Noting that births in Japan in 2008 were 40 percent below what they were in 1948, Nicholas Eberstadt writes, in Foreign Affairs, that “fertility, migration and mortality trends are propelling Japan into … a degree of aging thus far contemplated only in science fiction.”14
In December 2010, Agence France-Press, citing the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, reported: “On current trends, Japan’s population of 127 million will by 2055 shrivel to 90 million.”15 Recognizing the gravity of the demographic crisis, the Democratic Party of Japan, which was swept into power in 2009, planned $3,000 allowances per child and assistance with child care for families with grade-school children. The need seems desperate. In a 2010 Washington Post story on the decline in Japanese students attending U.S. universities, Blaine Harden wrote, “The number of children [in Japan] under the age of 15 has fallen for 28 consecutive years. The size of the nation’s high school graduating class has shrunk by 35 percent in two decades.”16
In 2010, China overtook Japan as the world’s second largest economy, a ranking Japan had held since surpassing Germany forty years ago. The New York Times concludes:
China’s rise could accelerate Japan’s economic decline as it captures Japanese export markets, and as Japan’s crushing national debt increases and its aging population grows less and less productive—producing a downward spiral.
“It’s beyond my imagination how far Japan will fall in the world economy in 10, 20 years,” said Hideo Kumano, economist at the Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo.17
Japan’s fertility level has been below replacement levels since the 1970s. By 2050, it will have been below zero population growth for eighty years. If the birthrate does not rise, Japan’s population at century’s end will be 20 percent of what it is today.
The aging of Japan, the oldest nation on earth, seems reflected in its economic performance. In the 1960s, Japan’s economy grew by 10 percent a year; in the 1970s by 5 percent a year; in the 1980s by 4 percent, still a healthy growth rate. But in the 1990s, the “lost decade,” Japan’s GDP grew by 1.8 percent a year.18 In the twenty-first century, Japan has failed to maintain even this anemic growth rate and, due to the vast public works spending in the 1990s, now faces a national debt 200 percent of her GDP.
In 1988, eight of the ten largest companies in the world in capitalization were Japanese, led by Nippon Telegraph & Telephone. Today, Japan does not have a single company in the top twenty, and it has only six in the top 100. “China has also surpassed Japan in having the biggest trade surplus and foreign currency reserves,” writes Tabuchi, “as well as the highest steel production. And next year China could overtake Japan as the largest automobile producer.”19 China already has.
South Korea’s population is projected to reach 49.5 million in 2025 but will recede to 44 million by 2050, a loss of 10 percent in twenty-five years.20 Few nations suffer losses like that in wars. In the Civil War, North and South lost 620,000, 2 percent of the population.
In 2050, the median age of South Koreans will have risen from thirty-eight today to fifty-four and a third of all South Koreans will be over sixty-five, an immense burden of retirees for the working population to carry.21 “Korea may lose out in the global economic competition due to a lack of manpower,” Health Minister Jeon Jae-hee told the Korea Times. “It is actually the most urgent and important issue the country is facing.”22
Technologically, Japan is among the world’s most advanced nations. South Korea is the largest and strongest of the Asian tigers. It is impossible to believe either can maintain its dynamism when, together, they will lose thirty million people and add a decade to their median age. By 2050, 40 percent of all South Koreans and Japanese will be over sixty years of age.23
Both nations appear prepared to accept their fate, a dying population and declining nation, rather than adopt the American solution: replacement of her departing native born with millions of immigrants.
Another tiger, Singapore, is advancing toward the same end with a birth rate only 60 percent of what is needed to replace the population. As we approach midcentury, Singapore’s median age will rise from forty today to fifty-four, almost 40 percent of the population will be over sixty, and there will be twice as many deaths each year as births by 2040. So worried is Singapore over its birth dearth it is offering mothers a “birth bonus” of $3,000 for the first and second child and $4,000 for the third and fourth, plus paid maternity leave.24
Free Asia, an economic miracle of the twentieth century, seems content to enjoy the good life and then pass away. At the end of 2010, AFP reported that the birth rate in Singapore had fallen to 1.2 children per women, while in South Korea it had fallen to 1.1, and on Taiwan to 1.03.25
VANISHING VOLK
For no country has demography had a greater bearing on destiny than Germany.
Indeed, behind the two wars that tore Europe apart lay a British fear that Germany, after crushing France in 1870, had grown too populous and powerful. Balance-of-power politics dictated Britain’s moving closer to colonial rivals Russia and France. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli recognized the earth-shaking importance of the Franco-Prussian War and of Bismarck’s having united the German states and peoples under a Prussian king:
The war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French revolution of the last century.… There is not a diplomatic tradition, which has not been swept away. You have a new world.… The balance of power has been entirely destroyed.26
For ten years, 1914–1918 and 1939–1945, Britons and Germans fought. By 1945, Germany was finished as a military power and Britain was finished as a world power. Now the Germans have begun to disappear. “Since 1972, Germany has not seen a single year where the number of newborns exceeded the number of deaths,” writes Reiner Klingholz, of Berlin’s Institute for Population and Development.27
The creeping population-shrinking process was only masked by high immigration that could camouflage the natural losses—at least until 2003. Since then, the overall population of Germany has declined; the Federal Statistics Office expects that the nation will have around eight million fewer inhabitants by mid-century—that is the equivalent of losing the population of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne and Frankfurt combined.28
What Klingholz is saying bears repeating: Germans have been dying out for forty years and this has been covered up by counting Turks, East Europeans, and Arabs as Germans. Now, not even immigrants from the Muslim lands, Eastern Europe, and the Third World can mask the reality.
Astonishing. Not long after World War II, West Germany boasted the world’s second largest economy. Now a united Germany is on schedule to become a retirement center, nursing home, and cemetery for the Germanic peoples, whose origins date back to before the birth of Christ.
Today, 20 percent of Germany’s population is older than 65, and 5 percent are older than 80. In 2050, the 65-plus age group will make up 32 percent and the 80-plus group 14 percent.… By mid-century one out of seven Germans will be older than 80. The figures are similar in Spain and Italy.29
In Austria, where the fertility rate is down to 1.4 births per woman, eighty-five-year-old Carl Djerassi, who contributed a key discovery that made the birth control pill possible, calls Europe’s demographic decline a “horror scenario,” a “catastrophe.” There is “no connection at all between sexuality and reproduction.”30 Donald Rumsfeld was on to something when he called it “old Europe.”
Of Southern Europe, where the fertility rate among the Catholic native-born has fallen to two-thirds of what is required to keep those nations alive, Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau says:
[Y]ou can’t go on forever with a total fertility rate of 1.2 [children per woman]. If you compare the size of the 0–4 and 29–34 age groups in Spain and Italy right now, you see the younger is almost half the size of the older. You can’t keep going with a completely upside-down age distribution, with the pyramid standing on its point. You can’t have
a country where everybody lives in a nursing home.31
As Longman writes, “This isn’t just a numbers game.”
As the darkest recent chapters of European history suggest, the point of transition from growth to demographic decline can be an unsettling and dangerous one. Fascist ideology in Europe was deeply informed by Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, and the writings of other eugenicists obsessed with the demographic decline of “Aryans.”32
Today, a new generation of Europeans that feels besieged by Muslim immigration has begun to shift allegiance from working class and conservative parties to anti-Islamic and anti-immigration parties that are flourishing now in virtually every country. In some they already share power and the mainstream parties have begun to submit to their demands
“THERE’LL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND”
The United Kingdom appears to be the great exception to the shrinking of European populations. In its 2006 Population Projections, the UN predicted that the UK would, by 2050, add the 8.5 million people that Germany would lose. The 2008 revision pushed Britain’s population projection at midcentury to 72.4 million, an increase of 10 million people in forty years.33
Yet one must look more closely at these numbers. Fertility in Britain has been below replacement level since the early 1970s. Even the revised 2008 figures say British fertility will remain 15 percent below zero population growth through 2050. Then, there are those reports of native-born Britons in the scores and even hundreds of thousands emigrating annually.
How can a nation add 10 million people when its women are not having enough babies to replace the existing population and its native born are departing? The answer is immigration. The Caribbean, African, Arab, and Asian population of Britain is keeping the birthrate up and new immigrants are assuring that the population grows by at least 8.5 million and perhaps 12 million as Germany’s declines. Britain is growing and changing its complexion.
“A Fifth of Europe Will Be Muslim by 2050,” ran an August 2009 headline in the Telegraph.34 In a related article cited by Cal Thomas, “Muslim Europe: The Demographic Time Bomb Transforming Our Continent,” the Telegraph wrote that “Britain and the rest of the European Union are ignoring a time bomb: a recent rush into the EU by migrants, including millions of Muslims, will change the continent beyond recognition over the next two decades, and almost no policy makers are talking about it.”35
Oxford demographer David Coleman adds that Britain’s nonwhite population is on course “to grow from 9 percent at the last census in 2001, to 29 percent by 2051.”36 That means 21 million of the 72 million British subjects in 2050 will trace their ancestry to Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, or the Caribbean, a demographic transformation of a country that has never assimilated a large number of immigrants. In late 2010, Coleman updated his projections. Britons—English, Welsh, Irish, and Scots—will be a minority by 2066 and immigrants will “transform” Britain. “The transition to a ‘majority-minority’ population, whenever it happens, would represent an enormous change to national identity—cultural, political, economic and religious.”37 That date, 2066, is the millenial year of the Norman Conquest.
Who are the newcomers to the old continent?
In Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West, Chris Caldwell writes that conspicuous among the more than 15 million Muslims in Western Europe are “militants, freeloaders and opportunists.”38 Fouad Ajami describes them:
The militants took the liberties of Europe as a sign of moral and political abdication. They included “activists” now dreaming of imposing the Shariah on Denmark and Britain. There were also warriors of the faith, in storefront mosques in Amsterdam and London, openly sympathizing with the enemies of the West. And there were second-generation immigrants who owed no allegiance to the societies of Europe.39
In a stunning revelation in 2009, Andrew Neather, speechwriter and adviser to Tony Blair and Home Secretary Jack Straw, revealed that Blair’s Labor government had thrown open Britain’s doors to mass immigration to socially engineer a “truly multicultural” country and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity.”40 The government did not reveal what it was about, said Neather, as that might have driven Labor’s “core working-class vote” to the British National Party of Nick Griffin.
“[T]he truth is out and it’s dynamite,” said Sir Andrew Green, the chairman of the think tank Migrationwatch. “Many have long suspected that mass immigration under Labor was not just a cock up but a conspiracy. They were right.”41 Under a clandestine Labor policy to alter the racial balance and change the face of Britain, three million immigrants, 5 percent of Britain’s entire population, came in from the Third World, said Green.
Is it not treason to bring in foreigners, deceitfully, to swamp a people and dispossess them of their culture and country? What is the difference between what Labor stands accused of doing and what Stalin did in the Baltic republics in the 1940s—and what China is doing today in Tibet?
According to the London Times, from 2004 to 2008 the Muslim population surged by 500,000 to 2,422,000, and was growing at ten times the rate of the native-born population due to higher birthrates, immigration, and conversions. And more and more of these Muslims are asserting their Islamic identity as they see their brothers fighting the West in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Hindus in Britain tripled to 1.5 million in the first seven years of the century. The “Black British” from the Caribbean and sub-Sahara have risen to 1.45 million.42 Although Hindus and Muslims and the black British are spread throughout the realm, they are heavily concentrated in what has come to be called Londonistan.
Some of the estimated one million Poles who migrated to Britain after Warsaw entered the EU have left for home where the wages were rising, as Britain entered the financial crisis and David Cameron’s era of austerity.43
THE LOST TRIBES OF ISRAEL
“In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, for they are no more,” wrote the evangelist Matthew.
As their nation enters its sixty-fourth year, Israelis can look back with pride. Israel is a democracy with the highest standard of living in the Middle East. Her high-tech industries are in the first rank. From a nation of fewer than a million in 1948, her population has grown to 7 million. In seven wars—the 1948 War of Independence, the Sinai invasion of 1956, the Six-Day War of 1967, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the Lebanon wars of 1982 and 2006, and the Gaza War—Israel has prevailed.
Israel has revived Hebrew, created a currency, immersed her children in the history, ancient and modern, of the Jewish people, and established a national homeland for Jews, millions of whom have come to settle. The nation is home to the largest concentration of Jews anywhere on earth.
Yet, Israeli realists must look forward with foreboding. For Israel became home to the largest Jewish population only because the number of American Jews plummeted in the 1990s from 5.5 to 5.2 million. Six percent of the U.S. Jewish population, 300,000 Jews, vanished in a decade. By 2050, the U.S. Jewish population will shrink another 50 percent to 2.5 million.44 American Jews appear to be an endangered species.
Why is this happening? It is a result of the collective decision of Jews themselves. From Betty Friedan to Gloria Steinem in the 1970s to Ruth Bader Ginsburg today, Jewish women have led the battle for abortion rights. The community followed. A survey in 2000 by the Center for Jewish Community Studies in Baltimore found 88 percent of the Jewish public agreeing that “Abortion should be generally available to those who want it.”45
As Jews were 2 to 3 percent of the U.S. population from Roe v. Wade to 2010, how many of the fifty million abortions since 1973 were performed on Jewish girls or women? How many Jewish children were never conceived because of birth control?
In Philip Roth’s The Counterlife, a militant Israeli character says, “what Hitler couldn’t achieve at Ausc
hwitz, American Jews are doing to themselves in the bedroom.”46
Stephen Steinlight, former director of National Affairs at the American Jewish Committee, sees in U.S. population numbers existential peril for Israel.
Far more potentially perilous, does it matter to Jews—and for American support for Israel when the Jewish State arguably faces existential peril—that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the United States? That undoubtedly at some point in the next 20 years Muslims will outnumber Jews, and that Muslims with an “Islamic agenda” are growing active politically through a widespread network of national organizations? That this is occurring at a time when the religion of Islam is being supplanted in many of the Islamic immigrant sending countries by the totalitarian ideology of Islamism of which vehement anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism form central tenets?47
“Will our status suffer,” Steinlight asks, “when the Judeo-Christian cultural construct yields, first, to a Judeo-Christian-Muslim one, and then to an even more expansive sense of national religious identity?”48 To listen to President Obama is to understand that post-Christian America has already arrived at that “more expansive sense of national religious identity.”
ISRAEL’S EXISTENTIAL CRISIS
If demography is destiny, Israel’s future appears grim. Her population of 7.5 million is 80 percent Jewish. But the Arab minority is growing faster, except for the ultra-Orthodox Jewish, known in Hebrew as “haredim,” for whom eight children to a family is not unusual. Indeed, according to the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, if present trends continue, by 2040, 78 percent of all primary school children in Israel will be either ultra-Orthodox or Arab.49
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