from AMERICA ALONE: The End of the World as We Know It by Mark Steyn

. . . from Chicken Little to Al Gore to Dennis Quaid, respected figures have been forecasting the end of the world pretty much since the beginning of the world. In Professor Little’s day, the sky was falling. In Vice President Gore’s time, it’s the Earth that’s falling apart. Plus ça change of direction, plus c’est la même prose. But, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. So let me put it in a nutshell: It’s the end of the world!! Head for the hills!!!

No, wait. Don’t head for the hills — they’re full of Islamist terrorist camps. Let me put it in a slightly bigger nutshell: much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries.

There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands — probably — just as in Istanbul there’s still a building known as Hagia Sophia, or St Sophia’s Cathedral.

But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate.

That’s just for starters. And, unlike the ecochondriacs’ obsession with rising sea levels, this isn’t something that might possibly conceivably hypothetically threaten the Maldive Islands circa the year 2500; the process is already well advanced as we speak. With respect to Francis Fukuyama, it’s not the end of history; it’s the end of the world as we know it. Whether we like what replaces it depends on whether America can summon the will to shape at least part of the emerging world. If not, then it’s also the end of the American moment, and the dawn of the new Dark Ages (if darkness can dawn): a planet on which much of the map is reprimitivised.

This excerpt was reprinted from America Alone with the permission of Regnery Publishing

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