Every German schoolroom should display
a stuffed Dutchman as a horrible example to youth, wrote
the poet Heinrich Heine in 1831. For Americans, the
horrible example to youth at the taxidermist shop is
Western Europe. Last month the US re-elected a president
despised by enormous European majorities. Europeans hate
and fear the United States, but Americans barely can
summon the energy to ignore Europe, which they have
written off as a decadent and soon-to-disappear
civilization.
In the major newspapers of the US
east coast, to be sure, Europeans continue to read about
their sad little concerns. What "red state" Americans
hear, by contrast, is that Europe is dying, like the
now-vanished "evil empire" of Soviet communism. I have
been viewing a video titled The Siege of Western
Civilization (Storm King Press,
www.stormkingpress.com, US$19.95) in which a former US
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official, Herbert
Meyer, advises Americans on what they may do to avoid
Europe's dreadful fate. Meyer's Siege video
better reflects America's mood than the international
pages of The New York Times.
When the
administration of president Ronald Reagan determined
that Soviet communism could be crushed, not merely
contained, I observed recently, CIA director William J
Casey "routinely ignored the legions of Russian-studies
PhDs, reaching out instead to irregulars who could give
him the insights he required" (How America can win the
intelligence war, June 15).
Herbert Meyer led the irregulars who broke with the
established CIA view to argue that the Soviet economy
was at the edge of breakdown.
According the
CIA's official history, Meyer, a Fortune magazine editor
whom Casey recruited as a senior aide, scoffed at the
agency's estimates of Soviet growth. He explained:
Everything I had been able to
learn about the Soviet economy, including visiting the
place, told me it couldn't be growing at the rate the
CIA said it was ... It simply couldn't be true. I know
what an economy looks like when it's growing 3% a
year, and that isn't what it looks like ... You cannot
have food shortages growing worse, production
shortages growing worse, bottlenecks - all those
things we knew were going on - and still have an
economy growing at the rate the agency said it was -
which the US was barely doing at that point ... It
couldn't be true.
Meyer
left the CIA more than 20 years ago, and the Clinton
years restocked the CIA with the same sort of
second-string academics against whom the Reagan people
had rebelled. The howls of pain attendant upon the
accession of Porter Goss as the new director of central
intelligence suggest that a similar rebellion now may be
under way. In any case, Meyer's conclusion that Europe
is beyond repair is consistent with his earlier reading
of Soviet decay.
In his video, produced for "red
state" audiences more attuned to the television screen
than to printed text, Meyer has the following to say:
Simply put, those of us who
are part of Western Civilization have stopped
breeding. We are not replacing ourselves with
children, and the economic implications of this are
staggering - so staggering, in fact, that if we don't
change course they will lead inexorably to our
political collapse.
Here's the problem: To
maintain a steady population in any country, its
birthrate must be 2.1 children per woman. (That
provides one child to replace each parent, plus an
extra fraction to replace children who die and to
compensate for the slightly smaller number of female
than male births.) Today the birthrate in Western
Europe is an average 1.5% - 30% below replacement. In
Japan it's 1.46%. The birthrates in Italy and Spain
are 1.2%, which means in these two countries the
population will be nearly halved in every generation.
Moreover, because we now are living longer than ever,
in countries with a low birthrate the population
rapidly ages.
Of course a country's birthrate
can change. But it cannot change quickly, and that's
the problem. Japan and Western Europe are already
caught in the vortex ... Europe has tried to solve the
problem by immigration - by importing workers to fill
in for the European children who weren't born. But
this is creating problems of its own. For example,
most of these imported workers are Moslems, who aren't
being absorbed into the Western culture and who now
pose a political threat to the European countries in
which they live and work - which, by the way, helps
explain why our erstwhile allies don't support us in
the war on terrorism. They are afraid of their own
immigrants, who in some European countries now account
for more than 10% of the total population.
With a birthrate of 2%, Meyer adds, the United
States still is in danger, but can be set to rights,
presuming that it takes early action to reform public
pensions and health insurance. Meyer concludes:
It is time to start
remembering - or perhaps to start learning for the
first time - how Western civilization developed and
what it really has accomplished ... And we need to go
beyond the schools and assure that all Americans
understand what Western civilization really is, and
why preserving it is so important to their own future.
If we do this, political support will start to fade
for those who would destroy Western civilization.
I do not think the
United States will find it difficult to avoid the
European or Japanese form of demographic decline,
presuming that they take measures to attract productive
immigrants. Stricter immigration rules in the wake of
September 11, 2001, had the unintended effect of
discouraging Asian immigration to the United States. One
must assume this is temporary; surely the US can
distinguish between desirable and undesirable entrants.
Western civilization - the heritage of St
Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Cervantes,
Shakespeare, and Goethe - may be harder to preserve than
America's pension system. Except for Western classical
music, which Asians have embraced as their own, the
cultural heritage of the West has no natural
constituency (When
immortality is not enough, January 5). American
evangelicals have deep roots in the Bible - which is
Western only at the margin - and only passing interest
in subsequent doings of the West. They are more likely
to listen to Christian variants of country and heavy
metal than J S Bach. A story (on www.ekklesia.co.uk)
from US marines outside Fallujah sums it up:
"You are the sovereign.
You're name is holy. You are the pure spotless lamb,"
a female voice cried out on the loudspeakers as the
marines clapped their hands and closed their eyes,
reflecting on what lay ahead for them.
In
times when fighting looms, many soldiers draw on their
evangelical or born-again heritage to help them face
the battle.
"It's always comforting. Church
attendance is always up before the big push," said
First Sergeant Miles Thatford.
"Sometimes, all
you've got is God."
Between the service's
electric-guitar religious tunes, marines stepped up on
the chapel's small stage and recited a verse of
scripture, meant to fortify them for war.
One
spoke of their Old Testament hero - David - a shepherd
boy who would become Israel's king, battling the
Philistines some 3,000 years ago.
"Thus David
prevailed over the Philistines," the marine said,
reading from scripture, and the marines shouted back
"Hoorah, King David," using their signature grunt of
approval.
Clearly the
marines grunted "Hooah!", not "Hoorah." Among its
meanings in soldiers' patois is "Amen." For an
explanation, see The Urban Dictionary. "Hooah, King
David!" Not what I anticipated
when first I studied the Psalter, but in lean times one
has to take what one can get.
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