The
Death of the West is not a prediction of what is going to happen. It is a depiction of what is
happening now. First World nations are dying.
If Western elites were asked to name the greatest crisis facing
mankind, climate change would win in a walk.
Thus
did Time magazine pass over every world leader to name a Swedish teenage
climate activist, Greta Thunberg, its person of the year.
On
New Year’s Day, the headline over yet another story in The Washington Post
admonished us anew: “A Lost Decade for Climate Action: We Can’t Afford A
Repeat, Scientists Warn.”
“By
the final year of the decade,” said the Post, “the planet had surpassed its
2010 temperature record five times.
“Hurricanes
devastated New Jersey and Puerto Rico, and floods damaged the Midwest and
Bangladesh. Southern Africa was gripped by a deadly drought. Australia and the
Amazon are ablaze.”
On
it went, echoing the endless reports on the perils of climate change to the
planet we all inhabit.
Yet, from the inaction of the
carbon-emitting countries like India, China, Russia and the USA, the gravity
with which Western elites view the crisis is not shared by the peoples for whom
they profess to speak.
For
many First World countries, there are more compelling concerns. High among them
is population decline, and, if birth rates do not rise, the near-extinction of
many Western peoples by this century’s end.
Consider.
The number of births in Japan fell in 2019 to a level unseen since 1874, around
900,000. But there were 1.4 million deaths for a net loss of 512,000 Japanese.
An even larger loss in Japan’s population is expected this year.
Japan’s
population has been shrinking since 2007, when deaths first exceeded births by
18,000. And with 28% of its population over 65, and fewer births every passing
year, Japan is aging, shrinking and dying — with no respite in sight.
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Across Japan, writes The New York Times: “Whole villages are
vanishing as young people choose not to have children or move to urban areas …
The Government estimates that the population could shrink by about 16 million
people — or nearly 13 percent — over the next 25 years.”
South
Korea has an even lower birth rate, and its population is expected to start
diminishing this year.
But
it is Eastern Europe where the population crisis is most advanced.
At the end of the Cold War, Bulgaria had 9
million people. By 2017, that had fallen to 7.1 million. In 2050, Bulgaria’s
population is estimated at 5.4 million — a loss of 40% to death and migration
since Bulgaria won its freedom from the Soviet Empire.
By
2050, Ukraine and Poland are each projected to lose another 6 million people,
and Hungary will lose 1.5 million.
Lithuania
and Latvia have seen serious population losses since the end of the Cold War
and are in the front rank of European nations losing people at the fastest
rate.
U.N.
demographers project Russia’s population may fall from 145 million today to 121
million by 2050. Such losses rival those that Russia suffered under Lenin,
Stalin and World War II.
The
Far East is home to some 6 million Russians who dwell on that vast tract that
is so full of natural resources like timber, oil and gas.
“The
population continues to decrease almost everywhere in the Far East,” lamented
President Vladimir Putin at an investment conference in Vladivostok: “The
inflow is increasing, but it does not cover the number of people leaving the
region.”
In
the Far East, Siberia and the Lake Baikal region, investors and workers from
China are appearing in growing numbers.
The
tribes of Europe, the peoples of almost every country of the Old Continent, are
visibly aging, shrinking and dying. The population crisis of Europe is
“existential,” says Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic.
Since this writer published “The Death of the West,” nothing
has happened to alter my conclusion as to where the West was destined:
“The Death of the West is not a prediction
of what is going to happen. It is a depiction of what is happening now. First
World nations are dying. They face a mortal crisis, not because of something
happening in the Third World, but because of what is not happening at home and
in the homes of the First World. Western fertility rates have been falling for
decades. Outside of Muslim Albania, no European nation is producing enough
babies to replace its population. … In a score of countries the old are already
dying off faster than the young are being born. … There is no sign of a
turnaround. Now the absolute numbers of Europeans have begun to fall.”
We
are talking here about what historians, a century hence, will call the Lost
Tribes of Europe. And if a
people has ceased to replace itself, and the national family is dying out,
it is difficult to generate alarm over the slow sinking of the Maldives into
the sea, the melting of the polar ice caps, or the fact that Greenland is
getting greener every year.