After America

by Mark Steyn

  Nor could the over-Europeanized cult of transnationalism survive in the wider world. As the EU, the UN, and the G7 seized up, the tranzis turned elsewhere, ever on the lookout for the Newest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game on the geopolitical circuit. For a while, in the wake of the 2008 downturn, they pinned their hopes on the G20: same great poseur multilateralism, brand new secretariat. You could see what was in it for EU prime ministers: the transnational talking-shops were the equivalent of those all-star charity fundraisers that spent so much money chauffeuring the stars to the stadium there was no cash left for the charity. Diplomacy used to be, as Canada’s Lester Pearson liked to say, the art of letting the other fellow have your way.15 By the twenty-first century, “soft power” had become more of a discreet cover for letting the other fellow have his way with you. The Europeans “negotiated” with Iran over its nuclear program for years, and in the end Iran got the nukes and Europe got to feel good about itself for having sat across the table talking to no purpose for the best part of a decade.

  In Moscow, Vladimir Putin, self-promoted from president to de facto czar, decided it was well past time to reconstitute the old empire and start re-hanging the Iron Curtain—not formally, not initially, but certainly as a sphere of influence from which the Yanks would keep their distance. Russia, like China, was demographically weak but geopolitically assertive. The Europe the new czar foresaw was one not only energy-dependent on Moscow but security-dependent, too. Hence, his mischievous support for a nuclear Iran—because mullahs with nukes served Russia’s ambitions to restore its hegemony over Eastern Europe. Only Washington was surprised at how far west “Eastern” Europe extended by the time Moscow was done. In an unstable world, the Russians offered themselves as the protection racket you could rely on, and there were plenty of takers for that once every

  In the nineteenth century the Anglophone powers killed or captured pirates. Two centuries later, with primitive vessels seizing tankers the length of carriers off the Horn of Africa, it was all more complicated. The Royal Navy, which over the centuries had done more than anyone to rid the civilized world of the menace of piracy, declined even to risk capturing their Somali successors. They had been advised by Her Majesty’s Government that, under the European Human Rights Act, any pirate taken into custody would be entitled to claim refugee status in the United Kingdom and live on welfare for the rest of his life.16 There was a film series popular at the time: Pirates of the Caribbean. I doubt it would have cleaned up at the box office if the big finale had shown Mr. Geoffrey Rush and his crew of scurvy sea dogs settling down in council flats in Manchester and going to the pub for a couple of jiggers of rum washed down to cries of “Aaaaargh, shiver me benefits check, lad.” For his part, the U.S. Attorney-General, the chief lawenforcement official of the world’s superpower, was circumspect about the legal status of pirates, as well he might be. Obviously, if the United States Navy had seized some eyepatched peglegged blackguard off the coast of Somalia and hanged him from the yardarm or made him walk the plank, pious senators would have risen as one to denounce an America that no longer lived up to its highest ideals ... and the network talking-heads would have argued that Plankgate was recruiting more and more young men to the pirates’ cause...and judges by the dozen would have ruled that pirates were entitled to the protections of the U.S. constitution and that under ObamaCare their peglegs had to be replaced by high-tech prosthetic limbs at taxpayer expense.

  Conversely, a 2010 headline from the Associated Press: “Pirates ‘Have All Died,’ Russia Says, After Decrying ‘Imperfections’ In International Law.”17 Perhaps it seemed just as funny at the time.

  The Somalis had made the mistake of seizing a Russian tanker. When Moscow’s commandos took it back, they found themselves with ten pirates on their hands and the prospect of submitting them to an “imperfect” international legal regime. So, as a Defense Ministry spokesman explained, they “released” them. The Russians supposedly put them in a boat and pointed it in the general direction of Somalia. “They could not reach the coast and apparently have all died,” said the official, poker-faced.

  Oh.

  Bad cop or metrosexual Euro-cop? On the high seas of reality, it was not a tough call.

  FIVE BILLION GUYS NAMED MO

  To state the obvious, the world after America is a lot more Muslim. Between 2010 and 2030, the ummah—the worldwide Muslim community—was predicted to increase from somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the global population to one third of humanity.18 By the time we got there, they wound up with a little more than that, the demographers having failed to take into account such icing on the ummah’s cake as the accelerating Muslim conversion rates on the Continent. But one third of humanity turned out to be a good ballpark figure, give or take. Non-Muslims did most of the giving, and Islam did the taking, especially of Europe. According to the UN, global population is supposed to peak at about nine billion in 2050, then level off and start to decline.19 If you were one of those now mostly extinct eco-fetishists who thought of humanity as a species, then that nine billion was the number to watch, up from six billion at the turn of the century. But, if you didn’t think of the world as one unified global parking lot, you were less interested in the big number and more in its constituent parts: on the road to that nine billion, almost all the increase in global population came from Islam and sub-Saharan Africa. Muslims would represent a third of the world’s population, yet,

  That would come as no surprise if you recall that statistic about Egypt’s economic decline relative to South Korea. And Mubarak’s thug state was considerably less decayed than Sudan and other Islamic hinterlands where by the dawn of the third millennium they had done a cracking job of killing almost all human progress of the modern age. Nevertheless, they are one in three of the global citizenry. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Niger, which is over 90 percent Muslim, increased its population by almost half—from just over 10 million to just over 15 million.20 In 2000, half a million of its children were estimated to be starving, but that was no reason not to add a few million more.21 Its population is predicted to hit just under 100 million by the end of this century—in a country that can’t feed a people one-tenth that size. Was it ever likely that an extra 90 million people would choose to stay within Niger? Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations (now banned in Europe, following a “human rights” complaint), wrote vividly about “Islam’s bloody borders”—“the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims” and provided so many of the horror stories on the nightly news.22 But by 2020 you could no longer delineate with any clarity that looping boundary: the border was a blur. By 2010, there were more Muslims in Germany than in Lebanon.23 Within a few years, Germany would be semi-Muslim in its political character. That doesn’t mean a majority of the population is Muslim, but the prevailing culture is. Recently, I saw an old film called Cabaret, with a memorable scene in a beer garden, in which an Aryan youth sings “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” and everybody joins in. It is a long time since I have been to a German beer garden. Tomorrow would belong to chaps less into draining their steins.

  Though less bibulous, the new Europe is an unhealthier continent. I am not speaking metaphorically. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, in the city of Bradford, 75 percent of Pakistani Britons were married to their first cousins.24 Even the Neanderthal racists warning against the horrors of

  The western elites stuck till the end to their view of man as homo economicus, no matter how obvious it was that cultural identity is a primal indicator that mere economic liberty cannot easily trump. If a man is a Muslim mill worker, which is more central to his identity—that he is a Muslim or that he works in a mill? So the mill closed down, and the Muslim remained, and arranged for his British-born sons to marry cousins imported from the old country, and so a short-term need for manual labor in the mid-twentieth century led to Yorkshire adopting Mirpuri marriage customs. Beyond Bradford, in the nation
as a whole, 57 percent of British Pakistanis were married to their first cousins by the turn of the twenty-first century.25 If, like most of the experts, you were insouciant about that number and assumed that the seductive charms of assimilation would soon work their magic, well, in 1970 the percentage was half that. But back then there were a lot fewer cousins to marry.

  Many non-Pakistani Britons were a little queasy about the marital preferences of their neighbors but no longer knew quite on what basis to object to it. “The ethos of relativism,” wrote the novelist Martin Amis, “finds the demographic question so saturated in revulsions that it is rendered undiscussable.”26 That was why, even though the marital customs of the Pakistani community of New York were little different, you heard not a peep on the subject from brave American urban liberals still cheerfully making sneering cracks about inbred fundamentalist redneck southern hillbillies.

  British Pakistanis were then officially less than 2 percent of the population, yet accounted for a third of all children born with rare recessive genetic diseases—such as Mucolipidosis Type IV, which affects brain function and prevents the body expelling waste.27 Native Scots families aborted healthy babies at such a rate they’re now all but extinct; Pakistani first-cousin families had two, three, four children born deaf, or blind, or requiring spoon-feeding and dressing their entire lives. Learning disabilities among this community cost the education system over $100,000 per child. They

  But this was being penny-wise and pound-blasé. When 57 percent of Pakistani Britons were married to first cousins, and another 15 percent were married to relatives, and a fair number of those cousin couples were themselves the children of cousins, it surely signaled that at the very minimum this community was strongly resistant to traditional immigrant assimilation patterns. Of course, in any society, certain groups are self-segregating: the Amish, the Mennonites, and so on. But when that group is not merely a curiosity on the fringe of the map but the principal source of population growth in all your major cities, the challenge posed by that self-segregation is of a different order.

  A combination of entitlements and demography would cripple much of the developed world both fiscally and physically. The new Europe is sickly, and its already unsustainable health systems have buckled under the strain. Unless you are in the government nomenklatura, or a member of an approved identity group with an effective lobbying organization, or a celebrity, “universal access to quality health care” means universal access to an ever lengthier, ever more bureaucratically chaotic waiting list.

  As for the aging native populations, they were the ones who found it increasingly difficult to self-segregate. There was an entertaining Swedish public health professor called Hans Rosling who liked to use his “Trendalyzer” software to present zippy four-minute demographic computerizations of how the world had progressed over the last two centuries.28 He used to pop up on YouTube back before the “gatekeeping” or whatever euphemism the Chinese owners now use for their “family-friendly filtering.” Professor Rosling produced fun stuff, showing how Botswana by 2010 had

  DARKNESS FALLS

  In 2006, Ezra Levant was the only publisher in Canada to allow his readers to see the so-called “Mohammed cartoons,” originally printed in Jyllands-Posten. As a result he was investigated by the Government of Alberta and subjected to three long years of judicial harassment. Halfway through his ordeal, Mr. Levant observed that one day the Danish cartoons crisis would be seen as a more critical event than the attacks of September 11, 2001.29 Not, obviously, in terms of the comparative death tolls, but in what each revealed about the state of western civilization in the twenty-first century.

  After the slaughter of 9/11, the civilized world fought back, hit hard, went on the attack, rolled up the Afghan terrorist camps, toppled the Taliban. In the battle cry of a soon forgotten man called Todd Beamer, “Let’s roll!”

  After the Danish cartoons, we weaseled and equivocated and appeased and apologized, and signaled that we were willing to trade core western values for a quiet life. Let’s roll over! It’s a lot less effort.

  For the shrewder strategists of the new Caliphate, it wasn’t hard to figure out which was the more telling event about the resolve of the West. Terrorism was useful as a distraction. Terror attacks so obsessed the national security state that it poured billions—trillions—into living perpetually at Code Orange alert, creating gargantuan bureaucracies that never caught a single terrorist yet managed to persuade the citizenry to accept the right of government officials to insert their latex-gloved fingers into your underwear and fondle your scrotum in the interests of “security.” Even today, when America is no longer worth blowing up, when the United States has to all intents blown itself up, it still takes longer than anywhere on the planet to board a plane, thanks to ancient security kabuki ever more removed from reality. The more alert the security state was to shoe-bombers, panty-bombers, implant-bombers, and suppositorybombers, the more indulgent it grew of any Islamic initiative that stopped short of self-detonation. Which suited the savvier imams just fine. They had no desire to be holed up in a smelly cave in the Hindu Kush sharing a latrine with a dozen halfwitted goatherds while plotting how to blow up the Empire State Building. Why fly jets into luxury skyscrapers? The real estate would be theirs soon enough. Eschewing the means, Islam’s

  In the Middle East, Islam had always been beyond criticism. It was only natural that, as their numbers grew in Europe, North America, and Australia, observant Muslims would seek the same protections in their new lands. But they could not have foreseen how eager western leaders would be to serve as their enablers. There was the Swedish minister of integration, Jens Orback, who said we must be nice to Muslims now so that when they’re in the majority they’ll be nice to us,30 and the Dutch justice minister, Piet Hien Donner, who said he would have no problem with Sharia if a majority of people voted for it,31 and of course all those American eminences from President Obama down eager to proclaim that a mosque at Ground Zero would be the living embodiment of the First Amendment. As the more cynical Islamic imperialists occasionally reflected, how quickly the supposed defenders of liberal, pluralist, western values came to sound as if they were competing to be Islam’s lead prison bitch.

  The Netherlands—“the most tolerant country in Europe,” to revive the long obsolete cliché—proved an especially instructive example. In a peculiarly enthusiastic form of prostration, the Dutch state adopted “shoot the messenger” as a universal cure-all for “Islamophobia.” To some, Holland had once meant tulips, clogs, windmills, fingers in the dike. To others, it meant marijuana cafés, long-haired soldiers, legalized hookers, fingers in the dyke. But by the second decade of the twenty-first century it was an increasingly incoherent polity where gays were bashed, uncovered women got jeered in the streets, and you couldn’t do The Diary of Anne Frank as your school play lest the Gestapo walk-ons be greeted by audience cries of “She’s in the attic!” There was, of course, some pushback from extreme right-wing racist extremists, if by “extreme right-wing racists” you mean the gay hedonist Pim Fortuyn, the anti-monarchist coke-snorting

  It was not “ironic” that the most liberal country in western Europe should be so eager to descend into a revoltingly illiberal servitude. It was entirely foreseeable. Justifying extraordinary levels of mass immigration first as narrowly defined economic self-interest and then as moral vanity, Europe made its principal source of new Europeans a population whose primal identity derived from a belief system that claimed total jurisdiction over every aspect of their lives. They were then amazed to discover that that same population of new “Europeans” assumed that all European social, cultural, and political life should realign itself with that belief system. Perhaps they should have considered that possibility earlier. Geert Wilders, a Member of Parliament, was prosecuted, ostensibly for “Islamophobia” but essentially because he was an apostate, a dissenter from the state religion of multiculturalism.32 It was a heresy trial, the first of many. And, in that sense at le
ast, the European establishment unwittingly eased the transition from “multicultural tolerance” to the more explicitly unicultural and intolerant regimes that followed.

  To state the obvious again, the world after America is less Jewish. “Sixty percent of Amsterdam’s orthodox community intends to emigrate from Holland,”33 said Benzion Evers, the son of the city’s chief rabbi, five of whose children had already left by 2010. When he walked the streets of his hometown, the young Mr. Evers hid his skullcap under a baseball cap. Seemed like old times. “Jews with a conscience should leave Holland, where they and their children have no future, leave for the U.S. or Israel,” advised Frits Bolkestein, former EU Commissioner and head of the Dutch Liberal Party. “Anti-Semitism will continue to exist, because the Moroccan and Turkish youngsters don’t care about efforts for reconciliation.” Minheer Bolkestein was not (yet) asking what else those “youngsters” didn’t care for, but like