Mr. Steyn has a clever writing style, which is needed to be able to read about such a somber subject. There is a Hilaire Belloc poem titled the Pacifist, which Mark Steyn references, and contains a line something like:

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight,
But Roaring Bill who killed him thought it right.

That will pretty much give you an idea of where this book will take you. Mr. Steyn points out that there's an angry and militant population out there, and the West isn't doing much to address it. The book is meant to be a wake-up call regarding the current war on terrorism, and who's winning. The author notes that Islam is on the rise, with high birth rates and zeal for its cause(s), while the West is declining with its low birth rates, and large social welfare dependency. Even if support for militant Islam is very low among Muslims, and assuming that the majority of Muslims neither support or condone the actions of the militants, the author notes that they're but a silent majority. As the author states, even if the number of militants is very small, like one-hundredth of one percent, in a population of one million, that still amounts to 100 potential terrorist supporters. And there are hundreds of population centers of over a million, not just in the Middle East and Muslim majority countries. Given that it only took 19 individuals to carry out 9/11, those numbers stack up against the west unless peaceful solutions are found.


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A hot steamy jingoistic paranoid-schizophrenic right-wing mess. ( )

CX02

N.B. Some people recommend trying to find points of agreement with someone you basically disagree with, before getting into the rest of it; the most obvious example is Paul in most of his epistles; many psychological writers make similar recommendations. So I’m at some point going to reread the book with an eye to that. Of course that’s not to say that I’m going to take on his battles against the youth, (not that he’s that old himself), the Muslims, or whoever, just that I would have something good to say about his intentions. I will try to carry both these tasks before me though, as they say, in the natural you can’t do it.

Update:

The world as a whole has always been mostly colored, and it is currently becoming less white. “We used to go out and colonize and now the immigrants are moving in.” So if you identify with the lily-white.... And he does slip in the disputes with the Mexicans, even though it’s supposed to be the Muslims, right. Unnerving!

Of course, globally Christianity is not receding; in Africa it’s expanding. But that’s not us, not the old stock, not the West.... And the old stock is still wealthy, wealthier—

But there’s the old human discontent. “I have money, so that’s not what I want.”

And there’s the old thing, which is very modern/young: the refusal to see that my rise, really any trend, does not last forever.

But Steyn likes to express his fears mathematically.

....................

Humor is usually a sort of veiled attack, although humor itself doesn’t have to be exactly an attack. Either way, when I first read through this book I wrote down all the things that I thought were funny, in a classic mock-the-mocker that was just too appealing to say no to. But when I really get going I can talk all day, so I decided to just leave the long review in the comments section in the unlikely event that you’re inclined to care, and leave you instead with one or two thoughts.

About Muslims. Steyn has to explain away, briefly at least, the success that the Muslim empires enjoyed in past centuries relative to Western empires; he does this by saying that they just sponged tax money etc. off the non-Muslim groups and had a big party until eventually there was nothing left. The problem here is what you consider the success of an empire, or really any human success, to be. Steyn seems to think it’s mostly money or something like that, or maybe warm bodies and the will to kill. But every African dictatorship has the warm bodies and the will to kill, including the Christian ones, but nobody cares, not even Steyn. But the Muslim states at their height were very advanced by any standards, in everything from math to mysticism, and many people in the past fled from West to East. And any, you know, cultured culture, whether it’s Renaissance Italy or anybody else, can’t just buy success. Sure, one guy buys the painting, but somebody else has to paint it. And it’s the same with anybody.

About Mark Steyn. I think that the real issue here is that he thinks that the youth are soft and corrupt. And there is some vice among the youth, although maybe it’s more a matter of being corrupt than soft, since rap has plenty of will to kill. But either way, Steyn’s solution is basically to have a big war with the Muslims—or the Mexicans, or whoever— and get a few youths killed to toughen the rest of them up. (I decline to comment specifically, except to say that this is not what I’ll be voting for.)

I must highly, HIGHLY recommend AMERICA ALONE to anyone who, like me, still believes in American exceptionalism. Mark Styen analyzes demographic trends in western civilization, paying special attention to recent trends in Europe. In particular, while the native populations of most European countries are on the decline, muslim immigrants are flooding in (and out-breeding europeans). Steyn hypothesizes that you cannot so drastically alter the demographic makeup of a nation without the political climate also being affected. He spends much of the book citing various statistical studies & current events to support his claim, and he does so marvelously! America Alone is an informative (as well as entertaining) wake-up call to the people of America. It is a warning of what we have to look forward to if we continue to kowtow to those who practice a faith that teaches that we are all infidels. Its not hard to see, based upon what is already happening in some parts of Europe. Its just a matter of whether or not America will realize what is happening before it is too late.

While the book has been banned in Canada (the weenies in the Canadian government claim that the book is "hate speech"!), it should not have been. It isn't about hating muslim people. It is about being aware of the goals of the so-called "religion of peace" & standing firm against the PC ideology that has us making concessions to the islamic faith & its practitioners.

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