? The birth of a child. If Christianity is just a myth, then it is, so to speak, an immaculately conceived one. On the one hand, what could be more powerless than a newborn babe? On the other, without a newborn...

Quartet of Ladies Shows Where We're Headed November 26, 2006 BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist Have you seen a movie called ''Four Jills In A Jeep''? Don't worry, it's not at the multiplex. It came out in 1944. A wartime movie, about the contribution of the gals to the big existential struggle. Great title, and downhill after that. This column is, metaphorically speaking, four Jills in a jeep: It's about a quartet of ladies who provide useful glimpses of where we're heading. The first is Fatma An-Najar, a 64-year-old grandmother who had a livelier Thanksgiving than most grandmas. She marked...

The Last Youth Standing - What the West and Islam share are elites detached from their own demographic realities Mark Steyn - November 20, 2006 I was watching Mansbridge One on One the other day. Don't ask me why. May have been an "encore presentation." Or more likely an encore presentation of an encore presentation. For a 24/7 news network, there's an eerie timelessness about CBC Newsworld: one would be only mildly surprised to switch on and find Mansbridge One on One with Lester B. Pearson or Sir Charles Tupper. Anyway, this week, the one he was on was the...

Mark Steyn, a Canadian journalist and columnist widely read in the United States and Great Britain, whose current book, "America Alone," is an alarming portrait of a rapidly rising Islamic Europe, has served his cause better than he could have hoped. Not only does his book convincingly demonstrate the catastrophic demographic consequence of Europe's descending birth rate and ascending Muslim population, it did one thing more. The only review of it that I could find in Canada's largely liberal print media showed unmistakably that the liberal Western world has no solution to the problem. It is utterly baffled. It doesn't...

. . . it may be too late for that. The “paleocons” do not want to fight for any country but America, “neocons” have come to resent Europe for failing to stand with them in Iraq, and “blue” Liberals (the only Americans most leading Europeans feel affinity with) lack the guts to fight for anything at all, including their own hedonistic values. We can deplore this as much as we want, but, again, this is the situation we are stuck with. I doubt whether the mid-term elections showed that neoconservatism is dead. I think they announced the death of the...

With Europe locked in the depths of demographic winter, the World Congress of Families offers a thaw ("the natural family" as "the springtime of nations") as it prepares for its 4th Congress -- Warsaw 2007. The population bomb, hyped by the likes of Paul Ehrlich (AKA: Malthus Man), turned out to be a dud. The Western world now faces the reality of depopulation. Since the 1970s, worldwide fertility rates have been cut in half. In all, 59 nations with 44% of the world’s people have below-replacement birthrates. To maintain a stable population requires a birthrate of 2.1 children per woman....

Here is Theodore Faron, Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, writing in the year 2021: "Like a lecherous stud suddenly stricken with impotence, we are humiliated at the very heart of our faith in ourselves. For all our knowledge, our intelligence, our power, we can no longer do what the animals do without thought." That's from the first chapter of P. D. James' novel The Children Of Men. On the shelves at Borders, Baroness James is the Agatha Christie de nos jours, but she has other strings to her bow and her dystopian vision of a world in which the human...

Most Europeans want two kids but are discouraged NewsStand - Friday, February 17, 2006 Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) Brussels (dpa) - Most European couples would on average like at least two children but end up having only one because of worries about financial costs, a European Union study showed Friday. The study, funded by the EU Commission and based on data from 30,000 people in 14 European countries, said that more than half of all those questioned - male or female - wanted to have two or more children. But it said many stopped after one child because they did not...

Yoram Ettinger, Arnon Sofer are demographic scare mongers A lot of us have "outie" belly buttons. It's hard to tell just who they are, they usually cover the them up with clothes. But don't think for a minute that they are like you just because they look like you. You've got a nice, elegant "innie," whereas they've got "outies." Minority belly buttons, in other words. But don't fool yourselves. The outies are gaining on us, they are cunning and devious, and one day they will outnumber us. We've calculated it. We've got statistics and scientific methods, and we've got the...

Eye on Eurasia: A Caliphate in Russia? By PAUL GOBLE TALLINN, Estonia, Feb. 2 (UPI) -- If current demographic trends continue, Russians have fewer than 60 years left until that country's Muslims will be in a position to set up a "Moscow caliphate," according to a leading Russian Orthodox publicist, who warned that such a development would mark "the end of Orthodoxy in Russia.". Deacon Andrei Kurayev, an outspoken Orthodox Christian missionary who is no stranger to controversy, told a section of the Russian Orthodox Church's annual meeting on religious life and education that "this is not a prophecy but...

“Europe will be Islamic by the end of this century at the very latest.” The floodgates opened with that comment from Bernard Lewis. Since its publication in Die Welt in July 2004, countless responses have appeared from writers as varied as George Weigel and Patrick Buchanan. The latest is Mark Steyn, in a New Criterion essay (reprinted in the Wall Street Journal) titled, in his customary understated style, “It’s the Demography, Stupid.” An unusual unanimity has prevailed – almost every writer concurs with Lewis that Europe is a lost cause, a casualty in the war against Islamofascism. The argument is...

Mark Steyn’s analysis of “The Real Reason the West is in Danger of Extinction” is completely correct in his important recent article, “It’s the Demography, Stupid.” But behind the problem of the West’s below replacement fertility levels, lies the problem of sex. Babies come from sex. The modern view of sex has created the demographic collapse of the West, and the human void into which Islamic fertility is rapidly flooding. Sex is an organic reality, with two natural purposes written on the human body. The first is procreation. The second is not so obvious but equally important. Sex builds up...