Dying Civilization

Fertility Falls in EU

Not ONE Country Hits Population Replacement Level

Victoria Friedman
Breitbart News

Total births in the European Union’s 28 member states in 2017 have fallen from the year before, while first-time mothers are now almost 30.

Figures released by Eurostat on Tuesday revealed that there were 5.075 million babies born in the union in 2017, compared with 5.148 million in 2016 with the total fertility rate standing at 1.59 births per woman — down from 1.60 on the year before and well below the 2.1 births per woman needed to maintain a population.

In terms of individual countries, France had the highest fertility rate at 1.90 births per woman, followed by Sweden (1.78), Ireland (1.77), Denmark (1.75), and the United Kingdom (1.74). 

The lowest fertility rates were in Malta (1.26), Spain (1.31), Italy and Cyprus (both 1.32), Greece (1.35), Portugal (1.38), and Luxembourg (1.39).

These figures reveal that not one of the 28 European Union countries came close to replacement level in 2017.

It's Time for Another, Genuine Cultural Revolution

The Good Old Days

China is finding out that you cannot just turn babies off-and-on.  The government was hailed for recently easing the draconian restrictions upon married couples to just one child.  It was a start, but a stuttering beginning, at best.  The social dislocation in Chinese society from the One Child Policy will take decades, generations to redress and put right.  

A recent article in Epoch Times describes how nothing much has changed in a town lauded for its adherence to, and its disciplined alacrity over, carrying out the former "one child" policy.

In the 1980s, the county of Rudong in China’s coastal province of Jiangsu was lauded for its strict adherence to China’s infamous one child policy. Three decades later, the county’s residents are paying the price of the Chinese regime’s efforts at population control.  Rudong County has come under scrutiny recently for having negative population growth for 17 straight years, and for having a rapidly aging populace, according to a report by the semi-official Beijing News on March 29. And the county’s residents haven’t taken to recently instituted pronatalist measures.

The problem is that a social cluster (such as a town) eventually reaches the tipping point of death--the point at which it is not possible to rebuild the town or area.  Like other cities and regions throughout history, living there becomes too hard, or costly, or inconvenient and people move.  The city or town dies.  That's what is happing in Rudong now.

Letter From the UK (About China's New Two-Child Policy)

The One-child Policy Changed China for Ever With its Cruelty

Isabel Hilton
The Guardian

Chinese married couples are now graciously permitted by the Communist party to have two children. It is a policy adjustment born out of anxiety about the impact on the economy of skewed demographics, and the fear that a shrinking labour force and growing ranks of retirees will condemn China to grow old before it grows rich.

But after 35 years of forced abortions, female infanticide, unregistered births and traumatised individuals, the party may find that it was easier to reduce China’s families than to enlarge them. It will take rather more, at this point, than official permission to change China’s birthrate significantly.

In 1969, after 20 years of Maoist disorder, China was an impoverished agrarian society with a typical birthrate of six children per woman. Children were assets then, because they brought an extra pair of hands and a hedge against starvation in old age. There was little geographical or social mobility, and several generations of the family still lived together, grandparents taking care of infants as mothers laboured in the fields. Large families were officially encouraged: Mao Zedong considered Thomas Malthus a capitalist thinker and socialism, he believed, would provide. China, he boasted, could afford to lose 100 million people, thus prevailing in the nuclear war with the USSR that he thought would come.

End of China’s one-child policy comes tragically late for many

By 1979, Mao was dead and Deng Xiaoping took a different view.

Reality Check in China

Virtual Worlds Meet Divine Law

When men in their arrogance attempt to abrogate Natural Law--as established and decreed by God--they are given rope--enough rope with which to hang themselves.  The consequences of the rebellion are usually unseen, but ultimately hard and real. 

An example is China's one-child-policy.  This policy was originally enacted to combat an alleged problem: the  over-population of China.  The rationalist-cum-materialists (aka, communists) decided the solution was to restrict couples to just one child.  The destructive consequences of this rebellion against divine law are becoming more and more evident.  This one instance of reckless hubris will end up doing  more than anything else to weaken China from within.

There is now a severe and burgeoning imbalance between the sexes which will destabilize Chinese society.  If you are allowed only one child, and abortion is the central state method of enforcing the dictat, then male children will be preferred to female because males are deemed to have better prospects.  For every hundred female children born, there are 117 males.  That adds up to millions of Chinese men unable to marry because there are no women available.  Men, unable to enter into marriage, congregating in large numbers will inevitably be drawn into anti-social, marauding behaviour. 

A society cannot rebel against the Creator's law--systematically and relentlessly--and escape the consequences.  Some of those consequences, whilst initially subtle, are now increasingly manifest.

Withering on the Vine

The Demographic Time Bomb is Most Marked in Japan

The demographic time bomb – whereby the elderly population assumes a greater and greater proportion of the total population - is no more marked than in Japan.

Falling birth rates (as a result of abortion, contraception and delaying childbirth) and increasing longevity as a result of better medical care have created this situation.

If we look at the population age structure in Japan (see graph above) we can see how dramatically its shape has changed since 1950 and how much more it will change by 2050.

The same trends are spelt out numerically in the table below where different countries are compared.

Unless something is done to reverse the demographic trends, ‘economic necessity’, together with the ‘culture of death’ ideology which is becoming more openly accepted, may well mean that the generation that killed its children through abortion will in turn be killed by its own children through euthanasia.

The population pyramid of 1950 shows that Japan had a standard-shaped pyramid marked by a broad base. The shape of the pyramid, however, has changed dramatically as both the birth rate and death rate have declined.

In 1950 the population of elderly citizens (65 years and over) accounted for just 4.9% of the total population. This had risen to 21.5% by 2007 and will rise to 39.6% by 2050.

The Odd Couple

Asininity and Contumacy

Here's a different take.  A geneticist, who is also an atheist, has argued that Christianity could well triumph over atheism.  Naturally, he employs both genetic arguments to develop the proposition.  This, from The  Telegraph:

Christianity will rise as sceptics die out, geneticist claims

Growth of Christianity in Africa coupled with population decline in Europe will trigger new resurgence of the religion, UCL academic claims 

The world could see a resurgence of Christianity driven by population decline in sceptical countries, the geneticist Steve Jones has claimed. Professor Jones said history had proven that religion grows rapidly during large population booms, particularly in poorer countries. He argued that rapid growth in Africa could spark a new resurgence of major religions like Christianity.

However in increasingly atheist countries in Europe people are no longer reproducing in sufficient numbers to avoid population decline, he told the Hay Literary Festival. “Britain is the only country in Europe that’s replacing its population,” said Prof Jones.

Might there be a causal connection between atheistic cultures and population decline?

Voices in the Wilderness

Why Does the World Still Ignore 2.6M Stillborn Children Every Year?

Posted on | May 20, 2014 

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.

Turtle Bay and Beyond

Why are the nearly three million children who die on their birth day every year still ignored? This is the question posed by a report released today in the Lancet. And it’s the question that should be on the table at the World Health Assembly  this week in Geneva. The high number of deaths hasn’t changed over the years, and neither it seems have the reasons for the utter failure of the world’s maternal health policy elite–see my blog of three years ago.

Delegates interested in making a real difference through the nascent Sustainable Development Goals now under negotiation will be keen on the report’s findings that what could save millions of maternal and newborn lives in the coming years is straightforward: more skilled birth attendants and better health facilities.

To put the matter baldly, we suggest the reason why these children continue to die is because the United Nations and its agencies want them to.  The Malthusians, the population controllers, the eugenicists, and the Greenists all advocate a smaller population for the world as a solution to its problems. 

The Annals of Hard Despotism

Withering on the Vine

We use the term "soft-despotism" to refer to the smothering embrace of the Western nanny state, driven by the demands of perverted consciences, riven by pseudo-guilt and self-righteous pity.  The alternative to soft-despotism is hard-despotism.  China is a nation with a hard-despotic system.  China is attempting to change, we are told, and we are sure there is truth in it.  But the social consequences of decades of hard despotism will take generations to work through and out.

Many of those consequences arise out of China's hard despotic attempt to control its population growth--something which the current leaders are now starting deeply to regret we suspect.  It is a startling lesson in what happens when a culture institutionalises and enforces atheistic rebellion against the Living God.  The curses of God's covenant fall--and they are exacting, hard, and remorseless.  Deep remorse, turning away from Unbelief, returning to the Creator and Redeemer and walking along a new road, His road, are the only ways of genuine escape.  Traditional Chinese pragmatism will not suffice.  The societal damage is too severe.

A recent article in the Telegraph succinctly presents just some aspects of the burgeoning social dislocation and economic disruption facing China as a result of the One-Child Policy.

Impeccable Ignorance

Population Control Goes Out With a Whimper

Posted on September 6, 2013
by Stefano Gennarini, J.D.
Turtle Bay and Beyond

 Here are three articles from the past week that address the slow hard fall from grace of population control…

1. Jonathan Last’s Review of a book that exposes Paul Ehrlich for the fraud he was. Ehrlich, an entomologist, not a demographer or economist, wrote the all-famous “Population Bomb” in the 1960s and became a world celebrity by prophesying that resource scarcity would drive up commodity prices causing humanitarian disasters of biblical proportions. Needless to say, his poor science helped the world turn a blind eye to brutal population control programs for the past five decades. He was exposed repeatedly by Julian Simon, an economist, who rightly predicted that with population increases, production would also increase and commodity prices would go down. Simon believed human ingenuity could resolve resource scarcity, and he was right. He also insisted that what populations need are robust civil and political rights regimes to enable individuals and enterprises to flourish.

The Future of China

 Long, Slow, Lingering Decline

China's one-child policy is going to devastate that country more than any other ill-conceived utopian folly.  The grim harvest has just commenced.  The Middle Kingdom has condemned itself to a long, slow lingering decline, as its social fabric rots away.  

Some of the poisonous fruits include:

• A growing hatred of the government for its stupidity and folly and the damage, pain, and suffering it has inflicted upon its people.
• A sense of being betrayed by the government.
• Gender imbalance, leaving men without any prospect of marriage and children.
• Labour shortages looming.
• Depression amongst the aged.
• Financial hardship.
• Ever more intrusive state bureaucracy.

The piece below was originally published in the Washington Post, and republished in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Simplistic Nostrums Don't Cut It

More Full Than a Craft Beer Bar

Consider the following testimonies.

Citation One:

Feeding the masses will be a problem if the population continues to soar.  The news on the population front sounds bad: birth rates are not dropping as fast as expected, and we are likely to end up with an even bigger world population by the end of the century. The last revision of the United Nations' World Population Prospects, two years ago, predicted just over 10 billion people by 2100. The latest revision, just out, predicts almost 11 billion.

 

That's a truly alarming number, because it's hard to see how the world can sustain another 4 billion people. The current global population is 7 billion. But the headline number is deceptive, and conceals another, grimmer reality. Three-quarters of that growth will come in just one continent: Africa.  The African continent has 1.1 billion people. By the year 2100, it will have 4.1 billion - more than a third of the world's total population. Or rather, that is what it will have if there has not already been a huge population dieback in the region. At some point, however, systems will break down under the strain of trying to feed such rapidly growing populations, and people will start to die in large numbers. 

Citation Two:

Mass Liquidation Project

Facing the Facts

We posted recently on Malthusian Cassandras who are predicting the end of civilization and humanity as we know them. The only solution (we are told) is twofold: reduce population growth and globally redistribute property.

Now The Onion has got in on the act, "reporting" on a recent scientific convention in the US.  Here are some excerpts.  (Warning: contains advocacy of extreme justifiable violence.)

Charity Begins At Home

China's War Against Families

China's One Child policy has been hailed by an effete liberal West as an intelligent and progressive response to population control.  In reality it represents a brutal destruction of individual and family life.  It also is beginning to tear the fabric of Chinese society apart.  Genuine Chinese patriots understand that an ancient demon that has been loosed upon the Middle Kingdom. 

One such patriot, Jing Zhang comments upon the case of blind Chen Guangcheng, who has been actively protesting the One Child regime, and upon the tyrannical policy in general.

Malthusian Cassandras

Purblind Arrogance and Invincible Ignorance

Malthusian despair grips the Western world in a vicious vice.  It is a puzzling phenomenon if one considers that the economic theories of Thomas Malthus were discredited centuries ago.  But the puzzlement exists only if one also believes in a false, objective rationalism, ignoring the blind foolishness attenuating the human heart.  Did not the prophet say, "the heart is deceitful above all things and is desperately sick; who can know it?" (Jeremiah 17:9)

We are sonorously told by modern sages that over-population threatens the continued existence of the planet.  Assuming that the world is one vast fixed, zero-sum game, our oh-so-wise cassandras insist that more mouths to feed means less food for everyone.  If one eats more, everyone else is condemned to eat less.  If a country expends more energy, there is less energy for every other nation. 

The latest voice is the respected and revered Royal Society.  Its purblind stupidity belies its reputation.

Cheering for the Seventh Billion

Beware Malthusians posing as progressives
 
Don’t be fooled by the fashionable new crowd of Malthus-bashing greens: they’re as misanthropic as old-style population scaremongers.
Brendan O’Neill
Wednesday 12 October 2011

As we approach the Day of Seven Billion, when the seven billionth human being will be born, a debate is raging. On one side, population scaremongers are fretting about the arrival of Child No.7,000,000,000, claiming that he or she will add to a growing human swarm that is heaping pressure on the environment. On the other side, liberal observers slam these Malthusians, claiming that their lament about overpopulation is ‘a mask for misanthropy’. As one headline put it: ‘Welcome baby seven billion – we’ve room for you on Earth.’

Well, that is what it looks like through a casual glance – that a fiery debate is taking place between followers of the Reverend Thomas Malthus on one side and hip questioners of the Malthusian thesis on the other. But this is deceptive.

Salute the Beckhams

Choosing Life, Not Death

When a culture turns away from the Lord and giver of Life, it ends up championing death.  The transformation is normally not immediate, but gradual.  Nevertheless, it is ineluctable.  The particular manifestation of death-devotion can vary.  As Germany transformed from a Christian nation to a champion of Enlightenment rationalism and idealism, it eventually elected a government which went on to exterminate six million Jews and millions of Gentiles--all in the name of the Volk and its superior "life".

The West generally has championed death through a perverse celebration of human rights.

Reaping the Whirlwind

The War Against Girls

Since the late 1970s, 163 million female babies have been aborted by parents seeking sons
By JONATHAN V. LAST
This review appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

Mara Hvistendahl is worried about girls. Not in any political, moral or cultural sense but as an existential matter. She is right to be. In China, India and numerous other countries (both developing and developed), there are many more men than women, the result of systematic campaigns against baby girls. In Unnatural Selection, Ms. Hvistendahl reports on this gender imbalance: what it is, how it came to be and what it means for the future.

In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that's as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.