A riveting -- thanks to its subject -- paper was posted the September 4, 2017 on the website of "Institut des Libertés," the think tank of the great French financier Charles Gave. In it, he asks: Does the native population -- by which he means the white population -- of Europe face extinction?
His answer is "yes": "It is not good or bad. IT IS", Gave writes. His basic argument is that with a "native" rate of fertility of 1.4, a "migrant" -- by which he means Muslim -- rate of 3.4 to 4 children per woman, and taking the initial Muslim population to be 10% of the total, it will take only 30 to 40 years for the Muslim population to become the majority. Indeed, writes Gave, with a "native" rate of 1.4 for a population of 100, after only two generations you merely see 42 "native" children born.
As expected, Gave was almost immediately scorned as a far-right lunatic for having adopted the theory known in France as "le grand remplacement" ("the great replacement") -- of the native population by a new, migrant population. The theory was earlier disseminated by the writer Renaud Camus, who was close to the Front National political party of Marine Le Pen.
In a furious and venomous article about the "foolish calculations" of Gave, the newspaper Libération -- compared to which the New York Times or the Washington Post look honest and balanced -- wrote that the Muslim population is not 10% of the French population, but less; that the fertility rate of the native population is 1.8, not 1.4; that the fertility rate of the migrants from the Maghreb is 3.53, not 4 and that the concept of "Muslim origin" is nonsensical.
Who then is right, Gave or his critics?
Let us begin by noting that the observation from Libération is fundamentally weak. Gave writes that the fertility rate of the Muslim migrants is between 3.4 and 4 -- not 4, as Libération falsely claims (Gave: between 3.4 and 4, Libération: 3.53, exactly the same). Moreover, nobody knows the exact proportion of Muslims in France -- the French State explicitly forbids any kind of religious or racial census -- but 10% seems a reasonable and moderate estimate. In addition, Libération misses the only real mistake in Gave's calculation: with a fertility rate of 1.4 and considering an initial population of 100, no other factors being taken into account, after two generations you do not have 42 children (Gave), but 49 (100 x 0.7= 70 x 0.7= 49, not 42).[1]
That being said, Gave's paper made a few assumptions with which I would disagree, for instance:
"Those who are born today will be there in thirty years and those who are not born will not be there. This is CERTAIN", writes Gave. One imagines that the same certainty was just as true in 1913, 1937 or just before the Black Death;
"Thinking that real estate will go up when there are only 42 buyers for 100 sellers is an interesting idea but I have a hard time understanding the logic", writes Gave; but he had just mentioned that the migrant population was replacing the native one -- in fact, France has never been as populous as it is today;
Gave concludes that the European native population is going to disappear in 40 years: "The immense news of the next thirty or forty years will thus be the disappearance of the European populations, whose ancestors created the modern world." Bearing in mind a fertility rate of 1.4 for the "natives", it would take more than 40 years for them to vanish from the surface of Earth; to say nothing of "mixed" marriages, and so on.
Most importantly, Islam is not a race. Islam is a religion and, in fact, much more than that; it is a doctrine, a political movement, an ideology, and a complete set of norms (Islamic jurisprudence in the form of Quran, Sunnah, Fiqh) intended to rule each and every aspect of human activity. Being a doctrine, one can join it and convert to Islam. One can also leave Islam; however, the punishment for leaving, called "apostasy," is death.
There are, nevertheless, people who define themselves as "former Muslims", even if they may not be a majority. It does not make much sense, however, to pretend to know 40 years in advance what will be the future of a belief, creed, ideology or cult, especially in Europe and the Western world. As the saying goes, "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future."
Only two or three generations ago, tens of millions of Europeans knelt several times a week in churches to show their adoration of Jesus Christ. Forty years after this religious fervor, almost nothing remains. What we have instead is the well-known phenomenon of "dechristianization", which has engulfed the whole of Europe.
Yet, despite a few differences, there is truth in Gave's paper. Bluntly put, Europeans are not making babies anymore. And this has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam; this "malady" is entirely self-inflicted.
In his book, The Population Bomb, published in 1968, the American biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote that the best method to reduce population is the legalization of abortion. And that was without even considering the effect of birth control.
When Europeans began to legalize both birth control and abortion 40 years ago, a few years after Roe vs. Wade (1973), the Catholic Church warned of the risk of Europe entering into a "morbid civilization". When the Belgian Parliament decided to depenalize abortion in 1990, the King -- a fervent Catholic -- refused to sign the law, there was a "crise de régime" and the Prime Minister at the time had to devise some kind of constitutional patch to sanction the law despite the King. Although this was said only a few short years ago, the mentality of the king now seems archaic.
Forty years later, we now know that Paul Ehrlich as well as the Catholic Church were right: Europeans evidently feel they have better things to do than look after babies.
Abortion has recently assumed epic proportions in countries such as Sweden or France. In France, there are 200,000 abortions a year. To put things in perspective, there are in France around 750,000 births a year. France, therefore, is aborting 20% of its babies/fetuses/embryos/cell clusters -- choose according to your personal convictions -- each year.
The French Parliament recently made abortion an absolute right (the Vallaud-Belkacem law of 2014). Before that, the mother had to be in a condition of distress for an abortion to be legal. This "condition" -- which was never verified nor controlled -- has now been done away with and abortion is now an everyday right, such as the right to drive a car or buy a sandwich.
The French Parliament also recently approved one of those laws -- outlawing "digital obstruction to abortion" -- for which France has a penchant. This new law states that it is a criminal offense to disseminate "false information" concerning abortion in order to deter women from having one. But what is "false"? Is it false to state that the psychological consequences of abortion are often devastating? Is it "false" to illustrate the clinical steps of an abortion? Is it "false" to put the value of human life above anything else? By the way, if "free speech" shall not entail the right to say "false" or even abhorrent things, the speech is free no more. This law means that probably around 99.9% of American pro-life websites are now set against the French criminal law: Americans, beware! In France, the right to have an abortion is now a dogma.
Some of these abortions are from "native" Westerners who have lived in France for generations, and some from people who have come as migrants. After a while, however, the "migrant" rate of abortion tends to converge with the "native" one.
But this is not of concern to us here. What is of concern, is that there is a sub-group of the European population which is in the process of very efficiently wiping itself out of existence. Indeed, with a fecundity of 1.4 the initial, "native Western" group of 100 becomes fewer and fewer -- 70, 49, 34, 24, 17, 12, 8, 6, 4, 3, 2, 1 -- in thirteen generations. The result is mathematical.
Of course, even if abortions were not permitted, there could be a demographic decline -- from war, disease, the "one-child" policy of the Chinese government (which sometimes involves forced abortions), and the like (see John Bongaarts' aggregate model of the proximate determinants, "Demographic Research," 33, 19: 535–560, 2015). One can think theoretically of a population where abortion is legal, yet the fertility rate in the long run is 3. But in real terms, there is not to my knowledge, in the vast literature on the subject[2], a single example of a population that has not declined after abortion has been made widely available -- especially, as in France, as a "right".
The point here is not whether or not abortion is "bad" or immoral, or if the policy should be reversed. The point is to show that the "white death" of Europe is a mathematical reality; and that this plague is not only self-inflicted, but that it began with the legalization of "birth control" and abortion even before the massive influx of Muslim migrants.
That uttering such a truth -- routinely predicted by such respected figures as the philosopher Raymond Aron (author of In Defense of Decadent Europe), the former Prime Ministers Michel Rocard and Alain Juppé, or even former President François Mitterrand ("demographic suicide") -- causes such mayhem and furious condemnations in the media, reveals that in Europe, not only is the "native" population dying, but free speech as well.
 (Image source: Eric Chan/Wikimedia Commons) |
Drieu Godefridi, a classical-liberal Belgian author, is the founder of the l'Institut Hayek in Brussels. He has a PhD in Philosophy from the Sorbonne in Paris and also heads investments in European companies.
[1] Actually it's probably around 45, if you take into account the fact that for a population of 100 you have 48 women able to procreate. See the book of the demographer Jacques Dupâquier, "Ces migrants qui changent la face de l'Europe" (with Yves-Marie Laulan), Paris: L'Harmattan, 2004.
[2] See e.g. Kapótsy, B., "The demographic effects of legal abortion on the Hungarian labor force," European Demographic Information Bulletin, September 1973, 4:136; Potts, M. Diggory, P., Peel, J., Abortion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977; Berelson, B., "Romania's 1966 Anti-Abortion Decree: The Demographic Experience of the First Decade," Popu. Studies, 33, 2: 209s. ; Tomas Frejka, "Induced Abortion and Fertility: A Quarter Century of Experience in Eastern Europe", Population and Development Review, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Sep., 1983), pp. 494-520; Senderowitz J., Paxman JM., "Adolescent fertility: worldwide concerns," Popul Bull., 1985 Apr. 40(2): 1-51 ; Susan Gross Solomon, "The demographic argument in Soviet debates over the legalization of abortion in the 1920's", Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique,1992, 33, 1: pp. 59-81; Carroll, P. "Ireland's Gain -- The demographic Impact and Consequences for the Health of women of the Abortion Laws in Ireland and Northern Ireland since 1968," London: Papri (Pension and Population research Institute), 2011; Potrykus, H., Higgins, A., "Abortion: Decrease of the U.S. Population & Effects on Society," MARRI Research (Marriage and Religion Research Institute), January 2014; Mueller, JD, Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element, Intercollegiate Studies Institute: 2014; John Bongaarts, "Modeling the fertility impact of the proximate determinants: Time for a tune-up," op. cit.
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