The Death of the West

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  With populations declining and children vanishing, Europe has no vital interest to justify sending tens of thousands of their young to war if they are not attacked. At present birthrates, Europe’s population in 2100 will be less than a third what it is today. Europe has voted for la dolce vita.

  But if Europeans are so uninterested in self-preservation that they refuse to have enough children to keep their nations alive, why should Americans defend Europe—and perhaps die for Europe? So they can live the high life until flame-out. Europe has embraced her destiny, perhaps not consciously as a people, but collectively as a people. Europeans do not plan to continue as a great vital race. What then are we defending? Christianity? That is dead in Europe. Western civilization? But, by their decisions not to have children, Europeans have already accepted a twenty-second-century end to their civilization.

  A FINAL SOLUTION TO THE AGING QUESTION

  In the 1973 Humanist Manifesto II, thousands of U.S. intellectuals urged “recognition of an individual’s right to die with dignity, euthanasia, and the right to suicide”22 They were ahead of their time.

  On November 28, 2000, the Lower House of the Dutch Parliament voted 104 to 40 to legalize assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia—“the first nation since Hitler’s Germany,” wrote Nat Hentoff in Jewish World Review, “to legalize … the direct killing of patients by physicans.” 23 The parliament was rushing to catch up with the Dutch doctors, who have been doing euthanasia for decades. In 1991, a government-backed study found that “the majority of all euthanasia deaths in the Netherlands are involuntary.”24

  Under the new law, children ages twelve to fifteen will need a parent’s consent to commit suicide or have a doctor help them kill themselves. But, after sixteen, parental consent will no longer be needed.25 The Council of Europe accused the Dutch of violating the European Convention of Human Rights, but Dutch doctors are already far down the slippery slope toward the Third Reich. As Rita Marker of the International Anti-Euthanasia Task Force reports:

  A month before the lower house debated the new euthanasia law, a Dutch court ruled that Dr. Philip Sutorius was medically justified when he helped 86-year-old Edward Brongermsa commit suicide. Brongermsa was not physically ill or in pain. He said that he was simply “tired of life” and his aging “hopeless existence.”26

  From his jail cell, Jack Kevorkian saluted the Dutch and predicted America would not be far behind. The U.S. Hemlock Society was equally enthusiastic and hopeful that Holland would show us the way. Said Hemlock president Faye Grish, “We are very excited. We have admired what the people of Holland have been doing for the last twenty years.”27

  To the Dutch Voluntary Euthanasia Society, however, the new law is gravely deficient, for it does not grant euthanasia rights for those simply weary of life. “We think that if you are old, you have no family near, and you are really suffering from life then it should be possible,” said a DVES spokesman.28 Minister of Health Els Borst agreed. Very old people, who are sick of life, she said, should be allowed to kill themselves: “I’m not against it, as long as it can be carefully enough regulated so that it only concerns very old people who are tired of living.”29 If such a patient wants to die, said the minister, he or she should be given a suicide pill.

  In his Christmas message in 2000, John Paul II surely had Holland in mind when he spoke of “alarming signs of the ‘culture of death.’”30

  We cannot but recall today that shadows of death threaten people’s lives at every stage of life and are especially menacing at its earliest beginning and its natural end. The temptation is becoming ever stronger to take possession of death by anticipating its arrival, as though we were masters of our own lives or the lives of others.31

  Hentoff is on the side of the Holy Father:

  During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, that country’s physicians rebelled against the culture of death by refusing to cooperate in the killing of patients.

  But now, their changed attitude reminds me of an Oct. 17, 1933, New York Times report from Berlin that the German Ministry of Justice intended to authorize physicians “to end the suffering of incurable patients, upon request, in the interests of true humanity.”32

  Yet, a hard look at the demographic and moral trends in Europe does not inspire confidence that this is a winning fight for those for whom the Holy Father speaks. For a Christianity that teaches that God is the author of life and that no one has a right to take innocent life is not a growth stock in Europe. By 2050, over 10 percent of the population of the four largest nations in Western Europe—Britain, France, Germany, and Italy—will be over eighty years old. Will Europe’s workers, whose taxes must rise and whose retirements must be put off to subsidize the pensions and health care costs of this burgeoning aged population, insist that the sick and senile elderly in their eighties and nineties be kept alive?

  A university study in Belgium found that one in ten deaths there is doctor-induced, either by lethal injection without the patient’s permission or by withholding treatment.33 In Zurich, assisted suicide is permissible in homes for the elderly.34 The baby boomers of Europe may live to see their lives ended, without their consent, by a society that has turned as callous toward their wish to stay alive as they were to the unborn in their own time. What goes around comes around.

  AFTER THE NEWARK riot of 1967, its black mayor wittily observed, “I don’t know where America is going, but Newark is gonna get there first.” Where Europe is at today, America will almost surely arrive tomorrow.

  In 1984, Colorado governor Dick Lamm startled seniors when he told a group of doctors, “We’ve got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts … and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.”35 Princeton now has on faculty an Australian bioethicist, Peter Singer, who argues that if a child is born with disabilities so severe that its parents and doctors think it would be better off dead, it is ethical to kill the newborn and let the couple conceive a healthy child.36 Singer’s argument is not illogical. If we concede parents’ rights to abort an unborn infant up to nine months, why do they lose the right to end its life the moment the fetus slips out of the womb?

  Singer’s ideas have an impressive pedigree. As far back as 1919, Margaret Sanger was admonishing America in her magazine Birth Control Review: “More children from the fit, less from the unfit.”37 Americans and Germans were soon competing to advance Sanger’s ideas. In 1920, Dr. Alfred Hoche, professor of psychiatry at the University of Freiburg, and Karl Binding, a law professor at Leipzig University, published The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life. The book argued the case for assisted suicide for the terminally ill and euthanasia for those “empty shells of human beings,” the mentally retarded, and those with brain damage and psychiatric conditions.38 A poll found three in four German parents favored letting physicians end the lives of severely retarded children.39

  In October 1933, the New York Times quoted Hitler’s Ministry of Justice as saying that ridding society of these poor creatures would make it “possible for physicians to end the tortures of incurable patients, upon requests, in the interests of true humanity.”40 The money saved could be used to benefit “those on the threshold of old age.”41 The language of tenderness is familiar to us all. It calls to mind the words Walker Percy put in the mouth of Father Smith in The Thanatos Syndrome: “Do you know where tenderness leads? … Tenderness leads to the gas chamber.”42

  In making their case, the Nazis could cite Churchill, who “wanted the curse of madness to die,” and George Bernard Shaw, who had said in 1933, “If we desire a certain type of civilization we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit in.”43 The führer’s thoughts exactly, G.B.

  Among the first and most famous cases of mercy killing was “Baby Knauer.” The little boy’s father made a direct plea to Hitler to allow his son, blind, retarded, and missing an arm and leg, to die. Hitler referred the request to his physician Karl Brandt. In 1938, permission w
as granted.

  “Mercy deaths” became common in Germany. In a “Review of Mein Kampf,” which introduced the 1939 Book of the Month Club selection, journalist Dorothy Thompson excoriated Hitler, except on one issue:

  On the subject of eugenics [Hitler] writes rationally, up to a point. Eugenists all over the world will agree with him that the palpably unfit for reproduction should be sterilized. But the German sterilization laws include habitual drunkards, and it is an amusing thought that had they existed in pre-Hitler Austria, Hitler himself would never have been born! (Neither, incidentally, would Beethoven or Nietzsche.)

  There is scientific foundation, though the field needs more exploration, for some of Hitler’s eugenic ideas.44

  Poet W. B. Yeats echoed Ms. Thompson: “Since improvements in agriculture and industry are threatening to remove the last check on the multiplication of the ineducable masses … the better stocks have not been replacing their numbers, while the stupider and less healthy have been.”45

  When war came, Hitler’s eugenic ideas received “more exploration.” He ordered the mercy killing of “life unworthy of life”—“useless eaters”—deformed infants and the severely retarded.46 Code-named “Aktion 4,” the program did away with scores of thousands before Bishop Clemens von Galen, in a fiery sermon in Münster Cathedral in 1940, excoriated Hitler’s regime for “plain murder” and called on Catholics to “withdraw ourselves and our faithful from their [Nazi] influence so that we may not be contaminated by their thinking and their ungodly behavior.”47

  Jolted, Berlin publicly put the program on hold, but continued it quietly. One veteran of Aktion 4, Franz Stangl, would do his graduate work at a place called Treblinka. In Judgment at Nuremburg, the 1960 film, Montgomery Clift movingly portrayed a victim of the Nazi eugenics program conditionally endorsed by Dorothy Thompson.

  But no film ever portrayed Raymond Ludlow, an American hero, who came home from World War II with a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and a Prisoner of War Medal. A repeated runaway in his early teens, Raymond Ludlow had been forcibly sterilized under the laws of Virginia, one of thirty-one states to pass compulsory sterilization laws in the halcyon days of Margaret Sanger.48

  The battle between those who believe in the sanctity of human life, and those who believe some lives are not worth living and ought to be ended, is thus not a new one. And with Europe facing a future where a third of her people will be over sixty-five and one in ten over eighty—and with few Bishop Von Galens and John Paul IIs around—the outcome does not appear to be in much doubt.

  ISRAEL AND THE MIDDLE EAST49

  Though Israel’s population is growing, the neighborhood trend helps one to understand why warrior-statesmen such as Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak concluded that they had no choice but to trade land for peace.

  The fertility rate among Palestinians in Israel is 4.5 children per woman; on the West Bank, 5.5 children per woman; in Gaza, 6.6 children per woman. If demography is destiny, Israel is in an existential crisis that can only be exacerbated by continued military occupation and expansion of settlements. Consider the numbers;

  (Millions of People)

  2000 2025

  Israel 6.2 8.3

  Jordan 6.7 12.1

  Egypt 68.5 95.6

  Syria 16.1 26.3

  Lebanon 3.3 4.4

  Saudi Arabia 21.6 40.0

  In the next twenty-five years, Israel’s population (Jewish and Arab) will grow by 2.1 million, while her Arab neighbors will swell by 62.2 million. Now consider Israel’s “Palestinian problem.”

  In twenty-five years, there will be 2 million Palestinians inside Israel, 7 million on the West Bank and in Gaza, and 7 million in Jordan—16 million Palestinians living cheek-by-jowl with 6 million Jewish Israelis. (Sixty percent of the Jordanian population is Palestinian.) In 2050, there will be 3 million Palestinians inside Israel, 12 million on the West Bank and in Gaza, and 10 million in Jordan—25 million Palestinians living alongside 7 million Jewish Israelis at midcentury.

  But if Israel must view these numbers with alarm, so should the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Jordan is among the poorest nations in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is run by a royal house that has antagonized millions of its people by being seen as America’s agent and having invited thousands of infidels onto sacred Islamic soil.

  Not one of the twenty-two Arab countries today qualifies as fully democratic. Yet, the more democratic they become, the more responsive their regimes must be to the will of the “Arab street.” Those who tell us that democracies never go to war with one another may see that proposition tested, as Arab monarchies fall to more “democratic” regimes, as happened in Teheran with the overthrow of the shah.

  RETURN OF THE PROPHET

  At the beginning of the seventh century, the Mediterranean world was Christian. But, within fifty years of Muhammad’s hejira to Medina in 622, the armies of Islam had swept over the southern coast of the Inland Sea. Early in the eighth century, Arabs and Berbers brushed aside weak Visigoth resistance, overran Spain, and crossed the Pyrenees into France, where one of the decisive battles of history was fought. At Tours, the “Hammer of the Franks,” Charles Martel defeated the Muslims, who withdrew back over the mountains. ‘“Thus was Christendom saved in the tongue between the rivers, a little south of Chatellrault, and a day’s march north of Poitiers,“wrote Hilaire Belloc.50 Except for the tiny kingdom of the Asturias, which would be the base camp of the Spanish Reconquista, Islam dominated the Iberian peninsula for centuries. Not until 1492 did Ferdinand and Isabella finally drive the Moors out of Spain.

  In the East, the Islamic invasion came later. In the fourteenth century, the Ottoman Empire entered the Balkans and defeated the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. In 1453, Constantinople fell. In 1683, the Turks were at the gates of Vienna when they were stopped by the Polish king John Sobieski. But not until 1913 were they finally driven out of most of the Balkans.

  The high tide of Western empire came at the close of World War I. In November 1917, Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour declared it to be His Majesty’s policy to create a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, as a British army under Allenby marched into Jerusalem. The Ottoman Empire went into receivership, and, under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the British and French divided the spoils. Three decades later, a Jewish state was born among the Arabs, under the auspices of the British Empire and a U.S.-dominated UN. But, by 1948, the British Empire was in retreat—out of India, out of Palestine, out of Jordan, out of Egypt, out of Iraq, out of the Gulf, with the French Empire close behind.

  Now the signs are everywhere that Islam is rising again. An Islamic secessionist movement is active in the Philippines. Muslim troops battle Christian secessionists in Indonesia. From Palestine to Pakistan, street mobs cheered the slaughter at the Pentagon and World Trade Center. For years, the Taliban gave sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and his terrorist cells and dispatched holy warriors into the old Soviet republics of Central Asia and to assist Chechen rebels fighting in Russia. Before the U.S.-led alliance drove him from power, Taliban ruler Mullah Muhammad Omar ordered all religious statues smashed, including the seventh-century Great Buddhas of Bamiyan, declaring, ‘“These idols have been gods of the infidels.”51

  Israel was driven out of Lebanon by Hezbollah and is being pushed off the West Bank and out of Gaza by intifadas in which the suicide bombers of Hamas are assuming the lead role. In Turkey and Algeria, elections in the 1990s brought to power Islamic regimes, which were removed by methods other than democratic. In Egypt, Muslim militants have renewed the persecution of Christian Copts. Islamic law has now been imposed in ten northern states of Nigeria.

  In Europe, Christian congregations are dying, churches are emptying out, mosques are filling up. There are five million Muslims in France, and between twelve and fifteen million in the European Union.52 There are fifteen hundred mosques in Germany.53 Islam has replaced Judaism as the second religion of Europe. As the Christian tide goes out in Europe, an Islamic tide co
mes in. In 2000, for the first time there were more Muslims in the world than Catholics.54

  While the ideology of “Islamism” has failed in Afghanistan, Iran, and Sudan to create a modern state that can command the loyalty of its people and serve as a model for other Islamic nations, the religion of Islam has not failed. In science, technology, economics, industry, agriculture, armaments, and democratic rule, America, Europe, and Japan are generations ahead. But the Islamic world retains something the West has lost: a desire to have children and the will to carry on their civilization, cultures, families, and faith. Today, it is as difficult to find a Western nation where the native population is not dying as it is to find an Islamic nation where the native population is not exploding. The West may have learned what Islam knows not, but Islam remembers what the West has forgot: “There is no vision but by faith.”

  ISRAEL AS METAPHOR

  As were the American Canal Zone, British Rhodesia, and the Republic of South Africa yesterday, Israel may today be seen as a metaphor and microcosm of the West itself.

  In its 1948 war of independence, Israel expanded well beyond the borders set by the UN. Exploiting blunders by Egypt’s Nasser and the UN’s U Thant in 1967, Israel seized the Syrian Golan Heights, Arab East Jerusalem, the Old City, Gaza, and the West Bank, and occupied all of Sinai to the Suez Canal in six days. In 1982, Israel drove to the suburbs of Beirut and expelled the PLO.