LIE BACK AND THINK OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION! A Review of Marc Steyn’s “America Alone.”

Luli made a new friend. The mother asked me: “Izzat her real name?” No, I said, and offered no further information.

Lightning fast review of “America Alone.” Oh, read it. Do. Absolutely great. Both my parents read excerpts and were awed. I read 2006 edition, from library. My mother got out a more recent edition and she tells me the prologue (which was fantastic, if you can only read an excerpt, read the prologue) in that edition is extended and updated.

This is basically the thesis:

(And this is fair use!)

What does it mean when the fastest-growing population on the planet is a group that, to put it at its mildest, has a somewhat fractious relationship with the characteristics of a free society? (page xxv)

[M]uch of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive the enty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries. (Prologue, page xiii)

The key factors are:

1. Demographic decline
2. The unsustainability of the advanced Western social-democratic state
3. Civilizational exhaustion
(page xvi)

He is very very funny too, and he is the kind of excellent writer who is mightily rare on the ground these days. He writes like an ENGLISHMAN. With the confidence, the intelligence, the sharpness, and the wit.

Hollywood should be making My Big Fat Uptight Protestant Wedding, in which some sad Greek only child marries into a big heartwarming New Zealand family where the spouse actually has a sibling. (page xvii)

Look how smart he is, though, he neatly wraps it up:

You may recall a pertinent detail during the bogus controversy over the “torture” of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay: U.S. guards at Gitmo are under instructions to handle copies of the Koran only when wearing gloves. The reason for this is that the detainees regard infidels as “unclean.” But it’s one thing for the Islamists to think infidels are unclean, quite another for the infidels to agree with them- and, by doing so, to validate their bigotry. Far from being tortured, the prisoners are being handled literally with kid gloves (or simulated kid-effect gloves). The U.S. military hands each jihadist his complimentary copy of the Koran as delicately as white-gloved butlers bringing His Lordship the Times of London. It’s not just unbecoming to buy in to Muslim psychoses; in the end, it’s self-defeating. And our self-defeat is their surest shot at victory. . . . A big chunk of Western civilization has given the impression that it’s dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, the jihadists figure: hey, why not us? (page xxviii)

And the bit on demographics is wild. It makes you want to go out and just:

[B]y 2050, 60 percent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. (page xvii)

By 2050 the population of Yemen will outnumber the population of Russia. (page xxviii-xxix)

And this. So true:

[T]here’s very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultured Sensitivity and sharia. (page xxx)

If you’re a teenager in most European cities these days, you’ve a choice between two competing identities- a robust confident Islamic identity or a tentative post-nationalist cringingly apologetic European identity. It would be a mistake to assume the former is attractive only to Arabs and North Africans. (page 90)

Even a Muslim wanted to, how would he assimilate with, say, Canadian national identity? You can’t assimilate with a nullity, which is what the modern multicultural state boils down to. It’s much easier to dismantle a society than to put anything new and lasting in its place. And across much of the developed world that’s what’s going on right now. Multiculturalism makes a nation no more than a holding pen. In the absence of cultural confidence, demography will decide the future. Or in the unimprovable summation of James C. Bennett: “Democracy, immigration, multiculturalism. Pick any two. (page 202).

This is one of the best books I have read for a while. This guy is razor sharp and writes so well. I finished it in two days.