April 23, 2015
Source: Shutterstock
Europe needs lots of young people to shore up its cratering demographics.
The only places where fertility is not cratering are (a) sub-Saharan Africa and (b) a handful of the most backward Muslim nations like Yemen and Afghanistan.
If we exclude (a) and (b) as sources for mass immigration, as”see previous item”we certainly should, it’s a demographically cratering world. Given the fact that it’s also a finite world with finite resources, this is probably a good thing. At any rate, it’s a thing we should figure out how to cope with by some means other than demographic Ponzi schemes.
It’s our fault for messing with their countries.
Their countries shouldn”t have given us occasion to. As a proud First Worlder, I reserve my country’s right to go and mess with nations that might possibly pose some danger to mine; and I set the bar for “possibly” way low.
While the Bush 43 administration was gearing up for war in Iraq I attended a dinner with a roomful of defense and intelligence types at Bill Buckley’s house. “You don”t really think Saddam’s trying for nukes, do you?” I said to the guy sitting next to me. “I doubt it,” he said, “but why take a chance? If there’s a one percent probability of us losing a city, we should take out the sumbitch. Make that zero point one.”
Memo to Third World: Don”t tug on Superman’s cape.
Note please that I”m a To Hell With Them Hawk. I”m not endorsing GWB-style missionary wars. Nor …
We should give lots of aid money and help to fix their home countries. It worked for Germany and Japan.
I”m down with this if it means we get to drop two nukes on them first.
Taking them in is the least Europeans can do after all those centuries of colonialism.
European colonialism was a great blessing to the Third World, back when our relative numbers and technological superiority made it realistic.
Many honest Indians have acknowledged their debt to Britain. Nirad Chaudhuri had a portrait of Winston Churchill in his sitting room. At this very moment there are black people all over Africa on their knees praying to their gods for the white man to come back and rule them again.
Traveling around China thirty years ago I noticed that the people most likely to greet one in a friendly fashion were older people from the treaty ports who had grown up under European colonialism and looked back on it nostalgically. The round-eyes may have been snooty and smelt like sour milk, but they were better than rapacious warlords and corrupt mandarins.
And if the topic is historical wrongs, Europeans have plenty to say. There were, for example, those centuries of slave-raiding across the Mediterranean from North Africa. Prof. Davis, in his 2003 book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, reckoned the total number of slaves taken from the early 1500s to the late 1700s, as one to one and a quarter million. Reparations!
