rebuilding European demographics

Let’s assume that eventually the anti-immigration argument succeeds and the flood of immigrants into the West is stopped. OK, it seems very unlikely but let’s just assume it anyway. What is the next step?

Western countries like Britain, France, the United States and Sweden are already in a mess. Clearly it’s not going to be enough merely to stop immigration. Those countries need to be restored to functionality and even more importantly they need to be restored to the status of civilised nations. For one thing that means the apparatus of totalitarianism that has been slowly built up over the past half century needs to be dismantled. I am assuming that what we in the anti-immigration camp want is for these nations to be restored to something like the state they were in in the 1950s before the process of de-civilisation got seriously underway.

So what would need to be done? There are many who would like to see the demographic balances of the 50s restored. It’s certainly an attractive idea but could it really be done? Bismarck famously said that politics is the art of the possible, and I’m not entirely sure that  a restoration of 1950s demographics falls within the range of the possible. Existing nationalist parties have had little success even though their policies are very much more moderate than this.

It seems to me that there are four options.

1 Mass deportations to forcible restore 1950s demographics.

2 Selective deportations to achieve a more favourable demographic balance.

3 Assimilation of existing immigrants.

4 Segregation.

Option 1 is almost certainly impossible and could in any case only be carried out by a government with such sweeping powers that it would have the potential to be more totalitarian than our current system.

Option 2 appeals to a lot of people who think our problems could be solved by expelling all members of a certain religion. The Spanish did this fairly successfully after the Reconquista in the late 15th century but they needed the Inquisition to make it work. A modern attempt would need something very similar to the Inquisition.

Enforcing deportations (or immigration bans) on religious lines is not simple. How exactly do you decide if someone actually belongs to the religion in question? Do you deport everyone who was born a Muslim? Or only practising Muslims? How do you define practising? If someone claims that they have abandoned their religion or converted to a different religion can you believe them? The Spanish (no doubt wisely) were not inclined to take people’s word for it that they had sincerely converted to Catholicism. It was the Inquisition’s job to make sure.

The Spanish Inquisition in fact was not particularly brutal or even particularly oppressive. Much of its evil reputation is due to the anti-Catholicism that dominated English intellectual life for so many centuries (Henry Kamen’s excellent book on the subject which I reviewed here is worth a read). But nonetheless it was certainly intrusive and I cannot imagine that a modern version is ever likely to be politically acceptable or even desirable.

http://anotherpoliticallyincorrectblog.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/the-spanish-inquisition-historical.html

We also need to ask ourselves if deporting people for their religious beliefs is a wise precedent to establish. It could just as easily be turned against adherents of other religions, especially Christianity. It’s worth remembering that our political establishment hates Christianity a lot more than it hates Islam. They’d be overjoyed to have the opportunity to ban Christian immigrants and to deport existing Christians.

On the whole any kind of large-scale deportation, whether selective or not, seems to me to be impractical and to involve very real potential dangers.

That brings us to Option 3, assimilation. This might be an unpopular thing to say but this is actually my least favoured option. For various reasons.

Firstly, it doesn’t work particularly well and it works least well with the very people who are most likely to be a social problem.

Secondly, you have to have a viable host culture for the immigrants to assimilate to. We no longer have that. Assimilation means embracing the core values of a culture and what are the core values of our civilisation? Mindless consumerism, greed, celebrity worship,  homosexual marriage, abortion on demand, promiscuity, pornography, transgender bathroom rights and feminism. Why would anyone want to assimilate to a death cult like modern western civilisation? Why would we want to encourage anyone to do so? Do we really need more crazy blue-haired feminist harpies?

Thirdly, I just don’t like the idea of assimilation. It means cutting oneself off from one’s history and cultural traditions. It means betraying one’s loyalties. Essentially it means becoming a rootless cosmopolitan and do we really need any more rootless cosmopolitans? It means you end up with a society with no actual culture (just a veneer of trash pop culture), no shared traditions, no shared history. You end up with a society that will be more and more inclined to embrace the very forces that have led us to ruin – liberal democracy, consumerism and capitalism. You end up with a society more likely to welcome totalitarianism and more likely to worship the state since they have nothing else of substance in which to believe. The descent into degeneracy will continue unchecked.

Option 4 is the one likely to provoke howls of outrage but some kind of segregation might well be the best solution for everyone. Something like the millet system in the Ottoman Empire, whereby different faiths can essentially live under their own laws and preserve their own cultures. This might seem like a very unattractive solution but it might be the best hope for preserving at least a remnant of European civilisation.

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demographic collapse and economic incentives

That the West is heading for demographic collapse is pretty much an established fact. Sub-replacement fertility is now the norm. In countries like Germany the fertility rate is disastrously low. In eastern Europe the situation is even worse, with countries like Lithuania well on the way to national extinction. And in east Asia it’s worse still. Taiwan is almost certainly beyond saving.

It’s long been accepted that economic development and prosperity almost inevitably leads to a plummeting birth rate, but while you might expect that fertility rates would eventually stabilise at a much lower level that isn’t happening. They just keep declining.

And of course we’re then told that we must accept mass immigration from the Third World or we’re economically doomed. Whether that’s really true or not can perhaps be debated, it  is possible that lower populations might be advantageous in some ways, but nonetheless it’s an argument that immigration restrictionists must find a counter for.

So can anything be done to halt the decline of fertility rates? Obviously the answer is yes but most of the solutions are at this point in time politically out of the question. It’s not very likely that any western government is going to outlaw feminism or abolish quick and easy divorce, no matter how desirable such actions might be.

Among the few politically feasible measures are economic incentives. To the extent that they’ve been tried they haven’t been notably successful but that may be because they’ve been poorly thought out. The idea that putting more money in people’s pockets will make them more willing to have children is simplistic and naïve. If people are contemplating starting a family they do not want short-term handouts. What they want is long-term security, and affordable housing.

Long-term security means job security. Job security is something we used to have in the bad old days. Of course in the bad old days we also had successful marriages and happy family life.

When it comes to having families what matters is not how much money people have, but the extent to which they can rely on having an adequate income for long enough to raise children and then be able to look forward to not living in destitution when they get old.

Equally important is affordable decent housing. That means not just a reasonably comfortable home, but a home that is not so far out in the suburbs that it requires a two-hour commute to get to work and a two-hour commute to get home again.

I’m not suggesting that job security and affordable housing would magically solve our demographic problems, but there’s little doubt that it would at least help a little. And as an added side benefit it would allow people to live lives that are somewhat more satisfying than the pursuit of mindless pleasures and an endless supply of consumer goods.

Of course I’m just day-dreaming. Can you really imagine a government wanting to put the interests of families ahead of the interests of globalists and social justice warriors, or seeing family life as more important than GDP growth?

defending Australia

Amfortas made this observation in a comment to my previous post.

“I have always held the view that we should use it before we are in imminent danger of losing it. We have far too few to even defend ourselves.”

That was in fact the logic behind Australian immigration policy for several decades after 1945. It was the major driving force behind the enormous in take of migrants in that period. The lesson of the Second World War (and of European history over the course of the centuries) seemed to be that in order to defend itself a nation needed a large population. Countries with small populations like Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark had been quickly overrun.

In 1945 it was a reasonable view.

Is it a reasonable view today? Would a population of 50 million, or even 100 million, make us more secure? The days when large numbers of men were needed as cannon fodder seem to be over. A larger population would theoretically mean a larger GDP which would of course theoretically allow us to buy more weapons, assuming that the population growth didn’t collapse our economy to Third World standards.

I’m inclined to think that we don’t need more defence spending. We need smarter defence spending. Why on earth did we buy M1A1 Abrams tanks? Are we going to refight the Western Desert campaigns of WW2? Is it really likely we’ll ever be fighting large conventional armoured battles on our own soil? If it ever got to the stage where we needed to do that we would already have lost. Our only chance of preventing an invasion by large conventional forces would be to stop them from landing. For that you need a credible navy and a credible air force. You don’t need tanks. But generals, like small boys, love the idea of playing with tanks.

We have an army that exists to fight as auxiliaries in someone else’s foreign military adventures.

We need a credible navy, and that means submarines. Nuclear submarines. As submariners like to say, there are only two kinds of ships – submarines and targets. What we have are a handful of submarines of dubious quality and lots of targets. In an actual shooting war with a real enemy how long would our frigates last? Half an hour? Of course you need frigates as escort vessels, except that we don’t have anything for them to escort.

If we scrapped the frigates and the tanks we could afford a dozen modern nuclear submarines which would be more than enough to deter any of our immediate neighbours. If you wish to deter attacks by major powers there is only one way to do that. You need a nuclear deterrent. If we spent our military budget wisely we could afford such a deterrent. Israel, with a third of Australia’s population, has a credible nuclear deterrent based to a large extent on submarine-launched cruise missiles.

We also have to consider the likely threats. Our immediate neighbours are not much danger. Indonesia’s army is intended for use against its own people, or for use against people who can’t fight back (like the West Papuans). Our only serious threat would be a major power. Russia has zero interest in our region. It’s hard to imagine India being a threat – they’re much too preoccupied with Pakistan and China. Japan is too preoccupied with China. That leaves China and the US. Only nukes would deter those powers.

We also need to consider that at the moment no-one regards us as a threat. An Australia with 100 million people would be a different proposition – we’d be a potential regional major power. If we went down the high population road we’d need a very serious military. If you’re going to put yourself forward as a major regional power you’d better be able to back up your pretensions with real military power.

how many people do we need?

If we want to oppose immigration we need to have a coherent well-articulated position on the issue. Simply saying we want immigration stopped isn’t going to work. If you do that you simply get accused of racism, and of wanting to wreck the economy. We need to put a bit more thought into our position.

There is for instance one very important question we need to consider. Exactly how many people do we want in our country?

Australia’s population is close to 25 million. That doesn’t sound much when you look at the size of the country but in fact our population is concentrated to a quite incredible degree in a handful of large cities. Well over a third of the population is concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne. Those cities are increasingly unpleasant places in which to live.

So assuming we want to stabilise our population, at what point do we want to stabilise it?

The same applies to other countries. The UK’s population is now 66.5 million, surely much too high. The US has a population of 325 million.

In all these cases the ideal figure would probably be somewhat lower than the current figure. Arguing for any serious population reduction is not within the realms of the politically possible. But we do need to have some kind of target to aim for.  Which means we need to come up with a realistic rate of immigration to achieve that target. A rate that will obviously be very much lower than the current rates.

Of course in reality we probably don’t need any immigration at all. The problem with that is that such a view will get you labelled as not merely an extremist but a hopelessly unrealistic one. I do think though that choosing some kind of target figure would be politically useful. If you’re asked how much immigration you want and you reply that you don’t know then you tend to look like someone who hasn’t thought things through.

In the year ending June 2017 Australia’s net migration intake was a staggering 245,000. The danger for anti-immigration advocates of not having a clear idea of how many immigrants we should be bringing in is that the government could announce that it was “slashing” the yearly immigration intake to 220,000 and we would be expected to hail that as a major concession. On the other hand if we say that we actually need no more than a maximum of 20,000 then it would be easier for us to point out that any minor reduction was merely a sham.

We also need to address other major issues. The demographic collapse of white European populations is real and it’s been happening for a long time. The official figures for fertility rates in western countries understate the scale of the problem because those figures are artificially inflated by the very high fertility of immigrant populations in those countries. The problem is a critical one. We need sensible ideas for addressing this problem. The big worry is that the demographic collapse may already be irreversible. We don’t know, because we’re the first society in history to try to commit suicide by failing to reproduce.

If we can’t articulate a strategy for reversing this demographic suicide then we leave ourselves open to the specious arguments of immigration boosters that western countries cannot survive without mass immigration. We also need to be able to counter the argument that an ageing population will be a disaster.

We also must find a counter to the argument that without immigration GDP would stop growing and the sky would fall.

There’s a fair amount of anti-immigration sentiment out there but it’s hopelessly disorganised and diffuse and incoherent. We need to take a position on the issue that is focused, consistent and well-reasoned.

politics, culture and immigration

One thing I notice on a lot of dissident right sites is an obsession with the idea that immigration must be stopped and that every other issue needs to be either put on the back burner or even entirely abandoned in order to focus on immigration. I think this is a mistaken view. I want to emphasise that this does not mean that I don’t think the immigration issue is important. It is vitally important. I simply don’t think that fighting on that one issue is a viable strategy. I’ll try to explain why I think this way.

The most crucial thing to understand is that politics really is downstream of culture. The state of the culture determines whether a particular political fight is winnable or not, in the current circumstances. At this point in time I don’t think the political fight on immigration is winnable. It could become winnable but that will necessitate at least some degree of cultural change.

The immigration debate cannot be won right now for several reasons. These reasons apply in the US, in Britain, in Australia and in western Europe, to varying degrees.

The first reason is that many people, possibly even a majority, simply do not see immigration as a major problem. The communities devastated by diversity are mostly poorer communities. Upper class and upper middle class people have not been affected. Even lower middle class people have, to a large extent, escaped the worst effects. Since people generally have difficulty in understanding the concept of long-term consequences those who have not so far been affected still believe they never will be.

Secondly, most people are still more concerned about social conformity than immigration. The social consequences to the individual of opposing immigration (accusations of racism, possible loss of jobs, social harassment) seem to outweigh the social consequences of immigration for the nation as a whole.

Thirdly, most people still buy the economic arguments in favour of immigration – without immigration economic growth would slow down and nothing could possibly be worse than having a slight slowdown in GDP growth.

Fourthly, the elites are still absolutely united in their determination to push immigration.

So what changes need to be made to the culture? Firstly the idea that GDP is the one and only measure of national well-being needs to be attacked. People need to be persuaded that there’s more to life than having the latest smartphone. Secondly, the whole basis of liberalism has to be attacked.

The most dangerous delusion is that you can accept liberalism on social issues and still successfully oppose immigration. You can’t. If for example you accept the liberal argument on abortion then it’s impossible not to accept the liberal position on all other social issues. If individual choice (even extending as far as the choice to kill your baby) is all that matters then how exactly are you going to oppose the principle that individuals should have the choice to live wherever they want to live? Including the choice to live in your country rather than their own?

You can’t use the argument that by exercising that choice they are infringing other people’s rights. You’ve already accepted that a woman’s right to choose is sacred, even if it means killing her baby (which is about as big an infringement of someone’s else rights that can be imagined). You can’t use the argument that immigration has social consequences, since you’ve already accepted the principle that only the individual’s wishes matter. It’s the same with all other social issues. If you accept that people can choose their own gender you can’t very well argue that they can’t choose where to live.

If you accept that the individual is all that matters then society as such doesn’t exist (this was in fact the position taken by the right-wing liberal Margaret Thatcher). If we’re nothing but individuals pursuing pleasure and our own interests then borders must inevitably come to be seen as unnecessary, oppressive and harmful.

Interestingly enough you can oppose immigration from a left-wing perspective, if you drop the internationalism. In fact if you’re seriously left-wing you have to abandon internationalism anyway – it’s impossible to maintain a welfare state or anything approaching a command economy if you have open borders. So a communist can, quite logically and coherently, be opposed to immigration but a liberal cannot. This is not an argument in favour of communism, merely an observation.

The bottom line is that if you accept liberalism you will get open borders. If you oppose open borders you must oppose liberalism. And the fight against liberalism is the fight that really matters. It’s the fight that must be won.

the new class struggle – the same but different

I’m going to start this post with a quote from a couple of feminists.

“Feminists Teresa Amott and Hester Eisenstein, writing separate studies, both came to the conclusion that feminism is largely a means for corporate America to ‘remain competitive’ by lowering labor costs. Further, Eisenstein adds that the weakening of unions was a part of this. Male-dominated unions both kept wages high and controlled the labor pool for an industry. Breaking the unions meant that more part-time and new female workers (let alone immigrants) can move into an industry, drastically cutting labor costs. It was a diabolically brilliant idea that was based on crass self-interest while able to pose as the most selfless of idealisms. 

Teresa Amott notes: Hiring women was a central part of the corporate strategy to restore profitability because women were not only cheaper than men, but were also less likely to be organized into unions and more willing to accept temporary work and no benefits.”

It’s amazing how the actions of the elites often seem incomprehensible and even self-defeating until you start to consider the part played by class interests. Then it all becomes crystal clear.

Now don’t panic, I’m not going to start recycling tired old Marxist arguments. Marx was wrong about almost everything. On the other hand, Marx’s errors notwithstanding, class struggle is a very real thing. It’s just that class warfare isn’t capitalists versus workers. It’s more complicated than that.

In fact even at the time Marx was writing, in England, there was a different kind of class warfare happening. It was a struggle between the old elite, with wealth based on land, and the new industrial elites whose wealth was based on money. And another intra-elite class struggle would soon develop, between the industrial capitalists and the financial capitalists.

In the 20th century yet another would-be elite start jockeying for power and influence, a class of intellectuals, journalists, media moguls, career politicians and senior bureaucrats. And more recently we have seen the emergence of another elite, the Silicon Valley elite.

There is however one thing that unites and always has united all these elites – they all hate and fear the non-elites. They hate the poor and what remains of the working class of course, but they also hate and fear the moderately affluent lower middle classes. They hate and fear everybody who does not belong to the elite. As far as the elites are concerned the only reason for non-elite people to exist is to prove cheap labour and docile consumers. They need the non-elites but they are determined to keep them in their place. The soft totalitarianism of modern society, feminism, identity politics, mass immigration – these are all ways to achieve that aim of keeping the non-elites powerless, divided and demoralised.

Once a society abandons traditional values and traditional ways of life and embraces liberalism then class warfare becomes a permanent feature of the landscape. The intra-elite class struggles can be fairly vicious but the class war of the elites against the non-elites will always be merciless.

conservatives and Christians defending liberal ideals

A major obstacle confronting anyone trying to promote social conservative or traditional values, or Christian values, is the extraordinary extent to which liberal values permeate our society. These liberal ideals are so all-pervasive that we often do not even recognise them as being fundamentally liberal.

It is common to encounter people who describe themselves as conservative who really do seem to believe that concepts like freedom of speech and freedom of religion are core conservative values. I have even come across Christians who think that freedom of speech and freedom of religion are the foundations of white Christian society. They also tend to be people who think that openness and tolerance are compatible with social conservatism. And it goes without saying that these “conservatives” take the same view of democracy.

In fact of course these are all core liberal values.

They date back to the Enlightenment, the most disastrous episode in the history of the West. Liberalism is the political child of the Enlightenment.

These concepts were all devised by white European liberals (or proto-liberals) who had one thing in common – they despised and detested European Christian society. They wanted to destroy European Christian society. They then intended to build Utopia on the ruins. They were especially hostile to Christianity.

As Mark at Oz Conservative is constantly pointing out (quite correctly) modern mainstream conservatives are actually liberals. They are right-liberals, the most dangerous kind of liberals.

The greatest danger currently facing the West is (as Mark has also pointed out) that the dissident right is going to be hijacked by right-liberals.

There is at the moment a great deal of disenchantment in the West with the existing political order. There is also a great deal of anxiety about population replacement, this being quite clearly the objective of the globalist class. My great fear is that naïve well-meaning people with genuine concerns about immigration are going to be persuaded to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with liberals in defence of liberal values. These liberal values (the ones enumerated above) will be sold to us as being the essential foundations of western civilisation. And a great many people are going to fall for this con.

And it is a con. These liberal ideals are the very things that have brought our civilisation to the brink of disaster. They are the very things that have weakened our society to the point where invaders no longer have to invade, they can just walk in and take over.

Any realistic hope of saving the West depends upon a categorical rejection of these pernicious liberal ideals. We must recognise these ideals for what they are – mechanisms for undermining social stability and for destroying Christianity.

Don’t be foolish enough to be persuaded that your bitterest enemies, liberals, can ever be allies. Liberals are the enemy, and right-liberals are the most dangerous enemy of all.