August 10, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — Historian Arnold Toynbee once famously said that “civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”
Using this as a springboard, commentator Mark Steyn shows in a new video how Western Europe is already in the death throes of “demographic suicide” because couples are no longer having enough children. He then shows how a thriving Muslim population in Western Europe is well on its way to filling all the empty space.
Steyn explained how given the divergent birth rate between Muslims and post-Christian secularists, it will take only two generations for the current Muslim population (sitting at about 10-percent) to have as many grandchildren as post-Christian secularists (who currently make up the other 90 percent). This is due, he said, to Muslims having on average 3.5 children per couple compared to post-Christian secularists who have only 1.3 children per couple.
“People think this is a slow process…It happens very fast. The catching up is well under way,” he said.
Steyn said that the takeover of Western Europe by Muslims is “not a prediction.” He noted that some elementary schools, such as in Antwerp, Belgium, already have a majority of Muslim students.
“Nobody is predicting anything. We’re talking about who are the kids in the grade school right now, which means they are going to be the guys entering the workforce in fifteen years time,” he said.
“That’s not a prediction. We’re not looking at trends. We’re looking at the actual warm bodies sitting in the elementary classes now,” he added.
Steyn quoted statistics from the Vienna Institute of Demography which he said predict that by mid-century a majority of Austrians under the age of 15 will be Muslim.
“This was a country that not so long ago was 90 percent Catholic,” he said.
Steyn said that some of his American followers might remember Austria as the setting for the film Sound of Music about a large family that fled the country in 1938 in the face of a Nazi takeover. Steyn said that by 2038, Austrians will no longer be singing “how do you solve a problem like Maria,” but “how do you solve a problem like Sharia.”
“This is the biggest story of our time, and yet hardly anyone ever writes about it,” he said.
“This is the biggest demographic movement/transformation in history, and it’s about to accelerate,” he added.
Steyn said that the demographic suicide of the West highlights the importance of U.S. President Trump’s July message in Warsaw, Poland about faith and family.
In his July 6 rousing speech, Trump issued a clear call for the defense of Christianity that underpins all of Western Civilization, along with all the culture and traditions that arise from that source. He urged Europeans to put “faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives.”
But for Steyn, it is likely already too late for most Western European countries to turn the boat around.
“A post-Christian Europe doesn’t really have any faith and it doesn’t have any families either. They are fading into the past. They have essentially broken the compact of human societies,” he said.
“The people who built the modern world are going out of business, voluntarily,” he added.
Steyn is not the only one warning of the pending demographic crisis.
Last month Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted that “The world's population is accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to notice or care.”
Earlier in March Musk told CNNMoney that the world “should be concerned about demographic implosion.”
“So if you look at countries like Japan, most of Europe, China,” Musk said, “and you look at the birth rates, in a lot of those places it is only at about half of the sustaining rate.”
Musk described an up-side-down demographic pyramid, where the elderly are now the new flat top that is supposed to be held up by a shrinking younger base.
“So it will sort of fall over,” he said. “It will not stand.”