By Alan Caruba
In 2006, Mark Steyn made a big splash with his book, “America Alone: The End of the World as We Know  It”, in which he said that, “much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries.”
The subject of the book was the science of demographics, tracking and predicting the growth and loss of various elements of the planet’s population. It’s all about the mathematics of birth rates, migratory shifts of people moving about the Earth in search of jobs, freedom, et cetera.
If you have no real experience with political freedom, however, it is hard to know how to maintain it, particularly since it requires free speech, a free press, and other infrastructure.
For those who read the book, it stirred up a lot of discussion, but that has since receded.
We are blessed or afflicted—depending on your point of view—with short memories and, for the vast bulk of the population, very little knowledge or even a sense of history. None of this, however, slows the inexorable arithmetic of birth and death among the world’s six billion-plus population.
Let me provide such one example. We all know about the September 11, 2001 attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, but did you know that on September 11, 1683 a Muslim army was decisively defeated near Vienna? That battle saved Europe.
For Americans, Europe is a nice place to visit. It is the “old country” for many people whose grandparents and parents migrated from there in search of a better life here for themselves and their descendents. America was still a young nation in the 1800s when millions flooded in, mostly at the invitation of those in need of their labor. By the end of World War II, America emerged intact and as a great power. By the 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed, it was declared a superpower.
Most Americans have no memory of the Depression of the 1930s. Those born after World War II, the “Boomer” generation, are now beginning to retire. The only memories of America anyone has today is of a nation triumphant, albeit one that engaged in two wars, Korea and Vietnam, that turned out poorly at the time, but a look at a thriving South Korea today suggest it was worth it and Vietnam now is eager to do business with us.
Wars in the Middle East stir memories of those previous ones and, being quite different in nature, tend to make most Americans eager to just leave. We are not facing a massed army. Instead, we are killing the enemies of progress and freedom a few at a time. It’s tedious work, but necessary, and we have few friends to help us.
What does this have to do with demographics? The answer is that Muslims from the Middle East, the northern nations of Africa known as the Maghreb, and immigrants in general from Asia and Africa have been pouring into Europe to replace the dwindling native populations, providing labor. It is a migration comparable to our own but this group of immigrants either does not want to integrate with the European culture or are not invited to. They are building mosques or taking over abandoned churches.
Meanwhile, a flow of Mexicans and others from nations south of us is reconquering America while our nation’s leaders look the other way. Why? No one seems to know.
As Patrick J. Buchanan notes in a recent column, “In 1950, whites were 28 percent of the world population and Africans 9 percent. In 2060, the ratio will remain the same. But the colors will be reversed.”
No one is suggesting that whites are genetically superior to other races, but they have a history of cultural and technological development with which few can compare. My guess is that the Chinese will pick up where we leave off, when we leave off, as we will surely do if our economic and political system is subsumed in a population that is indifferent to what made it different.
Pax Romana is no more. Pax Americana could be looking at the end as well if the numbers continue. As Buchanan put it, “The Caucasian race is going the way of the Mohicans.”
Alan Caruba's weekly commentaries are posted on the website of The National Anxiety Center and are widely disseminated on the Internet. He also has a daily blog called Warning Signs. Love to read? Visit his monthly report on the best in new fiction and non-fiction at Bookviews.com.
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