"How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)" by David P. Goldman

Review and Interview

Ruth King

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Demographic predictions often affect national security policy. President Jimmy Carter’s smarter brother Billy put it succinctly. When questioned about his shady deals with Libya, he replied “The only thing I can say is there is a hell of a lot more Arabians than there is Jews.” American policy with respect to the Middle East has been stated a tad more elegantly but it is based on the same immoral and obtuse calculations.

 

With respect to Israel, misleading predictions of Arab population growth were used, mostly by soft-core supporters to suggest that Jews were doomed to become a minority west of the Jordan River and should concede that geography in order to secure demography. A study : “The million Person Gap: The Arab Population in theWest Bank and Gaza-the American-Israel Demographic Research Group”was published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies in February 2006  withAmbassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger  as head of the Israeli team. All the meticulous research, including birth and death records and emigration numbers, revealed a net loss of Arab births and a surge in Jewish births in the West Bank.

 

As Ambassador Ettinger stated: “the demographic time bomb became a demographic scare crow.”

 

Today’s demographic scare crow evokes resurgent Islam, growing by leaps and bounds- invincible and inevitable and never to be challenged or offended.

 

David P. Goldman is a columnist and editor who writes a weekly essay on Western culture, economics, and politics under the very apposite pseudonym “Spengler.” In his book “How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam is Dying Too)” he shreds this current “demographobia” with documentation, statistics, analysis and hard facts.

 

He gets right to the task in the first chapter:” The Closing of the Muslim Womb” with the disclosure that “The Muslim world is on the brink of the fastest population decline in recorded history.” The media, particularly during the period of Arab uprisings has shown hundreds of thousands of Muslims in their mid- twenties.  However, this generation of people who grew up with six or seven siblings opts for smaller families and does not reproduce, while the graying population grows less productive and more dependent as food production dwindles – a prescription for economic collapse. The Moslem world is not alone in this scenario. Europe, both Western and Eastern face similar falling population rates and the same consequences. Goldman predicts that by the end of this century population collapse will affect the entire industrial world.

 

Islamic culture, Goldman states, has been singularly unsuccessful during the past seven centuries. The Muslim world, according to the author, suffers from a greater loss of traditional values and culture among the young generation where drug addiction and prostitution are more endemic than in Western nations. Furthermore, modern Islam does not promote success in science, art, philosophy or democracy, those institutions which sustain civilization and culture. 

 

For Goldman, “nothing less than the transformation of Islam from a state religion to apersonal religion is required for the Arabs to enter the modern world.” Goldman is skeptical and derisive of the efforts to export democracy to the Arab world. Events in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya, certainly bear out his theory.

 

For the United States, India and China, Goldman predicts a more cautiously optimistic scenario. American exceptionalism, resilient religion, higher birth rates, immigration and increased innovation and productivity will spare the United States. Furthermore, America is the only nation capable of maintaining its national character in spite of all the multi-cultural and hyphenated ethnic identities which challenge national pride and culture.

 

Herbert Spencer wrote in 1864 in “The Principles of Biology”: "The survival of the fittest, implies multiplication of the fittest." David Goldman demonstrates how and why the fittest civilizations survived and how population growth made them fit while others crumbled.   

This book is a tour de force with enough original data and analysis of history, religion, economics, philosophy  and demography to cross a reader’s eyes, to paraphrase Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye.  It is an invaluable asset for all who are interested in history, national security and national destiny.

 

It is a great pleasure to interview David.P. Goldman.

 

 

RK:  Tell us about your pseudonym “Spengler.”

 

DG:  When I began these essays in 2000, I was a managing director at Credit Suisse, and the controversial approach didn't square with a Wall Street job—so I hid behind a pseudonym. The choice of name was a joke: an essayist for the Asia Times using the name of the author of "The Decline of the West." Oswald Spengler, to be sure, was a nasty piece of work.

 

RK:  How do you explain the survival of Judaism? One of every three Jews in the world perished during the Holocaust, yet Jews and Israel remain vibrant, productive and even influential in politics.Continued