One reader and I have been having an on-going conversation about Europe and Islam. My main point is that there is something RIGHT going on in Islamdom where people have babies, and something WRONG going on in Europe, where more people die than are being born. True: some European countries have growing populations, but that is due to immigration, much of that Islamic. The immigration is much needed though because of the welfare state system (which the US seems to be rapidly copying). That welfare system requires many young (immigrant) workers for each retired (white European) person.
It's a recipe for disaster, as the late Sam Huntington has famously pointed out in his seminal book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, which is a must-read for anyone who...well, anyone at all really.
Anyway, what brought this all to mind was this post from a favorite blog of mine, Canterbury Tales.
In it one of the inventors of birth control makes the following observation:
The Austrian chemist was one of three whose formulation of the synthetic progestogen Norethisterone marked a key step toward the earliest oral contraceptive pill.
Djerassi outlined the "horror scenario" that occurred because of the population imbalance, for which his invention was partly to blame. He said that in most of Europe there was now "no connection at all between sexuality and reproduction." He said: "This divide in Catholic Austria, a country which has on average 1.4 children per family, is now complete."
He described families who had decided against reproduction as "wanting to enjoy their schnitzels while leaving the rest of the world to get on with it."
The fall in the birth rate, he said, was an "epidemic" far worse, but given less attention, than obesity. Young Austrians, he said, were committing national suicide if they failed to procreate. And if it were not possible to reverse the population decline they would have to understand the necessity of an "intelligent immigration policy."
Ah yes, intelligent immigration policy. I liked it better when they called it Eurabia.
Read it all.
