Mr. Steyn has a clever writing style, which is needed to be able to read about such a somber subject. There is a Hilaire Belloc poem titled the Pacifist, which Mark Steyn references, and contains a line something like:

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight,
But Roaring Bill who killed him thought it right.

That will pretty much give you an idea of where this book will take you. Mr. Steyn points out that there's an angry and militant population out there, and the West isn't doing much to address it. The book is meant to be a wake-up call regarding the current war on terrorism, and who's winning. The author notes that Islam is on the rise, with high birth rates and zeal for its cause(s), while the West is declining with its low birth rates, and large social welfare dependency. Even if support for militant Islam is very low among Muslims, and assuming that the majority of Muslims neither support or condone the actions of the militants, the author notes that they're but a silent majority. As the author states, even if the number of militants is very small, like one-hundredth of one percent, in a population of one million, that still amounts to 100 potential terrorist supporters. And there are hundreds of population centers of over a million, not just in the Middle East and Muslim majority countries. Given that it only took 19 individuals to carry out 9/11, those numbers stack up against the west unless peaceful solutions are found.


( )

A hot steamy jingoistic paranoid-schizophrenic right-wing mess. ( )

CX02

N.B. Some people recommend trying to find points of agreement with someone you basically disagree with, before getting into the rest of it; the most obvious example is Paul in most of his epistles; many psychological writers make similar recommendations. So I’m at some point going to reread the book with an eye to that. Of course that’s not to say that I’m going to take on his battles against the youth, (not that he’s that old himself), the Muslims, or whoever, just that I would have something good to say about his intentions. I will try to carry both these tasks before me though, as they say, in the natural you can’t do it.

Update:

The world as a whole has always been mostly colored, and it is currently becoming less white. “We used to go out and colonize and now the immigrants are moving in.” So if you identify with the lily-white.... And he does slip in the disputes with the Mexicans, even though it’s supposed to be the Muslims, right. Unnerving!

Of course, globally Christianity is not receding; in Africa it’s expanding. But that’s not us, not the old stock, not the West.... And the old stock is still wealthy, wealthier—

But there’s the old human discontent. “I have money, so that’s not what I want.”

And there’s the old thing, which is very modern/young: the refusal to see that my rise, really any trend, does not last forever.

But Steyn likes to express his fears mathematically.

....................

Humor is usually a sort of veiled attack, although humor itself doesn’t have to be exactly an attack. Either way, when I first read through this book I wrote down all the things that I thought were funny, in a classic mock-the-mocker that was just too appealing to say no to. But when I really get going I can talk all day, so I decided to just leave the long review in the comments section in the unlikely event that you’re inclined to care, and leave you instead with one or two thoughts.

About Muslims. Steyn has to explain away, briefly at least, the success that the Muslim empires enjoyed in past centuries relative to Western empires; he does this by saying that they just sponged tax money etc. off the non-Muslim groups and had a big party until eventually there was nothing left. The problem here is what you consider the success of an empire, or really any human success, to be. Steyn seems to think it’s mostly money or something like that, or maybe warm bodies and the will to kill. But every African dictatorship has the warm bodies and the will to kill, including the Christian ones, but nobody cares, not even Steyn. But the Muslim states at their height were very advanced by any standards, in everything from math to mysticism, and many people in the past fled from West to East. And any, you know, cultured culture, whether it’s Renaissance Italy or anybody else, can’t just buy success. Sure, one guy buys the painting, but somebody else has to paint it. And it’s the same with anybody.

About Mark Steyn. I think that the real issue here is that he thinks that the youth are soft and corrupt. And there is some vice among the youth, although maybe it’s more a matter of being corrupt than soft, since rap has plenty of will to kill. But either way, Steyn’s solution is basically to have a big war with the Muslims—or the Mexicans, or whoever— and get a few youths killed to toughen the rest of them up. (I decline to comment specifically, except to say that this is not what I’ll be voting for.)

I must highly, HIGHLY recommend AMERICA ALONE to anyone who, like me, still believes in American exceptionalism. Mark Styen analyzes demographic trends in western civilization, paying special attention to recent trends in Europe. In particular, while the native populations of most European countries are on the decline, muslim immigrants are flooding in (and out-breeding europeans). Steyn hypothesizes that you cannot so drastically alter the demographic makeup of a nation without the political climate also being affected. He spends much of the book citing various statistical studies & current events to support his claim, and he does so marvelously! America Alone is an informative (as well as entertaining) wake-up call to the people of America. It is a warning of what we have to look forward to if we continue to kowtow to those who practice a faith that teaches that we are all infidels. Its not hard to see, based upon what is already happening in some parts of Europe. Its just a matter of whether or not America will realize what is happening before it is too late.

While the book has been banned in Canada (the weenies in the Canadian government claim that the book is "hate speech"!), it should not have been. It isn't about hating muslim people. It is about being aware of the goals of the so-called "religion of peace" & standing firm against the PC ideology that has us making concessions to the islamic faith & its practitioners.

( )

The End of the World as We Know It

A controversial read and strengthens my views on all religious fanaticism. ( )

A controversial read and strengthens my views on all religious fanaticism. ( )

I think I would have liked this book better if the author hadn't talked so much about the dangers of Islam. ( )

Mark Steyn's writing is riveting. ( )

America Alone is a polemic on the problems of aging and diminishing European societies and the expansion of the Islamic world into those societies. It is written by a Belgian-Canadian living in the US who espouses Christian Republican beliefs and for most people this will either be a book you hate or love. What is great about this book is that it lays down the tough issues that we face. What is terrible about this book is that it associates some clear thinking on demographics and religion with utter nonsense about climate change, welfarism, and citizen militia.

Mark Steyn deals in issies that most find unpalatable and much of the European world has chosen to ignore. The European approach is disasterous and with the exception of a few in the Netherlands, we just aren't ready to deal with our own decline. Steyn spells it out brutally and while he might be picking and choosing statistics to bolster his case, it is the general thrust of the problem that should worry the western world.

The issue that Steyn deals with primarily is demographics - we all know that Europe is in decline but we do nothing about it. We know that our birth rates are too low and that the population count is being artificially inflated by immigration. Immigration is not inherently a bad thing (and Steyn stops short of arguing that it is) but an influx of people who refuse to identify with the host culture is. In the UK, Muslims have overtaken Hindus in population size in the last decade - I'm not sure anyone can recall a single problem within the British Hindu population as it sought to make itself part of the society within which it lived.

This is part of the problem that Steyn identifies - a pan-Islamic model is massively more appealing to Muslims than is any national identity. Steyn is absolutely right to say that the exportation of Wahabbism from Saudi Arabia is a direct threat in the same way that Soviet Communism was but it is just a much more effective threat. Islam is not monolithic but you wouldn't know that from the examples such as that Steyn cites in which a European of Bangladeshi descent demands the right to cover herself from view in a burkha - the burkha is a Bedouin garment designed to combat sandstorms in the desert - not very useful in Europe or Bangladesh so not of those cultures. What the example highlights is that it is the assertive Arabian form of the religion that is being embraced.

Steyn fronts up on the war that is really being fought between the West and Islam - culture. It is a war being fought on terms that the West will struggle to win. Demographics favour the East. Henlein (Starship Troopers) puts it better than Steyn can - cultures that out-breed others will inevitable dominate them. Steyn illustrates this perfectly with the case of the United Kingdom which dominated more of the world than anyone in history simply by generating a surplus of healthy people combined with technological superiority. Without the surplus, there would have been no British Empire, no exportation of Corinthian values, no end to the slave trade (a worldwide phenomenon), no system of international laws or liberal institutions.

We in the West choose to ignore history - we ignore the collapse of the great and enlightened Athenian empire because it's people became too decadent. Steyn makes the point well that it is younger, hungrier societies that win. Europe has pretty much given up. The societies of the Middle East, filled with a surplus of angry young men are more than we are prepared to cope with so we appease them instead.

Unfortunately in reading this book, it becomes difficult to associate with it's core argument because the rest is appalling. Steyn does not even feel the need for internal consistency and his arguments disintegrate which makes this a missed opportunity. Steyn discusses the disgraceful transfers of wealth from the West to the House of Saud in return for oil and what that money does in waging cool war against us. Yet he abjectly refuses to acknowledge the root cause in our dependency on fossil fuels. Without Americans driving their gas guzzlers, we wouldn't be funding our own demise.

Steyn doesn't understand climate change and bashes Al Gore in mostly humourless fashion. Steyn promotes gun ownership by citing the safety it provides while living in a society with unbelievable homicide rates compared to gentrified Europe. Steyn advocates citizen militia as a more effective form of self-defence and claims that it is the welfare state that has driven Europe into the tailspin. This is so annoying as it could be argued that the welfare state is a symptom of a decadent society but Steyn argues it as the cause - why do those who take stands against our decadent groupthink have to always make such basic errors of logic?

This is an irritating book - it deals brilliantly with the core topic and the culture war Europe cannot win on present course - but it associates that argument with specious nonsense that panders to the Redneck convert and makes it difficult for those who can think for themselves to promote the core thesis. ( )

One of the more fascinating attempts at explaining the decline of the West is Mark Steyn's "America Alone." Though the main thrust of the book is the threat of Islam, Steyn examines numerous sources of decay in Western society, the upshot being that we are vulnerable to the threat only because of our weakness, confusion, and self-defeating behavior.

Steyn offers the reader reams of evidence to back up his assertion that a "significant strain of Islam" (which today happens to be the overwhelmingly dominant one) is wreaking havoc across the planet. Everything from riots in the Parisian banlieue to the massacre of schoolchildren in Beslan to the Palestinian death cult is exposed in all its horror. It is virtually everywhere, and it is constant:

"We switch on the news every evening and, though there are many trouble spots around the world, as a general rule it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in 'Palestine,' Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali, Muslims vs. Danish cartoonists in Scandinavia."

Instead of confronting the threat, or even acknowledging it for what it is, Western elites drag their populations into an anesthetized state of denial. Discussion of the issue (if it exists at all) is filtered through the layers of the multiculturalist narrative, which leaves it sanitized and devoid of real content. Says Steyn:

"Bomb us, and we agonize over the 'root causes.' Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that 'Islam is a religion of peace.' Issue blood-curdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels, and we fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims. Behead sodomites and mutilate female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups can't wait to march alongside you denouncing Bush and Blair. Murder a schoolful of children, and our scholars explain that to the 'vast majority' of Muslims 'jihad' is a harmless concept meaning 'healthy-lifestyle lo-fat granola bar'."

As Steyn makes clear, the problem would never have gotten so out of hand were it not for the meltdown of intellect that has occurred among the "educated" portion of the Western world. The jihadis take full advantage of this breach, and they are aided and abetted at every turn by their "progressive" enablers.

The West has lost its will to fight. We consistently defeat ourselves. The Islamists

"know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western Civilization collapses on itself and Islam inherits by default. An army is only one weapon a civilization wields, and the weapon of last resort, too. But when you add up those elements of national power--military, judicial, diplomatic, economic, informational--it's hard not to conclude that (as was said of the British after the fall of Singapore) at least four of those five guns are pointing in the wrong direction. The point of the media is to speak truth to (domestic) power, the point of transnationalism is to constrain American power, the point of law is to upgrade the defendant--and the upshot of economic power in a time of plenty is that every time you gas up you're funding an enemy who's flusher than he's been since the fall of Constantinople. Meanwhile, we fight the symptoms--the terror plots--but not the cause: the ideology. The self-imposed constraints of this war--legalistic, multilateral, politically correct--are clearer every day."

Steyn devotes quite a bit of ink to the issue of demography. The Muslim world, including the recent transplants into Europe, are benefiting from a high birthrate (the "upper reaches of the fertility hit parade") whereas the native populations--especially in Spain, Italy, and Greece--are falling far below replacement rate. The U.S. is chugging along at slightly above replacement level.

This phenomenon is of vast historical significance:

"In the fourteenth century, the Black Death wiped out a third of the Continent's population; in the twenty-first, a larger proportion will disappear--in effect, by choice. We are living through a rare moment: the self-extinction of the civilization which, for good or ill, shaped the age we live in."

Steyn points out that in Europe, the Muslims are young; they are also energetic, confident, aggressive, and ready for sacrifice. The native populations are aging, and they are sluggish, guilt-ridden, fat, and dependent upon the welfare state. It does not take a sophisticated analyst to project scenarios one or two decades into the future. The picture is not pretty.

America Alone is a good read. Steyn's wit lies in wait at every turn of the page, and his observations on a wide range of peripheral topics are thought-provoking, to say the least. Take, for example, this perceptive comment on anti-Americanism:

"All dominant powers are hated--Britain was, and Rome--but they're usually hated for the right reasons. America is hated for every reason. The fanatical Muslims despise America because it's all lap-dancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it's all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it's controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too godless, America is George Orwell's Room 101: whatever your bugbear you will find it therein, whatever you're against, America is the prime example of it."

Which is followed by this marvelous segue:

"That's one reason why [America's] disparagers have embraced environmentalism. If Washington were a conventional great power, the intellectual class would be arguing that the United States is a threat to France or India or Gabon or some such. But because it's so obviously not that kind of power, the world has had to concoct a thesis that the hyperpower is a threat not merely to this or that rinky-dink nation state but to the entire planet, if not the entire galaxy. 'We are,' warns Al Gore portentiously, 'altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe.' ... You wouldn't happen to have the statistical evidence for that, would you?"

If things continue on their course, predicts Steyn, we may find that

"the world will be well on its way to a new Dark Ages. Now, as then, Europe has its do-nothing kings--les rois fainéants--thought these days we call them European commissioners and chancellors and prime ministers. Now, as then, we have a Great Plague--the virus of Islamism--and the great migrations--the continent-wide version of 'white flight' already under way in Holland, as the beleaguered Dutch leave their native land for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Now, as then, we must all bow before the 'edict of toleration'--as laws and customs are rearranged to abase themselves before the gods of boundless multicultural tolerance."

A classic case of this abasement is detailed in the recently added introduction, "Soon to be Banned in Canada." When excerpts from the book were published by the news magazine Maclean's, the Canadian Islamic Congress filed a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission. The Muslim group objected to the "flagrant Islamophobia" contained in the book.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission has established itself as an extra-judicial star chamber for the enforcement of politically-correct orthodoxy. These little Soviet-style kangaroo courts, staffed by bureaucrats and specializing in "hate speech," have cast serious doubt over the future of Canadian democracy.

Discussing the complaint over his "flagrant Islamophobia," and the ensuing witch hunt, Steyn remarks:

"The head of the Canadian Islamic Congress is a man called Mohamed Elmasry. In a TV interview in 2004, Dr. Elmasry said it was legitimate to kill any Israeli civilian, male or female, over the age of eighteen. He is, thus, an objective supporter of terrorism. Yet he's accusing me of 'hate speech,' and is apparently the new poster boy for liberal progressive 'human rights' in Canada.

"And, in a nutshell, that paradox is what this book is about: What happens when a Western world so in thrall to platitudes about boundless 'tolerance' allows the forces of intolerance to carve it out from the inside? In seeking to stifle the arguments of America Alone, the Canadian Islamic Congress is making my point more eloquently than I ever could--that a significant strain of Islam is incompatible with the rough and tumble of a free society."

Food for thought. ( )

Steyn is the poor man's Michael Scheuer. He is warning, as does Scheuer, that the battle with Islamists is largely over unless the West awakens. Steyn points out the simple demographic truth of Europe; it is Eurabia. Islam is far out producing the traditional European nations and will subsequently be eclipsed.

His point should not surprise us and Polybius observed the same phenomenon centuries ago.

"In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth-rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics. If, then, any one had advised us to send and ask the gods about this, and find out what we ought to say or do, to increase in number and make our cities more populous, would it not seem absurd, the cause of the evil being evident and the remedy being in our own hands? For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew." Polybius, The Histories, Book XXXVI, (c. 150 B.C.E.)

Greece committed a mass suicide as it suffered from its own ennui.

Steyn is no doubt repugnant to those who find him macho, politically incorrect, and strident. But historically he is on sound footing since simple aggression does not equal success between nations, but, it helps. No nation can maintain itself for long employing "soft" power as it is, after all, soft. Militarism is not the answer but nations must maintain themselves or suffer the consequences. He can point out how Western nations are emasculated and indeed they are. The Guardian ran an article complaining that the Americans are environmentally insensitive because they favor soft toilet paper (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/26/toilet-roll-america). If Americans bow to pressure they are too "soft" for global competition. The rejoinder is that capitalism produces higher quality products: a fact that should bring solace to the world who can enjoy its benefactions.

I'm cheering Mark Steyn on. It's not that I agree with every conclusion he makes, nor with every idea. But his fundamental thesis, that the western world in the hands of the liberal progressives and the political left cannot survive well in the real global world of ideologies and power, and so will collapse before the advance of any strong ideology that forces it's way, is a good one.

We have abandoned truth, common sense, and principles. Without them, the western world will die. Without them, maybe it should. Alarmist? Well what else wakes people up but an alarm? ( )

Steyn understands. ( )

Thought-provoking, attention-getting, and slightly alarmist. Steyn is a master writer with a skillful, post-modern blend of structure, humor, alarmist rant, sobering reality, and calm resolve. Concise and to the point, Steyn presents the facts of our demographically changing world and stands out as a watchman on the times. ( )

Pretty darn good, but it'll bother the bejeebers out of you. I really hadn't given demographics much of a thought with regards to immigration, multiculturism, etc. until reading this book. Its worth your time to read it, I wish a few of our polititcians would do the same. ( )

Showing yet again why he is one of the most widely published columnists in the Anglosphere, Steyn delineates the decline - both demographically, certainly, but of no less importance, in terms of cultural confidence - of the West, and masterfully (and amusingly) lays bare the internal contradictions of multiculturalism. America Alone is timely, perceptive, hilarious, and very, very accessible. ( )

Speaking to the National Press Club in 2005, Dr. Pat Robertson called the explosive growth of Christianity throughout Asia and the southern hemisphere the major global development of our time, which the Western media has either missed or ignored. To take just one example cited by Dr. Robertson, in China 28,000 people now come to faith in Jesus Christ each day. In twenty to thirty years, at least a quarter of the Chinese population will be Christian, making China the world’s largest Christian nation. The significance of this fact cannot be overstated.

If Dr. Robertson has identified the rising sun of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America as the brightest and most significant trend in the world today, writer Mark Steyn has spent the past several years warning of what might be called its negative corollary: the possibility of a new Dark Age in much of Europe. In his new book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, the author synthesizes his writings on the subject into a devastating description of a European future characterized by what he calls “the Four Horseman of the Eupocalypse:…Death—the demise of European races too self-absorbed to breed; Famine—the end of the lavishly funded statist good times; War—the decline into bloody civil unrest that these economic and demographic factors will bring; and Conquest—the recolonization of Europe by Islam.”

Steyn has said that that his book is about the intersection of three factors to varying degrees facing every advanced country today:

Demographic decline
The unsustainability of the advanced Western social-democratic state
Civilizational exhaustion
Civilizational exhaustion, of course, is the crucial factor, and the one that makes addressing the first two so difficult. For Steyn, it is also so connected as to be nearly synonymous with the post-Christian reality in most of the West: an entirely present-tense culture liberated from obligations to ancestors or descendents. In one poignant passage, Steyn quotes John Lennon’s nihilistic reverie “Imagine” as perfectly embodying the ethos of post-Christian man: “Imagine there’s no heaven…imagine all the world living for today…imagine there’s no countries…nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.” It would seem to be stating the obvious to suggest that over the long run, Lennonist Europe will be no match for a fierce, primal force like radical Islam.

Doom-mongering is standard fare in the publishing industry, so when a book comes out predicting imminent catastrophe, a healthy skepticism is well called for. What makes America Alone so convincing and gives his argument its force is the author’s profound sense of the fragility of civilization and the dynamic force of history, which is always moving. “Americans and other Westerners who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society should understand that the life we’ve led since 1945 in the Western world is very rare in human history. Our children are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid, and may well spend their adult years in an ugly and savage world unless we decide who and what we are is worth defending.”

Is a new European Dark Age based on Islamism (and the revival of fascist parties this development will bring) inevitable? A deep sense of pessimism pervades America Alone, and Steyn seems to regard Europeans to be like the sailors in the Odyssey who, having tasted the lotus-fruit (post-Christian hedonism), became “unwilling to take any message back, or to go away, but they wanted to stay there with the lotus-eating people, feeding on lotus, and forget the way home.” Steyn is not without hope, however, and toward the end offers a ten-point program for countering the ideology of Islamism and jihad. In the end, however, what is needed most of all is will and confidence that our ideals and way of life will prevail. “To see off the new Dark Age,” writes Steyn on the concluding page, “will be tough and demanding. The alternative will be worse.”

Published in Regent University Library Link, December 2006 (http://www.regent.edu/lib/news-archives/2006_11.cfm#book) ( )

Bracing, to the point of being frightening. Steyn lays out, using a deft mix of humor and horror, the demographic realities facing Europe in the coming decades, and the potentially disastrous effects this will have on the rest of the world. ( )

Wow, this should be required reading by anyone concerned about the future of the world as we know it. I mentioned the book's subject to a co-worker who is Estonian and she related that when she was a kid the pop was 1.5 million, it's now 1.3 million...she's 26. ( )

Wow. If one filters out Steyn's sarcasm and politics, this book is still unnerving. Using demographic trends with birthrates across the Western World, Steyn shows the current trends and possible outcome of a world with unchecked Islam. WEstern culture has sold out to political correctness for the sake of being polite and we are turning our governments into welfare states. Thought-provoking. ( )

The author is a columnist and this book reads like a collection of his columns. He's very funny and engaging but the book doesn't hang together well. Enjoyable to read in small doses, as if one were reading a newspaper column. He makes the point about the coming Islamist menace in the first few chapters, then proceeds to bludgeon us to death with it for the remainder. ( )

Seldom has a book managed to scare the hell out of me while, at the same time, making me laugh out loud. This one did those things.

Mark Steyn explains in great detail exactly why Europe has already crossed the line of ultimately being dominated by its Muslim immigrants and why the United States is the last best hope for the rest of the world, as usual.

A combination of factors seems to ensure that the United States will one day relatively soon find itself alone in defending a lifestyle and a form of government that no longer exists around the world, with a very few possible exceptions such as Australia and Japan.

These factors include: a birth rate that dooms most of Western Europe to being unable to maintain even its present population levels while Muslim immigrants outbreed them at a rate of four or five to one, a softening or "femininization" of Western cultures that are too concerned with being politically correct to defend their very cultures against the Muslim invaision, the billions of dollars of oil money that are being spent on a Muslim invasion of the rest of the world and the fact that Middle Eastern cultures have become a lethal combination of utter primitiveness and fairly sophisticated technology populated by people who do not fear death and will do anything, or kill anyone, to further their "cause."

This book should be read by everyone who is concerned with the future of his country, his children and, especially, his grandchildren. Unfortunately, it will not. ( )

Required reading. Only Steyn can make a topic so depressing so hilarious. Of the books I've read about the increasing war between Islam and the West this one strikes the nail on the head most directly discussing the West's current lack of both offspring and will. ( )