COMMENT: Europe's demographic winter?

I haven't seen a white Christmas for years. Then again, I haven't held a handful of snow for quite sometime either. The last time I saw snow was during a flight from Christchurch to Sydney. Our Pacific Blue jet took us over some mountains (real mountains, not the Claytons mountains we have in Australia), whose peaks were snow-covered. Or was that just cloud?

Anyway, some far-Right fruitloops in the United States are warning of a nasty winter about to hit Europe. Apparently Europeans are being out-bred by nasty aliens of Middle Eastern appearance.

It's the kind of thing that would scared the living be-jesus out of at least one irrelevant Federal Liberal back-bencher. And according to the in-breds of American Christian conservatism, the fault isn't that of the nasty "Mozlems" or "Ayrabs". Rather, the Europeans are too much into that nasty decadent women's rights, abortion and homosexuality stuff.

Salon writer Catherine Price cites a number of these conservatives as suggesting the only solution is to virtually force good European Christian women to have more babies.

Price provides a summary (well, not really) of an article first published in the March 3 2008 edition of The Nation. That article talks about the possible outcome if white Christian Europeans don't start throwing away the pills and frangers. Here is Price's spin on the message of the article:

The feared result would be a "demographic winter" where, to put it bluntly, Europe would run out of white people. By not having enough children, these doomsayers say, Western civilization is "laying itself down to die."

The solution is to take a leaf out of the cultural books of so many cultures practised by Muslim migrants. That means adopting socially conservative family values even if it means potentially curtailing gender rights. So the best way for us to beat those misogynistic "Mozlems" is to behave more like them. Or rather, to behave more like how we stereotype them.

Price continues ...

... American religious conservatives are trying to convince European secularists that to solve some of their demographic woes, they might want to rethink their position on women's rights. As author Kathryn Joyce explains, "The real root of racial tensions in the Netherlands and France, America's culture warriors tell anxious Europeans, isn't ineffective methods of assimilating new citizens but, rather, decades of 'anti-family' permissiveness - contraception, abortion, divorce, population control, women's liberation and careers, 'selfish' secularism and gay rights - enabling 'decadent' white couples to neglect their reproductive duties." They have, she explains, defied the biblical command to "be fruitful and multiply."

In other words, if those bloody "Mozlems" are going to have lots of babies, we should start doing the same. Which all sounds good and fine except for one minor point. As Muslim migrants move into their second and third generation, they tend to adopt the reproductive practices of their fellow Europeans. After all, they share the same economic, social and cultural conditions as their fellow citizens.

That means you won't be seeing a 3rd generation British Muslim lawyer or merchant banker in London having more kids than, say, a 3rd generation Irish Catholic lawyer of merchant banker in London.

There's another problem too. if you start encouraging people to have more babies, what happens when the wrong group start having more and more of them? As Price notes ...

... when Italy offered "baby bonuses" to families who had a second child, it revealed its racial motivations when it asked for refunds from immigrant families who had been accidentally issued checks (those weren't the types of kids the government was trying to promote). If I were an immigrant in Italy, I don't think that policy would make me feel too warm toward mainstream Italian society.

The emphasis in this quotation is Price's not mine.

You can watch a short clip of The Nation story here.

The Syrian Muslim writer Abul A'la al-Ma'arri may have had a point when he commented on the eve of the Crusaders conquering his town:

In this world, there are only two classes of people: those with lots of religion but not much sense, and those with lots of sense but not much religion.

Words © Irfan Yusuf 2008


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