Western Demographic Decline a False Crisis Manufactured by Racists?
In a Nation video piece on the film Demographic Winter, contributing writer Kathryn Joyce voices concern that an “international coalition of the religious right” [-vast right wing conspiracy, anyone?-] is overly focused on which babies are being born. To an enlightened member of the international community, it cannot be of any consequence what the religion and race are of the babies being born in Western countries. But can one imagine the following quote being uttered in reference to catastrophically declining populations of native Africans, or East Indians?
“The demographic winter is a -an old argument basically that European White Christian West is not having enough babies to replace its old and its dying. And that’s kind of an old argument, but it’s being repurposed now by an international coalition of the religious right, hoping to restore something they call the natural family, which is the patriarchal family, the family where the mother stays at home and raises a large family of children. They’re promoting it through a lot of different ways. They’re promoting it through a new documentary that was released this week called Demographic Winter, The Decline of the Human Family.
I think their real agenda, more than necessarily a concern for Europe, is a concern with gaining an entry for their ideology into European politics. Right now they’re really tapping into a lot of anxienty that Europeans are feeling about different cultural conflicts that are occurring because of differnt immigrant populations. Two examples really spring to mind, Italy and Russia, which have both promoted these different birth initiatives with prizes ranging from refrigerators or free cars if you conceive a patriot for the country, to actual -like- payouts, ranging from one thousand to almost ten thousand dollars.
Yes, there are demographic shifts; yes, women did decide in the past several decades to stop having as many children. They made a decision to control their fertility when contraceptives became more available. But the only reason to call that a crisis, or a demographic winter is if you are overly focused on which babies are being born, and whether they’re the right religion and race.”
Not even social trends which result in declining births for specific populations can be viewed negatively, for concern over the disappearance of a “people” presumes the desirability of their existence. In the most fashionable circles, of course, nothing of the sort obtains. It occurs to us here at the Kinist Review, that the “colorblind” conservative belief (hope, really) that Pakistanis would raise up a generation of Christ-worshiping children in England,or that the spread of “inclusive” evangelical mega-churches in the US would lead to the decline of black on white crime is the hopelessly naive and a wishful fairy tale that common sense critics knew it to be at the time. But the quote from Joyce is instructive in the elemental faith of self-loathing whites that “culture” doesn’t matter, is arbitrary -a faith that is a consequence of the ascendancy of materialism, and a materialist view of culture.
The roots of Western materialism are easily traced. Robert Nisbet saw in them the origins of the ideology of “progress,” and Thomas Molnar the source of the flight from adulthood into utopianism. In these complimentary theses, we see defined the oppositional camps in the “civilization war” that is the defining historical current of the 21st century. But, contrary to the neoconservative view, with its geopolitical focus that flows directly from the Machiavellian realism of figures such as Leo Strauss and Harry Jaffa, the civilizations in mutual confrontation are not “Islam” and the “West,” but rather the self-consciously white, Christian West and the devotees of materialism from within the same racial family. This internecine war supersedes and subsumes the conflict with Islam, which is no more than political and social pan-Arabism opportunistically making inroads into a West weakened by a spiritual clash that will, eventually, redefine and reorder its individual nations for the foreseeable future -either in the capitulation of the last vestiges of self-conscious identity by whites, clearing the way for their extinction, or in the breakup and realignment of Western Nations along ethno-political lines of force. Our readers know on which side of the battle we align ourselves.
