This man now represents Stratford-on-Avon, the town where Shakespeare was born.

His name is Nadhim Zahawi.

He is a Muslim and a Conservative Member of Parliament.

He argues that all illegal immigrants in Britain should be granted amnesty.

Translate into Arabic:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,

Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth,

Renowned for their deeds as far from home,

For Christian service and true chivalry,

As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,

Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son,

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,

Dear for her reputation through the world,

Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,

Like to a tenement or pelting farm:

England, bound in with the triumphant sea

Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege

Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,

With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:

That England, that was wont to conquer others,

Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

– William Shakespeare, King Richard II, Act 2 scene 1

Footnote: Needless to say, we are not sympathetic to the three lines from “For Christian service” to “Mary’s Son”, but it’s a great speech all the same. The last two lines are painfully apt.

The Islamification of Britain proceeds apace. The British government, media, public choose not to notice it. Or not very much. Not as the existential threat it is. Only an occasional lone voice cries out a warning: Look what’s coming, our doom, the obliteration of our culture, the end of our national identity, the cancellation of all we have achieved, our death as a free people.  

Here is one of the lone voices speaking. We quote from the Commentator:

Britain is in denial. There is no real public debate on a historic event that is transforming the country. Mention of it occasionally surfaces in the media, but the mainstream political class never openly discuss it.

What is that historic event? By the year 2050, in a mere 37 years, Britain will be a majority Muslim nation.

This projection is based on reasonably good data. Between 2004 and 2008, the Muslim population of the UK grew at an annual rate of 6.7 percent, making Muslims 4 percent of the population in 2008. Extrapolating from those figures would mean that the Muslim population in 2020 would be 8 percent, 15 percent in 2030, 28 percent in 2040 and finally, in 2050, the Muslim population of the UK would exceed 50 percent of the total population.

Contrast those Muslim birth rates with the non-replacement birth rates of native Europeans, the so called deathbed demography of Europe. For a society to remain the same size, the average female has to have 2.1 children (total fertility rate). For some time now, all European countries, including Britain, have been well below that rate. The exception is Muslim Albania. For native Europeans, it seems, the consumer culture has replaced having children as life’s main goal.

These startling demographic facts have been available for some time . … But on this historic transformation of the country there is silence from the political establishment.

Not everyone agrees with these demographic figures. Population projection, some say, is not an exact science. Perhaps the Muslim birth rate will drop to European levels.

But this seems to be wishful thinking. For years it was believed that Muslims would enter what is known as “demographic transition”, with European Muslim birth rates falling to native European levels. But that demographic transition has not happened. In Britain, for example, the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities continue to have significantly higher birth rates than the national average, even after more than 50 years in the country.

Over the short term (a few generations) demographic forecasting is as scientific as any social science can be. Britain and the rest of Europe are in native population decline and European Muslim birth rates are up. If that trend continues, then the projection of a majority Muslim population in Britain is sound. …

Many [almost all] British people find it hard to believe their country could become majority Muslim. After all, it was never what they wanted so why, in a democracy, should it be happening? …

The fact is that the deathbed demography of native Britons has come up against increasing Muslim birth rates and the result is a classic Malthusian geometric increase in the Muslim population. As Malthus emphasised, populations increase geometrically, not arithmetically. Given two populations, one declining one increasing, within a few generations the geometric increase of one over the other can be substantial.

Why has the Muslim birth rate not fallen to native levels? Just as there may be consumerist-cultural reasons for the low birth rates of native Britons, there may be strong cultural reasons for higher Muslim birth rates. …

Besides which, the Muslim jihad against the non-Muslim world requires high birth rates.

Population projections over the long term can be wrong. But for Britain … whatever way you do the numbers, they all point in one direction: Britain will be a majority Muslim state by the year 2050.

The political and social consequences of all this will be significant.

They will be huge. They will be terrible. The writer goes on to mention one or two, considerably understating them.

Britain’s traditional foreign policy, particularly regarding the US and Israel, would very likely change. In fact the US and Israel are already anticipating the consequences of a majority Muslim Western Europe.

Are they? We’ve seen no sign that they are. But a Muslim-governed Europe, armed with nuclear weapons, will be more than a minor nuisance to America and Israel.

Britain’s social landscape would also be changed. The Adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, would very likely be heard throughout most of Britain. The traditional iconic sights and sounds of the country would also change from church bell-towers to minarets.

Sharia will replace British law. Unless sharia law undergoes revision – which is unlikely – women will be subjugated, homosexuality will be treated as a possibly capital crime, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians (yes, there are even a few of those in Britain) will have to pay a special burdensome tax, polytheists such as Hindus may be confronted with a choice between conversion to Islam or death.

To fill out the picture of how everyday life in Britain could change under sharia law with a little concrete detail: There will be no more beer or wine or whisky. No pubs. No more bacon for breakfast, no more ham sandwiches. No mixed-gender dances or sport. Women will cover their heads in public (if not their whole bodies in a black tent).

There will be no freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly – in short, no freedom.

Very likely all of this would happen gradually but there can be little doubt that it will happen, and it would be perfectly democratic.

Given that such a historic change is taking place, the silence of the political class is curious, to say the least. Britain, until the 1950s, could trace its ethnic and cultural ancestry back thousands of years. In 1903, in Cheddar Gorge Somerset, the remains of a pre-historic man were found. Known as Cheddar Man, DNA tests on this almost 9000 years old skeleton showed that he has living descendents today, still in Somerset.

In fact, genetic studies show that the populations of the British Isles (and Western Europe) have been stable for millennia, giving the lie to the oft quoted liberal comment that “Britain has always been a country of immigrants.” That’s false. Until the mass immigration of the 1950s [of black immigrants from the West Indies], Britain was ethnically homogeneous. …

Waves of conquest, waves of immigration had brought only fellow ethnic Europeans to the British isles. Some additional thousands of  Jews, Chinese, Hindus did not alter the character of the nation. They were assimilated. They enriched the native culture. Europe owes it greatness in part to its eclecticism, its easy assimilation of foreign ideas and customs.

The dawn of cultural doom only came with the mischievous and malevolent decision taken by unnamed bureaucrats wielding irresistible power over elected politicians (as documented hilariously but accurately  in the TV series Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister) to invite millions of unassimilable Muslims into the country. Muslims are not a race but the adherents of a primitive and cruel ideology, an essential part of which is world-conquest. They came at the same time as the British people developed a reluctance to have children.

The long stretch of Britain’s exclusively European identity is now coming to an end, yet the political class refuse publicly to discuss such a culturally transforming event. Why the silence from the politicians? Are they not proud of their achievement?

The answer is that the demographic projections of a majority Muslim Britain show the British political class to have been catastrophically wrong on multiculturalism and immigration, and they are genuinely afraid to admit it. 

So they cannot take action to change it. When and how did the British become so cowardly? What weakened them so? We think it is socialism that has done it; socialism with its debilitating sentimentalities known as “political correctness”. That is the slow poison with which the British people – and other West European nations –  are committing national suicide.

Great idea! Bring them here to America. Thousands of – mainly Muslim – Arabs from Syria.

That’s the fruit of the long brooding by the Obama administration on What To Do About Syria.

How it came to be born:

First idea. Support the rebels, mostly al-Qaeda affiliates. But with what?  Canned goods or arms?

Second idea: Impose a no-fly zone. But what will happen when the Russian antiaircraft missiles are in place and functioning?

So what then? Send in US troops? Oh dear no. We are demilitarizing pacifists to our core.

But we need to seem to be doing something. What?

How can we “lead” this time “from behind”? Will there be enough shelter for us from those we push on in front? And where shall we lead to?

We haven’t a clue.

We thought we could put off doing anything forever by never  saying we were convinced that chemical weapons were being used. Never admitting that Assad or someone crossed the “red line” we pretended to draw. But we have to admit now that there are chemical weapons being used over there, so WHAT THE HECK ARE WE GOING TO DO?

We are good people. We won’t fight any more wars.

We’re compassionate now, not aggressive. Yes, that’s our foreign policy doctrine.

We no longer project American power, we project Samantha Power.

We’ll call our new foreign policy doctrine the Samantha Power doctrine.

So how can we apply it in the case of Syria, where upwards of 93,000 people have been killed in the fearfully dangerous civil war?

It’s (phew!) fortunately too late to protect the civilian population the way we did in Libya. Or the way we led Britain and France to do it in Libya (from behind).

What then? How apply the Samantha doctrine without actually going to Syria?

Brainwave (probably emanating from the Power source itself):

Help the refugees.

How? Canned goods to the camps in Jordan?

Further brainwave: BRING THEM HERE.

We’ve been trying to encourage Arab immigration into America. We can see how good it has been for Europe. (In forty years it will be a Muslim-majority continent, blessedly governed by sharia law.)

And after all, this is a Muslim country. Muslims have famously made a huge contribution to our success as a nation. Tens of thousands more of them are just what we need. We’ll show them a good time. Take them over the new NSA top secret spying station in Utah. Explain how it works. Give them jobs there. …

Brilliant, brilliant. The Age of Samantha dawns for America.

A new, strange, brilliant idea to solve the problem of too many poor illegal immigrants streaming over the southern border and living as “undocumented aliens” in the United States:

Issue hundreds of thousands – even millions – of permanent residence visas to European immigrants with money and skills, who will not be a burden on the welfare system of America, but will create jobs and increase wealth. Their culture will be entirely compatible. They will assimilate with no trouble at all. Whether they’re from Britain or the continent, they will speak English. (Most non-British Europeans have the start of learning English at school.) They will melt in the demographic pot. Their laws are like America’s laws. Their religions are or were the same as most Americans’. (Okay, we declare an interest: They’ve mostly given up religion now, so would happily swell the ranks of us unbelievers.)

Let the legal immigrants from Europe vastly outnumber the illegal immigrants from South America.

The scheme will also be a lifeline thrown to indigenous Europeans, as they are being crushed in their native lands by immigrants from the Islamic world. (And socialism.)

America is the depository, the great treasure house, of European culture. Indeed, America is Europe’s greatest product. Let it continue to be so: Europe triumphant in the New World, as the old continent sinks under the onslaught of a horde from the dark ages.

It’s time to re-write the poem on the Statue of Liberty:

Keep, ancient lands, your new sharia law!

Give me your gifted energetic best,

Your higher earners yearning to make more,

Your market-savvy ready to invest,

Your managers who’ve learnt to run the store,

Your traders who have undercut the rest,

Your masterminds who know what freedom’s for.

Jillian Becker    June 8, 2013

The Left, as a whole, in the Western World, has become far more extreme in this century than it was in the last. The Socialist and “Conservative” parties of Europe, the Democratic Party of America, the universities everywhere, the media and the film industries, book publishers, song writers, judiciaries, and a slightly varying half of the voters in almost all Western countries, are predominantly of one opinion, consciously or semi-consciously, articulately or silently, that Marx and Lenin, and even (though their names may be spoken a shade more sotto voce) Stalin and Mao, were right.

This is from Front Page, by Vladimir Tismaneanu:

It has become fashionable among leftist circles to invoke a return to Lenin, to radicalism, to utopia. Among those who advocate such imperatives to “retest the communist hypothesis” one can count French philosopher Alain Badiou, a former admirer of the Khmer Rouge, and Slovene thinker, Slavoj Zizek, the new idol of Western university campuses, subject of documentary hagiographic movies, and prophet of a new phantasmagoric world revolution.

To know more about Slavoj Zizek, see our post Red alert, January 21, 2009. And to get the flavor of the man, watch the video at the foot of this post.

Did the partisans of such positions ever stop to think how it would sound a call for “retesting the Nazi hypothesis”? One must be totally oblivious to history, an incurable cynic, in order to ignore the fact that Leninism, just like National-Socialism, means political terrorism, the apotheosis of fanatical partisanship, the boundless cult of violence and nihilism, etc. In short, Leninism presupposes … the destruction of the inner man. Leninism is theoretical and practical anti-humanism.

‘The inner man” in this context means the individual for himself alone, not as a unit of “society”.

There have been conferences and symposia where Lenin is presented, in an academic context and without any trace of compassion for the millions of victims of “the great experiment”, as the philosopher of the break with an order putatively condemned by history.

The “order putatively condemned by history” is of course capitalism, or the free market. Those who condemn it and praise “the great [Communist] experiment” have not noticed that the free market has brought widespread prosperity wherever it has been allowed to, or that Lenin’s experiment, the miserable Soviet Union, failed and fell and lost the Cold War.

All in all, it is unsurprising that the prophets of violence worship Lenin. What is surprising is that intellectuals, who should have learnt from the catastrophes of the 20th century, are engaged in an endeavor driven by  programmatic irresponsibility. It is simply shocking that in countries where the Leninist model was implemented, one can still read and hear hymns honoring the architect of a criminal system.

Should we be amazed by all this? What could one expect from the epigones of Georg Lukacs, the Marxist philosopher who declared … that he preferred the worst form of socialism to the best incarnation of capitalism. …

Georg Lukacs was the Hungarian Commissar, and philosopher of drama and art, on whom Jillian Becker’s character L is based in her novel L: A Novel History.

Real history does not matter for such sectarians. What does matter is the dogma to which they are faithful in total disregard of reality. … It is quite telltale that one of Hugo Chavez’s intellectual heroes was Istvan Meszaros, one of Lukacs’s former students who … has remained a flaming Marxist, faithful to the dialectical sophistries of his mentor.

An excellent example of such world-view is a recent memoir by a Romanian Marxist intellectual, Ion Ianosi, who happened to be deeply involved for long stretches of time in the ideologization of the country’s culture during communism. The volume’s title is My International. Some critics glorify the book as testimony of heartfelt sincerity. What is missing in those more than 800 pages is an honest analysis of Bolshevism as justification of social genocide. Ion Ianosi seemingly excels on topics such as “Marx and Art”, “Lenin and Art”, pretty much the same fields for which his expertise was called upon during his activity within the Romanian communist party’s Agitprop. But Ianosi shies away from trying his expert pen on topics such as the crimes against humanity inspired by the Marxist-Leninist ideology.

Even before the Bolsheviks’ coming into power, it was clear that Lenin was a fanatical propagandist, a utopian ideologue fixated on social purity and purification, an heir to Robespierre and St. Just, but no philosopher. Philosophy implies doubt and Lenin was the man without doubts. …

Lenin was the practitioner of a simplistic, partisan, and exclusivist philosophy. He rejected emphatically any possibility for a middle path, of a tertium datur between what he called “bourgeois ideology” and the “proletarian” one.

We at TAC are all for “bourgeois ideology”, if the bourgeoisie as such – the successful middle class – can be said to have such a dusty thing as an ideology. We value the middle class, anyway, above the others, because out of it has come almost every one of those men (and handful of women) who have advanced our civilization and augmented the glory of our culture in the last five hundred years. (Though also most of those who’ve done our civilization the worst harm, such as Marx, Lenin, Lukacs …)

Lenin’s Manichaeism [bourgeois bad, proletarian good] was inexorable. For Lenin and his followers, ideas were (are) always the manifestation of class interests. … This is the meaning of a notion essential for the Leninist conception about ideas, ideologies and philosophical consciousness: partiinost – partisanship, class position, militant commitment, total and abject subordination to the party line.

Leninism is a revolutionary doctrine that sanctifies political violence and condemns entire social categories to state-engineered extinction. It is … rooted in the visceral contempt for the rule of law, legality, and the universality of human rights. “Back to Lenin” means a return to barbarism, blindness, and murder.

We are not enamored of the phrase “human rights”. We prefer to speak of human freedom, which we suppose is what Professor Tismaneanu, who has lived under Communism in Romania, probably means.

Now here’s Slavoj Zizek. He starts at about the 2 minute mark. Don’t expect to be rewarded for over 15 minutes of  paying attention with any impressive ideas. He says nothing much, but with strong emphasis, and what he does say is notably wrong. For instance, that Norway is intolerant of immigrants! (Go here to test this notion, and to any other of Bruce Bawer’s numerous articles on the same subject.) He thinks the major political groupings in Europe are now the “capitalist anti-immigrants” on one side and the [Islamic] immigrants on the other. (Would it were so! ) He calls himself a Leftist, though oddly declaring that in America there is “an excess of  anti-capitalism”; calls Fox News “the enemy”; and implies that the worst problem facing mankind is … you guessed it … global-warming.

First a story about a little English boy who was so tormented and terrified by Muslim school fellows that he committed suicide.

Next the story of a Norwegian boy and his puppy, told in an article titled Europe: A Continent in Flight by Bruce Bawer at Front Page:

Danish Christians and Jews are being bullied by Muslim thugs into checking out of their neighborhoods and moving to safer locales. French Jews are taking it on the lam from Paris to settle in marginally less dangerous parts of London. Londoners are leaving their increasingly dodgy city and, literally, heading for the hills. East Oslo is being drained of ethnic Norwegians. And all of them are running scared for one reason, and one reason only: they’re terrified of getting beaten up by primitive thugs with a primitive religion who, at these European taxpayers’ expense, have been imported from some of the most primitive parts of the world.

Years and years ago these cultural hooligans, these religious autocrats, these would-be enforcers of sharia, were welcomed to Europe by clueless, spineless political leaders, and – although the reality of “creeping jihad” has long since set in – they continue to be celebrated by most of those leaders … for purportedly enriching European culture. And all the while, as a result, European culture is quickly going down the tubes.

For a step-by-step account of just what those clueless spineless political leaders did to bring about the Muslim conquest of Europe by immigration, see our post Europe betrayed, February 11, 2010.

When you’re discussing such large-scale phenomena such as this one – hundreds of thousands of Muslims occupying this or that part of this or that city, hundreds of thousands of native Londoners relocating hither and thither in consequence – it can be hard to grasp it all, to reduce the big picture to a comprehensible, human scale. …  The other day the Norwegian newspaperAftonbladet reported on [a] European boy who found himself in the jihadist crosshairs and was forced to flee. …

On the evening of February 16, a boy – whose named has been withheld, whether because of his age, or to protect him from reprisals, or both – got on a bus in the town of Egersund in western Norway. He was headed back home to Stavanger, fifty or so miles away, and was carrying his puppy. Upon boarding the bus, he checked with the driver to make sure it was OK to take the dog onboard. The driver said yes: he had no problem with it. Unfortunately, three other passengers, whom Aftonbladet identifies as being “of foreign origin” (another source actually dares to use the word “Muslim”), did have a problem. One of the men walked up to the driver and expressed his strong objection to the presence of the pet; another approached the boy and informed him that if he did not get off the bus with his dog at once, they would beat him up.

What happened next is in dispute. According to the boy, the driver, afraid not to cave in to the men’s demands, pulled the bus over and ordered the boy and his dog off the bus. The driver, for his part, claims that he knew nothing of the tensions between the boy and the Muslims, and insists that the boy left the bus of his own accord. In any event, the undisputed fact is that the boy exited the bus at a spot on the highway that was smack dab in the middle of nowhere. The temperature was below freezing; the time, just before midnight. Fortunately he had a cell phone, and was able to phone a friend to pick him up. When she finally got there, some time later, she said, “he was cold and still and it was plain that the incident had had a powerful impact on him.” The national railway system, which operates the bus, has chosen to accept the driver’s account and will not investigate the boy’s complaint.

Whatever the specific details of the story, the narrative’s main point is clear – as is its larger import. The story of that boy and his dog, simply put, is the story of today’s Europe in miniature – the story of a continent whose natives are increasingly being tormented by Koran-wielding tyrants, and increasingly in flight. 

Day by day, step by step, Islam advances towards dominance in every Western country, including America.

This is from Front Page, by David Solway:

Terrorism is an effective Islamic tactic, but “entryism” — the penetrating of academia, the media, government, labor unions, protest groups and the very social climate — is even more so. What we are observing is the practice of subversion … The neighborhood mosque, as we have seen, is only the beginning of our troubles. If its pacific nature cannot be guaranteed and its respect for local statutes and civic life assured, its effects will spread outward in waves of destabilization, one of the chief aims of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The mosque’s “pacific nature” and “respect for local statutes and civic life” certainly cannot be assured. And while they last, the forms and institutions of Western civic life are all too easily exploited by the quiet invaders.

Here’s an example of how it’s being done in Britain (via Vlad Tepes):

Note how easily the polite, reasonable, unaggressive voices of opposition are overruled by the bad-tempered chairwoman.

And here we quote from an article by Alan Caruba at Family Security Matters:

“The Faith of the Prophet Mohammed will continue to impact and transform all aspects of American life: social, political, and economic. Save for a cataclysmic event that will shatter demographics, Islam by 2050 will emerge as the nation’s dominant religion.”

The author quotes from a book by Paul L. Williams titled Crescent Moon Rising: The Islamic Transformation of America.

Williams offers facts that are nothing less than astounding.

“Muslims continue to pour into the country occupy positions (vacated by aging Americans) as physicians, engineers, and scientists. Others arrived to perform tasks that American workers are unwilling to perform in food-processing plants, agricultural facilities, and telecommunications. In addition to the Muslims who come here with employment visas, thousands more arrive with student visas to enroll in colleges throughout the country. Still others with ‘diversity’ visas to enrich America’s racial composition.”

“In 1992, nearly fifty thousand Muslims arrived in the United States and received permanent residency status. In 2009, that number soared to 115,000. In truth, no one knows for certain how many Muslim immigrants are presently living in the country.”

“In addition to the legal and illegal Muslim immigrants, eighty thousand refugees enter this country under resettlement programs. Nearly seventy-five thousand from Islamic countries.”

“Islam, at present, is the most rapidly growing religion in the country, with outreach programs on college campuses, in prisons, and within the military.”

“Islam provides an antithesis to secular America”, says Williams, offering a version of “traditional values” that would impose restrictions that few Americans anticipate; a ban on liquor, a reduced status of women, dress codes, and much more. “Muslims do not recognize the legitimacy of all faiths,” warns Williams. …

And those few – Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism – that they do recognize as “legitimate”, are suffered to exist, but sharia requires their adherents to be subjugated, and blood money (the “jizya” tax) to be extorted from them.

In an earlier America, there were restrictions on immigrants from various parts of the world deemed antithetical to the nation’s values. The early waves of immigrants came mostly from England and Nordic nations. They were followed by those from Italy, Germany and Eastern Europe as the need for more workers for America’s growing industries required more immigrants. Asians were not particularly welcome and Arabs were even less welcome. This changed with the Hart-Celler Act, signed into law by President Johnson in the wake of the Civil Rights Act. It ended an immigration quota system that had governed America for most of his history. It was, for the record, widely opposed by a two-to-one margin. It is a legacy from Edward Kennedy who shepherded the bill through the Senate.

It wasn’t until the shock of 9/11 that most Americans became aware of the hostility, the malevolence, and the spread of Islam.

Williams notes, “September 11, 2001, was not a day that changed everything. It was rather the day that revealed how much had changed. The real shock came not only from the devastation, but also the demographics. The world for many Americans became a place suddenly unrecognizable.”

This has already become a fact of life for Europeans and is rapidly become one for Americans, particularly in large urban centers where the presence of Muslims is visible for their dress, the many restaurants and outlets that cater to them, and the increasing number of mosques found everywhere. USA Today reported in February 2012 that “The number of Islamic places in the United States soared 74% in the past decade…the overall number of mosques quietly rose from 1,209 in 2000 to 2,106 in 2010.”

Largely unseen and unknown are the many Muslim organizations throughout the U.S., some of which have been found to have terror connections, and all funded not merely to spread the faith, but to ultimately impose it on our present political structure and open culture. …

Even so, Americans elected and reelected Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a Muslim father and adopted son of a Muslim step-father. He is a President who keeps insisting that al Qaeda is receding as a threat when it is, in fact, a growing threat everywhere. And, soon enough, here again.

On the other hand, offering a ray of hope, there is this by David Goldman, aka Spengler:

By 2050, elderly dependents will comprise nearly a third of the population of some Muslim nations, notably Iran — converging on America’s dependency ratio at mid-century. But it is one thing to face such a problem with America’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $40,000, and quite another to face it with Iran’s per capita GDP of $7,000 — especially given that Iran will stop exporting oil before the population crisis hits. The industrial nations face the prospective failure of their pension systems. But what will happen to countries that have no pension system, where traditional society assumes the care of the aged and infirm? In these cases it is traditional society that will break down, horribly and irretrievably so.

My 2011 book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too) assembled evidence that the decline of Islam as a religion explained collapsing fertility, just as the decline of Catholicism explained collapsing fertility in lands once blessed by large families — Spain, Italy, Poland, Ireland, and Quebec. Iran’s total fertility rate plunged to an estimated 1.6% in 2010, barely above Europe’s rate of 1.5 children per female. In 1979, when the Islamists took power in Iran, the average woman bore seven children. Nothing like this sudden snapping shut of the national womb has ever happened before in all of history. And the rest of the Muslim world is headed in the same direction. …

Islamist leaders like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan have been shouting from the rooftops about the trend for the past five years, as my book reports. Excluding the independence-hungry Kurdish minority, Turkey’s fertility rate is probably around 1.5 children per female, about the same as Iran’s, and a guarantee of national decline.

We are cheered by this information. Though we don’t understand why David Goldman writes: “In September 2006 I warned that the Muslim world was heading towards a demographic catastrophe.”

It may be a catastrophe for the Muslim world, but if the Muslim womb really is “snapping shut”, it is surely extremely good news for the rest of us.

At present the Muslims who are colonizing Europe are bearing children at a higher rate than the indigenous populations. Will the European Muslim womb “snap shut” too?  And if so, will the snap come in time to save Europe from falling under the savage totalitarian rule of Islam?

It is a thing passing strange that many – a big majority –  of the successful Silicon Valley billionaires, who achieved what they did precisely because their inventiveness and enterprise were nurtured by capitalism and freedom, vote for socialism with its restrictions and regulations, its discouragement of individual effort, its confiscation of wealth by punitive taxation, its infertility for innovation. The same could be said of the elites of the east coast, and wherever else the children of Liberty have grown to despise her.

How explain the cognitive dissonance?

Victor Davis Hanson explores the contradictions that are writ so large in California. He writes at PJ Media:

We keep trying to understand the enigma of California, mostly why it still breathes for a while longer, given the efforts to destroy the sources of its success. Let’s try to navigate through its sociology and politics to grasp why something that should not survive is surviving quite well — at least in some places.

The old blue/red war for California is over. Conservatives lost. Liberals won — by a combination of flooding the state with government-supplied stuff, and welcoming millions in while showing the exit to others. The only mystery is … how high will taxes go, how many will leave, how happy will the majority be at their departure?

California has changed not due to race but due to culture, most prominently because the recent generation of immigrants from Latin America did not — as in the past, for the most part — come legally in manageable numbers and integrate under the host’s assimilationist paradigm.

Which is to say, the melting-pot, that worked so well for a few hundred years.

Instead, in the last three decades huge arrivals of illegal aliens from Mexico and Latin America saw Democrats as the party of multiculturalism, separatism, entitlements, open borders, non-enforcement of immigration laws, and eventually plentiful state employment.

Given the numbers, the multicultural paradigm of the salad bowl that focused on “diversity” rather than unity, and the massive new government assistance, how could the old American tonic of assimilation, intermarriage, and integration keep up with the new influxes? It could not. …

There were, of course, other parallel demographic developments. Hundreds of thousands of the working and upper-middle class, mostly from the interior of the state, have fled — maybe four million in all over the last thirty years, taking with them $1 trillion in capital and income-producing education and expertise. Apparently, they tired of high taxes, poor schools, crime, and the culture of serial blame-gaming and victimhood. In this reverse Dust Bowl migration, a barren no-tax Nevada or humid Texas was a bargain.

Their California is long gone … and a Stockton, Fresno, or Visalia misses their presence, because they had skills, education, and were net pluses to the California economy.

Add in a hip, youth, and gay influx to the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, and coastal Los Angeles that saw California as a sort of upscale, metrosexual lifestyle … and California now has an enormous number of single-person households, childless couples, and one-child families. Without the lifetime obligation to raise $1 million in capital to pay for bringing up and educating two kids from birth to 21 …  the non-traditional classes have plenty of disposable income for entertainment, housing, and high taxes. …

Finally, there is our huge affluent public work force. It is the new aristocracy; landing a job with the state is like hitting the lottery. Californians have discovered that, in today’s low/non-interest economy, a $70,000 salary with defined benefit public pension for life is far better than having the income from a lifetime savings of $3 million. …

And with money came political clout. To freeze the pension contribution of a highway patrolman is a mortal sin; but no one worries much about the private security’s guard minimum wage and zero retirement, whose nightly duties are often just as dangerous. The former is sacrosanct; the latter a mere loser.

The result of 30 years of illegal immigration, the reigning culture of the coastal childless households, the exodus of the overtaxed, and the rule of public employees is not just Democratic, but hyper-liberal supermajorities in the legislature. In the most naturally wealthy state in the union with a rich endowment from prior generations, California is serially broke — the master now of its own fate. It has the highest menu of income, sales, and gas taxes in the nation, and about the worst infrastructure, business climate, and public education. Is the latter fact despite or because of the former?

How, then, does California continue? Read on, but in a nutshell, natural and inherited wealth are so great on the coast that a destructive state government must work overtime to ruin what others wrought. …

Somehow, in just thirty years we created obstacles to public learning that produce results approaching the two-century horrific legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. About half the resources of the California State University system are devoted to remedial schooling for underperforming high school students (well over half who enter take remediation courses; half don’t graduate even in six years; and well over half have sizable financial aid). … The majority of the once-vaunted upper-tier University of California campuses now resemble second-tier CSU of old. Yet I think a Fresno State graduate of 1965 was far better educated than a UC Irvine or UC Santa Cruz student of today.

The state’s wealthiest and best-prepared students are perhaps only well-taught at its elite schools — the two UC campuses at Berkeley and UCLA, Stanford, Caltech, USC, Pepperdine, or Santa Clara — while the poorer but still serious students increasingly enroll in the new private online and tech schools that sprout up around failed CSU campuses. …

The coastal elites unite politically with the interior poor …  Along the coast, elites have harvested well California’s natural and acquired wealth. I’ll again just toss out a few brands; you can imagine the lucre and jobs that are generated from Santa Rosa to San Diego: Apple, Chevron, Disney, DreamWorks, Facebook, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Hollywood, Napa Valley, Oracle, PG&E, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Wells Fargo, the ports of Los Angeles, San Diego, and Oakland.

So let us not speak of California decline, but of California’s decline and another California boom — one of 6% unemployment and another of 16%, one of $100,000 per capita income and another of $15,000, one of cottages sold on the first day on the market in Newport and another of vacant McMansions molding away in Stockton.

Success continues on the coast and is managed by very wealthy and mostly liberal residents of the sprawl that surrounds Los Angeles and San Francisco. For the five million or so who are enriched in enterprise zones like these — and there are thousands more spin-off and smaller such companies — life is pretty good if you keep your household small, inherited a house, or make enough money to buy something at about $500 to $1,000 dollars a square foot. In Selma, new 1800 sq. foot homes sell for $140,000; in Palo Alto, dollhouses go for $1.5 million. …

Coastal folk seem to view high taxes like Mafia protection money, but in the sense of psychological satisfaction and freedom from guilt. For now, sales, gas, and income taxes are not so high as to matter to those who voted for them, at least in view of the social and political advantages of coastal living: the beautiful weather, the Pacific panorama, the hip culture …

To the extent that “they” (i.e. you, reader) exist, the distant others are nebulous, rarely thought-about souls. Perhaps they really do enjoy polluting the planet as they generate the electricity, pipe in the natural gas and oil, refine the fuels, grow the food, and cut and haul the lumber that gives a Palo Alto or Santa Barbara the stuff to go on …

One of the questions I always hear from strangers: “Why doesn’t everyone leave?” The answer is simple: for the coastal overdogs there is nowhere else where the money is as good and the weather and scenery are as enjoyable. [But] yes, the middle-class small farmers, hardware-store owners, company retirees, and electricians are leaving in droves.

The Latino population, I would imagine, would be in revolt over the elitist nature of California politics. Of course, thousands of second-generation Latinos have become public employees, from teachers to DMV clerks, and understandably so vote a straight Democrat-public union ticket. But millions are not working for the state, and they suffer dramatically from the ruling Bay Area left-wing political agenda of regulations, green quackery, and legal gymnastics. It is not just that the foreign national illegally entered the U.S. from Oaxaca, but entered the most complex, over-regulated, over-taxed, and over-lawyered state in the nation — hence the disconnects.

Take energy. California may have reserves of 35 billion barrels of oil in its newly discovered shale formations, and even more natural gas — the best way to provide clean electricity and, perhaps soon, transportation energy for the state. Tens of thousands of young Latino immigrants — given that agriculture is increasingly mechanizing, construction is flat, and the state is broke — could be making high wages from Salinas to Paso Robles, and along the I-5 corridor, if fracking and horizontal drilling took off. Even more jobs could accrue in subsidiary construction and trucking. And for a cynic, billions of dollars in state energy taxes from gas and oil revenue would ensure that the state’s generous handouts would be funded for a generation. Did someone forget that the California boom of the 1930s and 1940s was fueled by cheap, in-state oil?

More importantly, our power companies have the highest energy bills in the nation, given all sorts of green and redistributionist mandates. The costs fall most heavily on the cold winter/hot summer interior residents, who are the poorest in the state. Those who insist that the utilities invest in costly alternate energy and other green fantasies live mostly in 65-70 degree coastal weather year-round and enjoy low power bills.

Yet the liberal coastal political lock-hold on the state continues.

No one in San Joaquin or Tranquility cares about a baitfish in the delta, but they do vote nonetheless for the elites who divert water from farms, put the poor farm worker out of work, and feel good about saving the smelt in the process. …

How then does the California coalition work, and in some sense work so well?

The coastal elite offers an agenda for more welfare funding, scholarships, class warfare, public unions, diversity, affirmative action, open borders, and amnesty, and in response the interior voter signs off on everything from gay marriage, solar and wind subsidies, gun restrictions, mass transit schemes, and the entire progressive tax-and-spend agenda. Most of this coalition never much sees one another.

The young Mountain View programmer keeps clear of Woodlake. He even has only a vague idea of what life is like for those who live in nearby Redwood City and make his arugula salad at the hip pasta bar in Palo Alto. In turn, the Redwood City dishwasher has an equally murky sense that the wealthy kid who works at Google does not wish to deport his uncle — and so the two become unspoken political partners of sorts. One of the state’s wealthiest cities, a gated Atherton, is juxtaposed to one of its most Latinate communities, Redwood City. But they might as well be Mercury and Pluto. Or should we applaud that the owner of the manor and his grass cutter vote identically — and against the interests of the guy who sold and serviced the Honda lawn mower? …

The liberal aristocracy is as class-bound as the old Republican blue-stockings, but saved from populist ostracism by what I have called the “hip” exemption — liberalism’s new veneer that allows one to be both consumer and critic of the Westernized good life, to praise the people and to stay as far away from them as possible. 

California is a tired idea.

Is America a tired idea? Are Americans becoming tired of the idea on which America was founded  – liberty itself?  Do they really want a different America, a country more like socialist Europe? Or are they just blind to where their votes are taking them?

Geert Wilders speaks

Creeping Sharia – where we found this video – asks a question to which we too would like to know the answer :

Is there a Geert Wilders in the U.S.?

Is there anyone in America who will stand up not only to the increasing Islamic influence in the U.S. but more importantly to the tyranny of a corrupt, dictator-like government now imposing its will on Americans?

Yesterday, by a majority of 1,057,148* (a figure we have just derived from the Drudge Report), Americans chose to give up liberty by re-electing the socialist Islam-lover Barack Obama to the presidency.

And so “government of the people, by the people, for the people” is perishing, contrary to President Lincoln’s hope.

It is no wild exaggeration but a sober truth that Obama prefers to govern in the manner of a tyrant, against liberty in principle, and destructive of it in practice.

Thomas Sowell gives a few of many possible examples of Obama’s contempt for American Constitutional democracy:

The checks and balances of the Constitution have been evaded time and time again by the Obama administration, undermining the fundamental right of the people to determine the laws that govern them, through their elected representatives.

You do not have a self-governing people when huge laws are passed too fast for the public to even know what is in them.

You do not have a self-governing people when “czars” are created by Executive Orders, so that individuals wielding vast powers equal to, or greater than, the powers of Cabinet members do not have to be vetted and confirmed by the people’s elected representatives in the Senate, as Cabinet members must be.

You do not have a self-governing people when decisions to take military action are referred to the United Nations and the Arab League, but not to the Congress of the United States, elected by the American people, whose blood and treasure are squandered.You do not have a self-governing people when a so-called “consumer protection” agency is created to be financed by the unelected officials of the Federal Reserve System, which can create its own money out of thin air, instead of being financed by appropriations voted by elected members of Congress who have to justify their priorities and trade-offs to the taxpaying public.

You do not have a self-governing people when laws passed by the Congress, signed by previous Presidents, and approved by the federal courts, can have the current President waive whatever sections he does not like, and refuse to enforce those sections, despite his oath to see that the laws are faithfully executed.

Barack Obama … has refused to carry out sections of the immigration laws that he does not like, unilaterally creating de facto amnesty for those illegal immigrants he has chosen to be exempt from the law. The issue is not — repeat, NOT — the wisdom or justice of this President’s immigration policy, but the seizing of arbitrary powers not granted to any President by the Constitution of the United States.

You do not have a self-governing people if President Obama succeeds in having international treaties under United Nations auspices govern the way Americans live their lives, whether with gun control laws or other laws. …

The desire to circumvent the will of the American people was revealed even more ominously when Barack Obama said to Russian President Medvedev – when he thought the microphone was off – that, after he is reelected and need never face the voters again, he can be more “flexible” with the Russians about missile defense.

There are other signs of Obama’s contempt for American Constitutional democracy, but these should be more than enough. Dare we risk how far he will go when he never has to face the voters again, and can appoint Supreme Court justices who can rubber stamp his power grabs?

A majority of 1,057,148 chose to force the nation to risk it.

America is no longer the political embodiment of the idea of liberty.

Thomas Sowell ends by asking rhetorically –

Will this still be America in 2016?

No.

* Later numbers of popular and electoral college votes may be found here.