And This is Also a Tragedy
If you look closely at demographic data worldwide, you’ll find something interesting: Europeans are not the only ones suffering birth rate collapse. In fact, the third world is in worse trouble than we are, and demographic trends will look very different by the end of this century than they do now.
When I was a kid, I lived in the Muslim holy land. My father had a job there and after it was done, he took the family travelling. One of my prized possessions was a farmer’s almanac, one of those books filled with stats about different countries—I used to pore over that thing for hours looking at the different flags, thinking about the different languages, religions, and geography of all the different nations of the world, thinking about what it would be like in Turkey, Russia, Thailand, Greece. I was even lucky enough to visit some of these places—it was a once in a lifetime experience.
This gave me a taste for the different cultures of the world. So, when I later came to understand what multiculturalism really is—the flattening out of all human difference—I rejected it with total disgust. Normal people feel the same way. Any nationalism not repulsive to normal people must be founded on something other than chauvinism. There’s no one-size-fits-all mode of civilization—the Egyptians, Chinese, and Persians created high civilization too. But there is one mode of civilization that fits nobody except human detritus: liberalism.
Liberalism hurts us, but it also hurts non-whites and that is also a tragedy. If we look at the data, we have every reason to think that European peoples will enjoy a demographic comparative advantage soon. Great news for us, but it would be a shame to lose the richness of the different peoples of the world, and by working to blot out liberalism everywhere, we help everyone. This is a powerful framing, so keep it in mind as you read on.
I spoke in an earlier article of the Mithridates Strategy—asymmetric warfare under the illusion of formal equality. Think of that scene in The Princess Bride where two characters drink the poison but only one is immune. The emergent ethnic strategy of the West is to accustom itself to the poison of liberalism, first in its immature form (the aristocratic liberalism of the 19th century), and to build up a certain tolerance to it as it matures. It then exports the poison in its concentrated form (civil rights, liberty, capitalism, etc.) to other societies who have no evolved defense mechanisms. We have given the smallpox blanket of democracy, rule of law, and human rights to the third world, and the data are only now starting to come back—things are not looking good for them. Let’s dig into the numbers.
Last year, MSNBC ran an article that puts this in stark terms:
For years, Latinas have had more children per woman than women of all other racial and ethnic groups in the U.S.
However, as with women of other racial and ethnic groups, that number has been dropping, said Rogelio Saenz, a professor of demography at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Hispanic women also have seen some of the largest declines in fertility rates.
In 2019, Latinas’ fertility rate was 1.93 children per woman, and for 2020, it was just under 1.87. That’s a significant drop from the 2.1 fertility rate for Latinas about five years ago, Saenz said.1
A total fertility rate (TFR) drop of about 12% in five years is catastrophic—at this rate, Hispanics would achieve zero births in two centuries (please see the postscript about this zero births calculation).2 And they are not the worst by any stretch. I collated data across many studies and came up with the following rates of fertility decline by race over the same period:3
Jews: 17% — (1.8 to 1.5)
Muslims: 15% — (2.3 to 2.0)
Hispanics: 12% — (2.11 to 1.87)
Blacks: 9% — (1.88 to 1.71)
Whites: 7% — (1.66 to 1.55)
Note that the race with the lowest rate of decline is whites. Note also that the rate of decline bears no consistent relationship to where your TFR starts. In other words, we would expect that the lower your fertility, the slower your decline, but this is not the case. But we do notice a pattern—we see a consistent inverse correlation between rate of decline and prolonged contact with liberal democracy. You would think that Jews and Hispanics have been liberal longer than Muslims, but Jewish and Hispanic decline is driven mostly by collapse in the TFR of immigrant and religious communities. The longer a people has been exposed to the virus, the better it fares against it.
There’s more in the study cited by MSNBC, and it’s even worse.
Saenz noted that the numbers of foreign-born Latinas in the U.S. and Latinas in childbearing years, 15 to 44 years old, have fallen as Mexican migration has slowed.
But more Hispanic women — 61 percent — are in that childbearing age group, Saenz said, compared to 41 percent among non-Hispanic white women.4
So, we are seeing a steeper decline in Hispanic TFR despite that they have more childbearing age women. If Hispanics are below replacement even without the masking phenomenon that whites have with a larger older population, then Hispanics are likely at or even below white fertility rates controlled for age. We can infer something similar about the other races, who are all weighted towards younger cohorts,5 and yet have seen steeper declines.
This is not limited to the West:
In July the UN’s population project forecast a decline in China’s population – from a present high of 1.43 billion to around 1.3 billion by mid-century. The projection is accompanied – and apparently explained – by a dramatic decline in fertility rate, as well as increasing life expectancy. Indeed, although China relaxed its infamous one-child per couple policy in 2014 in favour of a three-child policy in 2021, it is now in the midst of its weakest population growth for decades.
In response to the population figures, China’s National Health Commission reported that total fertility rate had dropped to 1.3 in 2020, a rate well below the notional 2.1 needed to maintain population levels. Other reports put present TFR as low as 1.16, with catastrophic implications for economic growth, healthcare and living costs. One report said China was ‘facing a demographic timebomb’.
Taking China’s TFR in 2015 as 1.62,6 if this rate of decline continues at the low end (to 1.3), it would mean China achieves zero births in 140 years, at the high end (to 1.16) it would mean zero births in a century.
China’s case is complicated by the One-Child Policy, so its decline is not totally organic. However, China has recognized the Mithridates Strategy in Western liberalism and has tried to withstand it, as the leak of Document Number Nine shows.7 So, China sees that liberalism is part of the problem but has not yet fully succumbed. What does it look like when a non-Western culture succumbs completely to liberalism?
South Korea broke its own record for the world’s lowest total fertility rate last year, census data showed on Wednesday, and experts project it will drop even further this year, adding to concerns about the country’s shrinking and aging population.
[…]
The fertility rate — the average number of children born to a woman during her reproductive years — declined for the sixth straight year to 0.81 in 2021, according to Statistics Korea, the national statistics agency. Experts said it might drop below 0.8 this year, as rising housing prices further discourage people from having children.
South Korea is a perfect case to illustrate the devastating effect of the Mithridates Strategy because a) the culture is non-European, b) it has suffered “heavy viral load” (advanced liberalism) for decades with no natural defenses against it, and c) it shows quite clearly that starting with a low TFR doesn’t mean low rate of decline. Liberalism is an existential threat to South Korea—if we take its TFR in 2015 as 1.2,8 this continued rate of decline would produce zero births by the year 2100.
It’s not clear that this problem can be solved by social engineering. Even North Korea is feeling the effects of global liberalization, although its TFR is more than twice that of its neighbour (1.9). North Korea is preventing childbearing age women from emigrating for work and is exporting older women instead.9 Eastern Europe, held up as the great white illiberal hope, does not seem to be doing much better. Victor Orbán has spent around 5% of annual GDP on raising the TFR from 1.23 to 1.55,10 but this seems to have maxed out its returns since the TFR has changed little since 2016.11 Poland and Russia lag behind even dog-whipped Germany in fertility. We need not even mention supposedly “based” illiberal city-states like Singapore—like COVID in 2020, this thing is not going to be containable, and like COVID, it was cooked up in a controlled environment at the behest of Western elites.
Even decidedly third world countries like Bangladesh are below replacement. India as a whole is hovering around replacement rate, with the northerly and southerly states being fertility dead zones and the states that are holding up the fertility rate being among the most populous—exactly the opposite of what we would expect.12 Even Africa, by far the continent with the fastest growing population, is starting to show the effects of global liberalization, particularly in urban centres. While Kenya’s TFR of 3.4 dwarfs that of any Western country, a decline from 4.8 in the years 2009–2019 is among the most catastrophic in the world. At this rate, Kenya would achieve zero births in 160 years. South Africa is expected to drop below replacement in 2036, but one expects much sooner given the metastasis of LGBT rights there, and similar trends across Africa threaten to crush high birth rates elsewhere.13 The dark continent has always been a hotbed of viral contagion, and liberalism will be no different.
We could talk about Mexico, Columbia, Chile, or Brazil. We could talk about Lebanon, Turkey, and even Pakistan. I don’t think we need to.
What’s happening globally is quite simple—peoples whose culture and folkways have never had so much as a whiff of materialism, individualism, and liberty are coming in contact with 100% proof, high-test, late-stage liberalism, and they are getting piledriven by it like a welterweight Funko Pop collector by Dan Severn in his prime. Not only is it not a fair fight, it’s grotesque and cruel, like kicking a puppy. These people are defenseless. Liberalism seems to have especially buck broken societies with universalist religions, even tribal societies like Afghanistan, which 20 years ago averaged 7.5 children per woman but which would hit zero births within about two centuries at the current rate of decline. Some religions like Hinduism, particularly those denominations which are more traditionalist and clannish, have fared better, despite that Indian TFR has been suppressed by government campaigns since the 1970s, and despite that 37% of Indian women of childbearing age are sterilized.14
Whites, specifically northwestern Europeans, have also fared better. America, despite the cratering fertility of its minorities, would achieve zero births in about 300 years given current trends,15 mostly on the strength of its white population’s relatively stable TFR, centuries after many third world countries would reach zero births.16 However, whites have fared better for very different reasons than Hindus.
Like Mithridates himself, we have been exposed to the poison of liberalism for a long time, and have built up a tolerance to it. We, particularly Germanic and Celtic descended Europeans, have undergone a ruthless selection process. For decades, even centuries now, we have been under extreme Darwinian conditions that have excluded from the breeding pool those individuals who engage in race-mixing, homosexuality, careerism, materialism, and sense-gratification. Whites today have passed through a crucible that is still going, in fact, reaching a fever pitch—this is part of why you have seen the rise of a genuine illiberal movement in the alt right. And our descendants will be fitter and less liberal still than us. Our ethnic competitors are going up in a puff of smoke. This is not something to be celebrated, it is a tragedy. Multiculturalism, liberalism, universalism, and other viral, entropic belief systems will kill off cultures that, although they have taken advantage of our hospitality, are in some cases still noble and deserve a place on this earth—in their own backyard.
Some of you have heard of Emma Lucy Shaw, a woman who moved to Peru from Britain some years ago, and who became an ethnonationalist after seeing the effects of globalism there. If you doubt any of this, I urge you to watch her video where she details how little resistance there is against liberalism in Peru, how defenseless and defeated the younger generations are. She understands the Mithridates Strategy. We created this poison, unleashed it on the world, and although we have suffered greatly, others will yet suffer worse. The centre of resistance to this plague will come from within the West. The sort of altruistic nationalism recently discussed in our little sphere pales in comparison to the real humanitarian contribution that destroying liberalism would represent. Emma Lucy Shaw understands this too. She no longer feels she has the right to live in Peru, and has decided to return to her native land and take up the fight there—where it matters. Will you?
POSTSCRIPT: The method used to calculate the time to zero births is simplified but it is not meant as a predictive model. Obviously, population dynamics are more complicated than this and the zero births estimates in this article are not predictions but extrapolations—they are intended to provide a basis for comparison of current trends.
Because the decline is asymptotic and never quite hits zero, I define zero births here as TFR of 0.01, or 1 birth per 100 couples.
These are all in America. I had to scrape this data from a variety of different studies across different years, so methodologies may differ. Also, obviously Muslims are not a race but this still illustrates the point.
Op. cit.
TFR drop from 1.9–1.6 from 2010–2020, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=US
Obviously, the calculation of zero births is based on extrapolating from short term trends. However, we have good reason to think these trends are anything but short term if we understand the mechanisms behind the Mithridates Strategy.
Subscribe to Imperium Press
The classics department of the future.
https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/the-third-world-is-going-to-cop-it-b9e
