Fraser Nelson
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— Europeans are today the idlers of the world. 54 per cent of Belgians and Greeks aged over 15 participate in the labour force, compared with 65 per cent of Americans and 74 per cent of Chinese.
— Mass immigration is not necessarily the solvent of a civilisation. Between 1999 and 2009 a total of 119 individuals were found guilty of Islamism-related terrorist offences in the UK, more than two-thirds of them British.
— He quotes a scholar from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences “We were asked to look into what accounted for … the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world. We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past 20 years we have realised that the heart of your culture is your religion. Christianity.”
— Britain is already one of the most godless societies in the world, with 56 per cent never attending church at all, the second highest rate in Western Europe.
— Collapse can be sudden. Japan’s empire reached its maximum territorial extent in 1942, after Pearl Harbour. By 1945 it was no more. The UK’s age of hegemony was effectively over less than a dozen years after its victories over Germany and Japan.
— Many Asian powers, notably India, wasted decades on the erroneous premise that the socialist institutions pioneered in the Soviet Union were superior to the market-based institutions of the United States.
— The financial crisis of 2007 should be understood as an accelerator of an already well-established trend of relative Western decline.
— Japan has been able to increase government debt without triggering a crisis of confidence. But almost all Japanese debt is in the hands of Japanese investors and institutions, whereas half the US federal debt in public hands is in the hands of foreign creditors. [NB, the UK does not release our figures].
— [On Huntingdon’s Clash of Civilizations] Of 30 major armed conflicts either still going on or that had recently ended in 2005, twelve years after the publication of Huntingdon’s essay, 19 were essentially ethnic [ie, civil] conflicts.
— More cars are now bought in China than in America. In 2007, China overtook Germany in terms of the number of new patent applications, having overtaken Britain in 2004, Russia in 2005 and France in 2006.
— Many Europeans today will say religious faith is just an anachronism, a vestige of a medieval superstition. They will roll they eyes at the religious zeal of the American Bible Belt, not realising that it is their own lack of faith that is the anomaly.
And his sign-off sums up his argument:
Today, the biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations but by our own pusillanimity — and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.
Because you read about china
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