The peacekeepers of Penzance (falling European birth rate)

[donsu]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HH22Ak02.html


Like W S Gilbert's cowardly policemen in The Pirates of Penzance, Europe's prospective peacekeepers have decided that "a policeman's lot is not a happy one". Europe's serious exercise in peacekeeping led to the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, when Dutch soldiers turned over Muslims in their charge to Serb death squads.

-snip-

A people without progeny will not accept a single military casualty. If this generation is the last, there will be no children for whom to sacrifice. Today's Europeans value their distractions and amusements more than they do prospective children. Germany's 2005 birth rate of only 8.5 per 1,000 inhabitants indicates that Europe is following the low variant of UN population estimates. These guarantee the virtual disappearance of the Europeans by the end of the present century.

-snip-

It might be objected that Europe's demographic catastrophe lies a generation hence, and that it need not determine European policy today. Just the opposite is true: it is Europe's present attitudes that dictate the demographic catastrophe. Europe began to die in the 1990s when deaths outnumbered births.

-snip-

From this we should conclude that the so-called "international community" is an empty construct. The Europeans, Russia included, are the walking dead. Europe wants a quiet transition to the cemetery, while Russia plays spoiler indifferent to future consequences; whatever those consequences might be, very few Russians will be alive to see them. The United States is the only superpower not because no other Western country will have sufficient people to act like a superpower a century hence; the United States will have more people a century hence precisely because Americans think and feel like citizens of a superpower.
-snip-
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"the so-called "international community" is an empty construct"

so, just who will keep peace in Lebanon and Israel?

(however, I disagree with what the writer says about Iran)

[leesa]

1. This author's insistance that immigrants do not assimilate and become

real citizens of their new country is a little strange. Apparently only ethnic purity makes citizenship valid. Europe is dying because their birthrate is low and their immigrants don't count.