Programming note: Later today, Tuesday, I'll be back with Episode Five of our latest Tale for Our Time, our "Christmas crime story" by Jefferson Farjeon - Mystery in White. Tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be here for our midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.
~On Sunday President-elect Trump chose to threaten the ever swelling ranks of BRICS nations:
The idea that the BRICS Countries are trying to move away from the Dollar while we stand by and watch is OVER. We require a commitment from these Countries that they will neither create a new BRICS Currency, nor back any other Currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar or, they...
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2024
We all like the butch-boy bluster, I'm sure, but I am not so certain, if I were Chairman Xi or any other BRICS head of government, that I would be persuaded by it. For one thing, it was Washington that forced de-dollarisation on the Kremlin in pursuit of shoring up Lindsey Graham and Hunter Biden's Ukrainian pension plans, and every other BRICS leader saw both that:
a) if the Yanks can do it to Putin, they can do it to them;
and
b) it did not have the desired effect.
Beyond that is a more basic problem. The west is institutionally nuts. It purports to believe both that women can have penises and that vast transformational immigration from what Trump calls bleephole countries will be no problem because these new citizens "share our values", such as the value of a bepenised woman. The risk when you get too close to people who are nuts is that you become nuts - and there is no evidence that Xi, Putin, the ayatollahs or any of the other BRICS bigshots wish to do that. They have our number, and don't want it on speed-dial.
Right now, the west is undergoing conquest. I wish more of our commenters on yesterday's column had addressed that fairly obvious point instead of speculating on the benefits, with improved life expectancy, of lower fertility. We do not have the luxury of living in abstractions: as one population declines, so another rises. As Japan and South Korea and the peoples of Europe exit the stage, so Islam and sub-Saharan Africa make up a greater percentage of global population - and, in Europe and His Majesty's dominions, a greater percentage of the local population. Pick a Muslim country you'd like to be like. If you don't want to be like any Muslim country, the alternatives are not pretty. When Gatekeeper Farage rules out deportations of illegal aliens, he's telling you your daughters will be Muslim.
Just for the record, I would like to note the precise moment when I realised where we were headed. In the spring of 2002, after six months of confident post-9/11 columnar bluffing about the global scene, I decided to embark on a little fact-finding mission to the Middle East. Having no great hopes of the bar scene in Saudi et al, I thought I'd treat myself to a fortnight on the Continent beforehand. Waiting to meet an old chum in Vienna – a courtly Habsburgian specialist in silver-age operetta, absurdly enough - I noticed that everybody going in and out of the maternity shop across the street appeared to be Muslim. Insofar as I had given any thought to Austria and Islam, it was mostly confined to the Battle of Vienna in 1683. Now it appeared that Vienna had been surrendered without any battle. My friend arrived, and we repaired to the Café Sacher to sit under a portrait of Franz Josef and talk about The Merry Widow and The Countess Maritza.
But I could not un-see what I had seen.
That's just anecdote, as the biens pensants who dismissed my subsequent demographic bestseller as "alarmist" like to say. Yet it was nevertheless striking – because Austria is not one of those western nations one associates with mass immigration. Nor is it entirely anecdote. In 2006 a paper published by the Vienna Institute of Demography reported that in Austria "if current fertility trends remain constant, Islam could represent the majority religion for those below fifteen years of age in 2051".
2051 seemed a long way off back then. Not so much on the brink of 2025. "Current fertility trends" have, if anything, advanced a little in Islam's favour. Polls regularly show some two-thirds of Austrians want all immigration from majority Muslim countries to cease, and, in a supposedly democratic age, they vote for parties willing at least to make sympathetic noises on that front - more sympathetic noises than Gatekeeper Farage is willing to make. And yet there are no public policy changes, Islam has advanced from 0.3 per cent of the Austrian population in 1971 to just under ten per cent now, and almost half the available time between 2006 and 2051 has elapsed.
All this in a land that not so long ago was ninety per cent Catholic. But "not so long ago" is another country. I distilled it into a joke that always got a laugh on the after-dinner doom-monger circuit:
Salzburg, 1938, singing nuns, Julie Andrews — 'How do you solve a problem like Maria?'
Salzburg, 2038: How do you solve a problem like sharia?
I don't do that gag anymore, partly because it's no longer quite so funny as it was twenty years ago, and partly because, well before 2038, the Austrian authorities, like Nigel and others throughout Europe, have decided that the real problem is not sharia but just a few glitches in managing the transition. One recalls the briefly famous case in which an Iraqi "refugee" raped a ten-year-old boy because of what his counsel called "a sexual emergency" (he had not gotten any action for four months). The Austrian Supreme Court reversed the conviction on the grounds that the prosecution had entered no evidence to suggest the perp was aware the ten-year-old boy did not "consent".
In civilised societies, a ten-year-old cannot consent to anal rape. The boy himself was physically damaged by the encounter and reported to be suicidal. But, as a subsequent Supreme Court jurist put it, for the rapist it was a "one-off incident" and it was important "not to lose your sense of proportion". Whatever problem it may once have had with sharia, the Austrian judiciary has artfully solved.
The "one-off incidents" have proliferated since then, in France, Sweden, Germany, Your Country Here ...and the state's standard operating procedure has hardened, which is why Sir Keir's Starmtroopers will throw you in gaol for noticing it. We are turning into bleephole countries before our eyes. The BRICS guys know that. We should, too.
~We thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly months - and especially all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
