I’m currently reading a very interesting book by Paul Morland titled “The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World“.
The blurb reads:
The rise and fall of the British Empire; the emergence of America as a superpower; the ebb and flow of global challenges from Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Soviet Russia. These are the headlines of history, but they cannot be properly grasped without understanding the role that population has played.
The Human Tide shows how periods of rapid population transition — a phenomenon that first emerged in the British Isles but gradually spread across the globe — shaped the course of world history. Demography — the study of population — is the key to unlocking an understanding of the world we live in and how we got here.
Demographic changes explain why the Arab Spring came and went, how China rose so meteorically, and why Britain voted for Brexit and America for Donald Trump. Sweeping from Europe to the Americas, China, East Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, The Human Tide is a panoramic view of the sheer power of numbers.
The blurb is no exaggeration. It is a panoramic view, and provides a foundational perspective on how and why our world is changing around us so quickly. In particular, it demonstrates how the population-static or -declining First World is under dire, possibly terminal threat of being overrun by the overpopulated and resource-poor Third World. Whether or not that can be averted without major war(s) is an open question.
Here’s the book’s opening discussion, setting the scene for the details into which it delves.
Joan Rumbold was nineteen years old in 1754 and living in the London district of Chelsea when she met John Phillips. Three years later, pregnant by Phillips and having contracted gonorrhoea, she was abandoned by him and with nowhere else to turn was admitted to a workhouse. When an opportunity to work in service came up, she was sent to nearby Brompton, leaving her son, John junior, in the workhouse, where he died two years later. This unexceptional story of desperation, abandonment and infant death would today scandalise most societies in the developed world, triggering heart-searching and finger-pointing from both the social services and the press. In eighteenth-century England, and just about anywhere else at the time, it was completely normal. It had been so since the dawn of human history. Similar stories might be told of hundreds of thousands of girls across Europe and millions across the world at the same time or earlier. Life was lived against a background of material deprivation where, for most people, every day was a struggle against hunger, disease or some other form of disaster.
Historically, it was only yesterday that life was nasty, brutish and short. Almost any account of an aspect of the ordinary person’s existence in pre- and early industrial society, whether of diet or of housing, of patterns of birth and death or of ignorance, of lack of hygiene or of lack of health, can easily shock today’s reader. For Spanish peasants in wine-producing regions, for example, all hands were required in critical seasons of the annual cycle, including mothers of small children who left their offspring ‘alone, crying and hungry in putrid diapers’; neglected, the children might end up with their eyes pecked out by domestic fowl allowed to wander in and out of their dwellings or have their hands chewed by pigs, or they might ‘fall into the fire, or… drown in pails and wash buckets left carelessly on doorsteps’. Small wonder that between a quarter and a third of babies born in eighteenth-century Spain were dead before their first birthdays.
Life the other side of the Pyrenees for the ordinary French peasant–the vast bulk of the population–was little better. Today the department of Lozère is a charming region known for its kayaking and trout fishing, but in the eighteenth century most of its inhabitants were clothed in rags and lived in miserable cottages, ‘surrounded by manure’ which emitted a dreadful stink; the hovels rarely had windows and their floors were covered by scraps of canvas and wool serving as beds ‘on which the old, decrepit man and the new-born child… the healthy, the ill, the dying’ and often the newly dead lay side by side. Similar descriptions of squalor and misery could apply to most places on the globe at almost any time since humankind adopted agriculture around ten thousand years or so ago.
So much for the idyll of rural life in earlier times, a myth only possible in a society so long urbanised as to have lost its memory of what pre-industrial country life was really like. This was the life which every penniless Jane Austen heroine on the hunt for a wealthy heir was trying to avoid, if not immediately for herself, then quite possibly for her children or grandchildren in a world of merciless, steady downward economic and social mobility and no welfare state.
Rural life across most of the world today is very different from that of the eighteenth-century country dweller of Spain or France. Urban life, too, has improved immeasurably from the miserable norms common as late as the nineteenth century even in what was then the most developed part of the world. This is well captured in the memoirs of Leonard Woolf, husband of the more famous Virginia. Woolf was born in 1880 and died in 1969 and witnessed a transformation of living conditions in south-east England where, but for a decade as a colonial administrator in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), he spent all his life. He wrote towards the end of his life that he was struck by the ‘immense change from social barbarism to social civilization’ in London and indeed in most of Britain during his lifetime, considering it ‘one of the miracles of economics and education’; slums, with their ‘terrifying products’, no longer existed and by the middle of the twentieth century, thought Woolf, it would be hard for those who had not experienced the London of the 1880s to imagine the condition of the poor in those days, living ‘in their lairs, with poverty, dirt, drunkenness and brutality’.
These changes were not restricted to Britain. Stefan Zweig, like Leonard Woolf a memoirist and born just a year after him in Vienna, noticed a marked improvement taking place in the years before the First World War with the arrival of electric light brightly illuminating once dim streets, brighter and better-stocked shops displaying a ‘seductive new brilliance’, the convenience of the telephone and the spread of comforts and luxuries once reserved for the upper classes but now reaching into the middle class. Water no longer had to be drawn from wells and fires no longer ‘laboriously kindled in the hearth’. Hygiene was advancing and dirt retreating, and basic living standards were improving year on year so that ‘even that ultimate problem, the poverty of the masses, no longer seemed insuperable’.
Scenes of misery and material deprivation can still be seen in the worst slums of the developing world or in the last holds of rural poverty. But for most people across the world, such scenes would be recalled, if at all, as something of the past, a more distant past for those in some places, a less distant one for those in others.
The great improvements in material conditions, in nutrition, in housing, in health, in education, which have swept across most of the globe since the start of the nineteenth century, have clearly been economic but they have also been demographic, which is to say they have concerned not just the way people produce and consume but also the numbers of people born, their rate of survival into adulthood, the number of children they in turn have, the age at which they die and the likelihood of their moving region, country or continent. The improvements are reflected in the data on population and specifically births and deaths.
In a nutshell, the sorts of societies in which most people now live, as against the one into which Joan Rumbold lived and her unfortunate son was born in 1757, are marked by dramatically lower infant mortality, with far fewer babies or infants dying and almost everyone born making it at least into adulthood. They are marked too by generally longer life expectancy, in part the result of lower infant and child mortality but also of far fewer people dying in middle age and more living to ripe old ages and even to ages scarcely heard of a couple of hundred years ago. Women, given education and the tools of choice, have far fewer children in our societies. Many have no children at all and very few have the six or more common in Britain even until the middle of the nineteenth century. Having moved from the demography of Joan Rumbold’s era to that of our own, the population has grown enormously. Back in the eighteenth century there were not a billion people on the face of the earth. Today there are more than 7 billion. Just as the politics, the economics and the sociology of societies today are radically different from those of the past, so is the demography.
This process, which started in the British Isles and among sister peoples in the United States and the British Empire around the year 1800, spread first across Europe and then to the whole world. Much of Africa has not yet completed the transition, but most of it is well on its way. Outside sub-Saharan Africa there are barely half a dozen countries today where women have on average more than four children, the global norm as recently as the 1970s. There is now no territory outside Africa with a life expectancy below sixty, again around the global norm in the 1970s and close to the European norm as recently as the 1950s. The achievement of the best in the middle of the twentieth century became the global average a few decades later. The global average of a few decades ago has become the bare minimum for most of the world today. This has been achieved through a combination of the most basic and the most complex means: the increased washing of hands, better water supply, often rudimentary but critical interventions in pregnancy and childbirth, improved general health care and diet. None of these would have been possible on a global scale without education, again often rudimentary but radically better than nothing, particularly of women, allowing life-preserving practices to be disseminated and practised. It has also required achievements of science and technology from agronomy to transportation.
Philosophers of history have long debated the fundamental factors which shape historical events. Some suggest that vast material forces are most important, determining the broad outlines if not the fine detail of the human story. Others see history as essentially the story of the playing out of ideas. Still others claim that accident and chance are in the driving seat and that it is vain to look for large-scale causes behind the unfolding of events. Once historians talked of history as if it were the creation of ‘great men’. None of these approaches is fully satisfactory and none can fully explain history. The interaction of human beings over time and space is just too vast and too complex for any one theory to encapsulate it. Material forces, ideas and chance, and even great individuals and their interplay must all be comprehended if the past is to be understood.
There has been a revolution of population over the last two hundred years or so, and that revolution has changed the world. This is the story of the rise and fall of states and great shifts in power and economics but also a story about how individual lives have been transformed; of British women who within a generation stopped expecting most of their children to die before adulthood; of childless Japanese elderly dying alone in their apartments; of African children crossing the Mediterranean in search of opportunities.
Some of these phenomena, such as the fall in infant mortality from high levels in the UK, are historical. Others, such as the sheer number of Japanese dying childless and alone and the African children heading to Europe, are still very much with us and likely to intensify. The demographic whirlwind–the ever-accelerating pace of change in population–has rattled through the globe from one region to another, tearing up old ways of life and replacing them with new. It is the story of the human tide, the great flow of humanity, swelling here, ebbing there, and how this has made a vast and too often overlooked or underplayed contribution to the course of history.
The fact that life has got immeasurably better for billions–and that the world should be managing to support 7 billion people and rising–should not obscure the dark side of this story. The West, which invented the conditions that allowed so many people to survive their early years and materially to flourish, has much to be proud of. Many of its critics would not be alive today, and certainly not enjoying rich, educated lives, were it not for scientific and technical advances from pharmaceuticals and fertilisers to soap and sewage systems. Yet this awesome achievement should not lead us to overlook the marginalisation and genocide perpetrated against non-European peoples, the decimation of indigenous populations from the Americas to Tasmania, the industrial-scale Atlantic slave trade which treated black people as disposable commodities.
The rise in nineteenth-century life expectancy in Britain was a great achievement but the Irish famine should not be forgotten. The fall of child mortality across Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century is to be celebrated but does not compensate for the barbarity of two world wars and the Holocaust. Infant mortality has fallen across the Middle East but this has contributed to the youth and instability of many societies where a mass of young people, unable to integrate into the workplace, resort to fundamentalism and violence. Rejoicing in the lengthening of life expectancy in large swathes of sub-Saharan Africa in recent years, we should not forget the Rwandan genocide in 1994 nor the appalling loss of life in the wars in Zaire/Congo in the years shortly thereafter. Account should also be taken of actual or potential environmental damage posed by rising populations. The story of the human tide should not be a ‘whiggish’ one, that is, one painting a cheery picture of endless progress towards the light with History moving ever onwards to higher and brighter prospects. It is not surprising that such a view was common among much of the British elite in the nineteenth century, when the British found themselves the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world; it is not a view which can be supported today.
But for all the caveats, proper acknowledgement should be made of the great achievement that is the vast multiplying of human numbers and the provision of billions of people with a standard of living and health care and education which the wealthiest of earlier ages would have envied. The story of the human tide should be told warts and all, but it should also be told for what it is: nothing short of a triumph of humanity. The slave ships and the gas chambers should not be forgotten, but their horrors should not blind us to the fact that today countless parents like Joan Rumbold can confidently fear little for their children’s health and that billions from Patagonia to Mongolia can expect to enjoy lives which, from a relatively recent historical perspective, are breathtaking in their richness and longevity. And this multiplicity of lives has increased the stock of human creativity and ingenuity, contributing in turn to achievements from vaccines to placing a man on the moon and to–however incomplete–the spread of democracy and human rights.
What This Book Is About–and Why It Matters
The Human Tide is about the role of population in history. It does not argue that the great trends in population–the rise and fall of birth and death rates, the swelling and shrinking of population size, the surges of migration–determine all of history. Demography, it argues, is part but not all of destiny. The case is not made here for a simplistic, monocausal or deterministic view of history. Nor is the claim made that demography is in some sense a primary cause, a first mover, an independent or external phenomenon with ramifications and effects in history but not causes preceding it. Rather, demography is a factor which itself is driven by other factors, numerous and complex, some material, some ideological and some accidental. Its effects are varied, long-lasting and profound, but so are its causes.
Demography is deeply embedded in life. In a sense, it is life–its beginning and its ending. Population must be understood alongside other causal factors such as technological innovation, economic progress and changing beliefs and ideologies, but population does explain a great deal. Take for example the ideology and perspective of feminism. It is impossible to say whether the feminist movement prefigured demographic change and drove it or rather resulted from it, but we can chart how the two have worked together. Today, feminist ideas have permeated almost every aspect of (a still imbalanced) society and the economy, from the acceptability of premarital sex to female participation in the workforce. However, the revolution in social attitudes to sex and gender may not have taken place along these lines had it not been for the invention of the Pill and the fertility choices this allowed. But then again the Pill, in turn, was the product not just of the genius and grit of a number of women and men but a change in attitudes to sex, sexuality and gender which meant that research into it became acceptable within academia and fundable by both corporate and philanthropic interests. The ideology of feminism, the technology of the Pill and changes in social attitude towards sex and childbearing have all played a role in reducing fertility rates (that is, the number of children a woman can expect to have in her lifetime) and these in turn have had their own profound impact on society, the economy, politics and the course of history. Asking what came first–the social will or the Pill–is something of a chicken-and-egg problem; the story of the interplay between these forces can be told but it is futile to try to promote one as the supposed ‘prime’ or ‘ultimate’ cause and demote the others to mere effects.
Likewise, it would be a mistake to substitute a demographic for a pseudo-Marxian view of history, replacing ‘class’ with ‘population’ as the hidden factor that explains all world history. To leave demography out, however, is to miss what may be the most important explanatory factor in world history of the last two hundred years. For millennia, the same bleak story could be told of steady population progress reversed by plague, famine and war. Since around 1800, however, humankind has increasingly managed to take control of its own numbers, and to stunning effect. Demography has gone from the slowest- to the fastest-changing discipline. Population trends no longer move at a snail’s pace, with occasional shocking interruptions like the Black Death. Fertility and mortality fall with growing speed and transitions which once took generations now take place in decades.
The book goes into more detail in subsequent chapters. I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s already helped me understand just how important is the science of demographics to our future. To take just one example, the sheer numbers involved make some “orthodox” solutions to the illegal alien crisis seem utterly nonsensical. Mathematics is a hard science, and the numbers tell their own story – one that overrides considerations of traditional property rights and national borders, whether we like it or not. Demographic pressures are going to force us to examine such considerations in a whole new light. To put it bluntly, can we defend what may be defensible in terms of law and tradition, but is sheerly, utterly indefensible in terms of the numbers involved?
Demographics also sheds a dire historical light on the current worldwide threat of famine. It may be that we’re going to see, on a much, much larger scale, a re-enactment of famines that threatened the survival of individuals, families, communities, and entire nations in earlier centuries. It’s not alarmist, but coldly realistic, to point out that if current threats materialize, we might be talking about the death by starvation and associated social and geopolitical upheaval of literally hundreds of millions of people over the next few years.
I highly recommend this book. At present it’s only $3.99 in a Kindle edition, which is extremely affordable. The author has just published a sequel, “Tomorrow’s People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers“, which is as yet only available in print, but should soon be published in e-book format as well. I look forward to reading that, too.
Peter
Probably the weirdest demographic trend in the US at least isn't Latino immigration. That is in pretty rapid decline as Latin America goes below replacement.
No its that the Amish have a fertility rate so high that they could become the majority population in 150-200 years.
This isn't going to happen as material standard of living are going to decline a huge amount and early mortality is going to skyrocket over the next few decades if not years but going from a few thousand people to possibly being the majority in a few counties even as of 2018 is vastly impressive.
Largely only people wired like them are reproducing which suggest that "the future" will looks like it always had, most people are farmers or crafters, quite religious and superstitious and there are a few cities here and there.
As the Romans once said nil sub sole novum
As for the intermediate period, chaos and bloodshed. Right now Marine La Pen may well be the next leader of France and she is staunchly anti immigration. Given she was considered beyond the pale a few years ago, the times they are a changing. French Generals have even stated clearly "deportation on a massive scale or civil war."
v
A heavy subject for the wee pre coffee hours, Peter. My beloved is sleeping, and I choose to be quiet.
But it did engage my mind. From what I've learned of your history we have both seen places where children are not given their adult names because of the understood fact that not all would make it to adulthood. It's hidden politely by cute kiddie names but still true.
I've been involved in the rudimentary hygiene and advancing farming you speak of. Often to see it destroyed by anger.
Mother Nature (Mans nature?) bloody of tooth and claw does often overrule the "Civilized Man".
Chaos or the stripping away of the thin veneer of civilization has always been near, as our efforts to feed, shelter, clothe and keep the ravages of serious diseases away from our families.
3 meals to chaos isn't just a phrase. Some folks will indeed arise up with rage to GET Theirs, some gentler souls will also arise as the most frighting words in history are spoken "Mommy I'm HUNGRY" becomes all too common.
The sweetest Grandmother will kill you to feed their grandkids, if that's her only path. A lot will fall into apathy and be victims (as history proves) but a solid number will fight to feed theirs.
So easy to destroy, one neon blue haired creature of undetermined sex can firebomb your life's work, a few ounces of pressure and a bullet is on the way.
So HARD to Build, create more when the raging forces of anger corrupt even those you might think of as allies.
The deliberately provoked DIS-Unity makes dangerous and difficult the effective leadership. Leadership to assemble men of good will to build and re-create those crude building blocks a far cry from the shiny flush the toilet-and the waste is GONE to be cleanly processed by Others.
My question is can we in America (yes, I'm feeling selfish this am) keep a basic capability to retain rudimentary sanitation, recover a more regenerative agriculture and restore a Republic where you can be free or are we doomed to chaos, mass death and enslavement by the Powers that Be.
Population pressures do indeed affect history, but I suggest that only the advances of much cheap oil energy creating that excess food (machinery and fertilizer) to HAVE those population pressures can be reversed in the most horrific manner by the 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Such as the loss of some 15% of the calories of the world with this foolish proxy war between Russia and USA. The secondary and beyond knock on effects will have the anger of hungry men destroying even more of the often-fragile supply web and other foods not directly crippled by the Ukraine situation will also fail to get to and feed the hungry.
The famine wars are here or as Michael Yon says PanFamWar.
Plant potatoes, beans and cabbage. Know how to process human waste safely.
Maintain basic sanitation. The family you save might be your own.
1 Timothy 5:8 Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
Of course we can defend our civilization. We just actually have to do the messy, unpleasant work of, you know, actually deporting aliens and stopping them at the border. (Step 1: Replace the current politicians who are Hell bent on eliminating us and destroying our nations.) Shoot anybody who tries to illegally cross the borders. Sink the ships.
Julius Caesar and Charles Martel showed us the way.
As far as "orthodox" solutions to the illegal immigrant invasion, I guess it depends on what you mean by "orthodox". I contend that if we ended welfare and free medical services, the hood rats and welfare queens would have no choice but to work, and would be available to replace immigrants in the fields and on construction jobs. As a positive example, the black standard of living jumped dramatically during the exodus from the south to the factory jobs in the midwest during the 1940s.
This would entail no small amount of social disruption, but we should never have allowed Democrats to support lives of pure consumption at taxpayer expense in the first place.
McChuck
"Shoot anybody who tries to illegally cross the borders. Sink the ships.
Julius Caesar and Charles Martel showed us the way."
How many women and children have you looked in the eyes before shooting them?
Literal factor of your "Plan" to save our civilization.
Gaze too long into the abyss the abyss will gaze into you. Friedrich Nietzsche
Contrarian View
"This would entail no small amount of social disruption, but we should never have allowed Democrats to support lives of pure consumption at taxpayer expense in the first place."
Understatement at its finest. The disruption of EBT cards a few years ago for a mere few hours was enlightening. Amazing how FAST the normally sluggish Gov.com FIXED that problem, eh? Made the Black Friday rioting over cheap TV's look amusing.
Please don't confuse the directed "Rage" of Antifa and BLM shopping sprees for the level of destruction real Mobs can do. I notice neither of the "Raging but mostly peaceful protesters" (need I add a sarc tag here?) damaged ANY of the Critical Systems NEEDED for Modern Life ™.
No power distribution damage, no destruction of sewage systems, of water systems and so on. No widespread arson. Just Democrat directed and paid for agitprop to push an elected President out of office as ineffectual.
When the EBT crowd really gets rolling cities and towns will burn. Given most of the power grid and such runs through and resides inside those cities THAT will affect us outside the cities. Given that all major roads go through cities that will affect truckers. That WILL affect all of us.
America's population before the power grid was around 100 million. Not due to on demand abortions and "The Pill" but due to food production and ability to preserve it with freezers, mass canning and so on. Today 330 million NOT including uncounted millions of illegals.
Going to be a whole lot of starving in the dark once the MOBS get a rolling.
I'm not smart enough to plan for the BIG PICTURE so I plan for me and mine to survive as best we can with our friends. Economy a word with a Greek Background meaning (from Ancient Greek οἰκονομία (oikonomía) 'management of a household, administration'
Praying for wisdom
Ideas and communication technology is where I place the largest share in moving history.
Where would Marxism be without that idea not being propagated by the use of the printing press, for one example.
In the 1700s or 1800s, at least, the were places where to escape and try new ideas.
The executors of the Cultural Revolution understood and made sure that the bad-think folks in position to oppose were no longer able to do so.
I cry for my grandkids at what is coming in these uSA.
Micheal. A fence and you start by shooting the leaders, the people making the money and bringing the mass of illegals.
If we are so hell bent for wars, then, there is a stateless swath of land on the other side of our Southern border that needs a work-over.
Many people don't realize how unprecedented (and how fragile) modern prosperity and health is.
At some point, most places will revert to the historical average. It will be incredibly painful and devastating.
We need to actively fight this upcoming change as a nation…
Jamel I happen to agree with you BUT as Cisero said:
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
First, we'd need a Sodom and Gomorra level cleaning of the swamp to include our Deep State folks. Then after that a cleaning of some 50 states worth of wannabe tyrants and their Neon Haired Karen True Believers. Then an elimination of the 4th branch of government AKA the Mass Media who was and is the propaganda warriors for the Swamp.
Replace the election of our leadership with a system of you are sent a letter saying You're going to be a senator of New Hampshire for the next two years. Your salary is, you have an assigned house in DC and like jury duty off you go. Like being called up for National Guard duty your job would be guaranteed when you get back. Only the law abiding gets on the computer driven selection system. THAT alone would prevent the vast majority of wannabe politicians from getting selected. I feel a broad selection of law-abiding citizens would do better than our bribery driven political parties.
Establishment of protection for our most important assets Children from sexual grooming and revisionist histories making them racist or victim just because of the color of their skin.
Then offer to every surviving citizen and illegals a simple set of laws. A fixed tax rate that everybody pays (put the Gov.com rebuilt on a Budget). Offer illegals a path to citizenship provided they are willing to work for a living and put everybody on the dole to work.
Picking up trash, picking recyclables out of that trash, something useful.
Workfare not welfare.
Put sexuality back in the bedroom not in the board room. Personally, I don't care what your sexuality is but don't harm children or animals.
Do a Biden EO cancelation just like he did to Trump on a massive scale to peel away layers and layers of "Woke" crap.
Restore our Republic to what Jefferson said:
“Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations…entangling alliances with none” ― Thomas Jefferson
Bring ALL our Troops home and establish a military powerful enough to keep other nations wary. Stop being the world's policeman.
THEN the Fence and all that means something. Otherwise, you putting up a pretty white picket fence as your house is burning down.
Michael. Good comment.
"To put it bluntly, can we defend what may be defensible in terms of law and tradition, but is sheerly, utterly indefensible in terms of the numbers involved?"
We must, or perish.
Demographics, while important, is but one variable in the equation.
the lessons of history are clear on a number of things, one of them being that multi-focal, polyglot nations cannot survive. Examples abound. The late Roman Empire. Modern Yugoslavia. Lebanon.
For that matter, how did the bi-focal civilization of SAfrica do, Peter?
By contrast, monofocal cultures like China and Japan have stood the test of centuries.
The current immigration "crisis" (actually designed to occur) is but the first chapter of the story.
What you've seen here since 1965 has been forcing something down the throat of the dominant culture here.
With all such, there is an eventual and inevitable violent vomiting of that which has been force-fed back out. harshly, and in a projectile manner.
This is true in both physics, and physiology: Ever action generates and equal and opposite reaction.
The reaction, when it comes, is liable to bring the pendulum back far more rapidly that it took to push it this far to one side. The buffer zone afterwards is highly liable to glow at night, for some years.
Bear in mind Cortez conquered the entire Aztec Empire, of several millions of inhabitants, with about 450 men. What's overwhelmingly liable to come next will make that pale into insignificance. It may not stop anywhere this side of the Panama Canal.
Demographics isn't a guaranteed result. It merely sets the table for what's to come, and leaves place markers for the guests.
Throughout history large groups of peoples have invaded other lands. In the past the warriors came first, but these days the vast array of peoples have swarmed us first. We are into the MILLIONS of peoples who have come here and are not inclined to leave. As has been said: this will not end well.
I'm impressed with the bleak view of life depicted here. I lived in the rural South and interacted with people from all classes, colors and backgrounds. No matter how poor, everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) found ways to enjoy their lives. I think that were people as focused on the difficulties as the language of the book quoted above depicts, well, I wonder. Could they live thus? There are patches of misery in every location and every generation but there are patches of people knowing how to make the most of what looks miserable from the outside. I'm thinking of the tenant farmers I encountered and who served as my baby sitter at times. They were poor, you could see the dirt between the floorboards of their houses. But by golly, they lived, too. I know I'm fortunate. I have genealogies that go back more than six generations in every direction. I'm pretty sure that will get pushed back even further when I have time to attend to them. Many of them were not poor, but in my personal experience in their lives, they suffered inordinately. The whole sweep of human movement is way more complex than what I read in the text quoted, and way more interesting.
I would suggest reading the 24-page PDF by Sir John Glubb, entitled "The Fate of Empires".
http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf
A few excerpts:
"History, however, seems to suggest that the age of decline of a great nation is often a period which shows a tendency to philanthropy and to sympathy for other races." (page 17)
"The United States arose suddenly as a new nation, and its period of pioneering was spent in the conquest of a vast continent, not an ancient empire. Yet the subsequent life history of the United States has followed the standard pattern which we shall attempt to trace—the periods of the pioneers, of commerce, of affluence, of intellectualism and of decadence." (page 6)
"The first direction in which wealth injures the nation is a moral one. Money replaces honour and adventure as the objective of the best young men. Moreover, men do not normally seek to make money for their country or their community, but for themselves." (page 9)
History goes in cycles.
Cheers
@Michael: I care more for my people than I do for foreigners. I care more for civilization than for barbarism. Charity begins at home.
Through all of history, violence has proven to be the only truly effective tool for defending nations from invasion. (And you generally only have to kill the first few, for the rest to catch on to the idea.)
You can't hug invaders away. You can't wish invaders away. You can pretend that they're not invaders, but that doesn't change the facts. Marcus Aurelius made that mistake, and Rome burned for it.
Policemen carry weapons for a reason. So do soldiers. They do the nasty, brutish, dirty work that you seem to want to deny is unpleasant but necessary.
McChuck your ability to ignore a complex message for a simplistic reply is startling.
I expected better from you.
Currently there are far more illegal aliens in America that you think. It's not the invaders coming over the boarder that's the greatest threat.
It's the swampy traitors inside the District of Criminals that are enabling them.
But do go ahead and chase away a few from the boarder while the traitors continue to destroy our once healthy Republic for their own personal power and gain.
Other than that, I AGREE with your quote "I care more for my people than I do for foreigners. I care more for civilization than for barbarism. Charity begins at home."
START with putting out the fires burning down your house before you shoo away the unwanted visitors and put up that nice white picket fence.
Micheal, we can have many kind of troubles one feeding off another. DC is an issue, illegal immigration is an issue, legal immigration is an issue and your local leftists/degenerates are another. Honestly the STEM crowd needs trim and the money boys who put profit above all else are worse than DC
Nobody on our side is ready for the reality of forcing social conservatism, economic nationalism an economy based not on grifting, regulatory capture or living on interest but on productive remunerative work down people's throats
In order to win and to have a fertile society you must do this. A dishonest immoral society means a semi truck full of law books for simplest thing and until morality and integrity and the like are crammed down against all our ignoble history its not going to work
And note while possible is like reclaiming the sea with ponders , its going to take a while and a lot of time, effort and patience,
Also there is abroad assumption from you that extermination warfare needs to be chivalrous. No on needs to look the person being shot on the face, dehumanizing people is shockingly simple though its pure devil's work .
Anyway the main weapon isn't going to be firing squads but water, food and possibly natural plague anyway.
I wish I could sit down and have some coffee with you 5stonegames.
The open internet isn't the place to discuss this subject properly.
The "extermination warfare" isn't going to be against illegal invaders, I fear. It's us troublesome Americans that are on our "Leaderships" chopping block.
Actions speak louder than words and energy, fertilizer and soon food shortages were decisions made by the Powers that Be.
We are facing an American version of the Holodomor. Holodomor literally translated from Ukrainian means "death by hunger", "killing by hunger, killing by starvation", or sometimes "murder by hunger or starvation."
ADDING to that "the rifle behind every blade of grass" so feared by Yamato.
It's not a strength we keep saying how many guns and such we have as chaos and "Mommy I'm HUNGRY" is going to have those guns shooting each other.
We are divided, angry, scared and soon HUNGRY and well-armed. An explosive situation that the Powers that Be plan on allowing while they hide behind their taxpayer funded "Safe Zones" until the smoke clears.
History proves IF you keep your security troops and their families well fed and paid, they will be loyal enough to allow the riots to burn themselves out.
I pray I am wrong but am too much a historian to ignore the obvious signs.
Our Republic is in ICU and rats are literally chewing on the ventilators breathing tubes and power cords.
Thus, I ask folks to look past the distractions of Ukraine, Illegal Immigration and see that very soon the Clown show will come to an end and the curtain will pull back to a Bare Brick Wall.
Holodomor, the tyrant's cheapest weapon of mass extermination.
GOT FOOD, lots of food? Got trusted friends?
Micheal there are a lot of people well aware of the need for food though friends are harder to come by since most of us can't agree on where to live together.
Also what is going to make this a very weird collapse is that most people are not in family groups with children . The average lifetime fertility rate in the US is 1.6 with aggregate 30% of them being single parents mostly mothers.
The bulk of single moms aren't armed or trained and will simply end up dead or enslaved, probably the former.
Half the populations is singles, many most have no friends to speak of and of the families with kids I'd suspect most are preppers.
Its the gang members and addicts that you should fear along wit bands of rogue cops and soldiers.
And while there are going to be safe zones for a few psychopathic rich folks , our elite while dangerous to us are not up to the caliber of Stalin or Pol Pot
They are already behind wire over unarmed protests and frankly they are not going to be able to handle massive widespread violence , paramilitary action, state succession or any of the the other fun times coming down the pike .
That's assuming D.C. and a few larger cities don't end up with a radioactive hole when our egotism, lust for power and cupidity make us do something very stupid.
I like your optimism 5stonegames. I'd like to understand the basis of your hope so I can share it.
Your Commets and my thoughts this pre-coffee moment
"Half the populations is singles, many most have no friends to speak of and of the families with kids I'd suspect most are preppers."
Singles can and do get together under some sort of leadership. Often BAD Leadership and thus become proto-gangs. A fair number of those Leaders I met up with are ex-cons with recent sandbox military experience. Single moms in Latin America form quite dangerous gangs.
Where do you think the 3 letter agency command structure of antifa and BLM got their man power from? So I'd not dismiss them out of hand. Refer to Sun Tsu about this.
CURRENTLY the "Rule of Law" rewards sheep like behavior. Do what they want and get free stuff. ONCE that STOPS the gates of chaos open in my opinion (formed from many 3rd world missionary trips). Look towards the EBT Failure a couple of years ago to see how fast GIMMIE DATS get together and strip resources without leadership per say.
Why and how do you expect the preppers will identify "fellow Preppers, AKA Good Guys" and come together as a cohesive force? The herding of cats seems simpler from my observations.
"Its the gang members and addicts that you should fear along wit bands of rogue cops and soldiers."
I agree here but suggest that rogue Preppers will also be quite the threat with training and high tech night vision to become quite viable predators over the short timeframe.
I say short timeframe as live by the sword-die by the sword and destroying is EASY. Re-Building and growing food is hard work that takes TIME and Leadership.
Last time I checked, I've not seen George Washington or such available for the leadership role.
"And while there are going to be safe zones for a few psychopathic rich folks , our elite while dangerous to us are not up to the caliber of Stalin or Pol Pot"
While you agree that a few rich psychopathic folks CAN do the safe space. That's encouraging. THEY ARE THE Powers that Be. They Own-hand select our political Leadership.
What level of Psychopaths we have will be known in time.
To the psychopathic Powers that Be, the Political Face People are DISPOSABLE.
Like Biden once not useful off and away with him to appease the angry Sheeple. A Scapegoat of sorts. Given the recent Obama RETURN and the media slamming Biden I actually have GREAT CONCERNS what evil event they are saving this Scapegoat for. A quiet retirement for medical-family reasons should take but a little Media prepping and off he doddles.
That so far isn't the event I'm seeing. Is he a scapegoat for a bigger OOOPSIE? As in Canned Sunshine or Bioweapon or Economic-Cyber-collapse?
The sheeple always demand their scapegoats as to deflect the blame away from the psychopaths. Even Stalin scapegoated his people when needed. We meme it as the disappearing act.
I suspect Dr. SCIENCE (aka Dr. Fauci) will also be put away in a State Show Trial for the sins of bio-crimes. Pity the damage was done and generations will suffer over it.
I can see the Big Circles and foresee some of how it will affect my Little Circles. I cannot affect the Big Circles but I can do something about my Small Circle. Thus my focus on protecting me and mine.
The Family and trusted friends is my small circle. They historically form the basis of civilization.
Got a year+ worth of food? Got safe water as in wells and ability to get it when the grid fails? Got trusted friends (Folks that really have your back and they know you have theirs)? You're in better shape than most preppers I've met and talked to. And in far better shape than non-preppers.
Pray for wisdom, He will give.
Lost a too long comment 5stonegames. Short version reply
"Its the gang members and addicts that you should fear along wit bands of rogue cops and soldiers."
How do Preppers recognize their fellow "Good Guys" Preppers? Let alone trust each other enough to work together. Betrayal is a real concern.
Such preppers after their food runs out still remain "Good Guys"? Most I've met have about two months of stored foods.
"And while there are going to be safe zones for a few psychopathic rich folks , our elite while dangerous to us are not up to the caliber of Stalin or Pol Pot
They are already behind wire over unarmed protests and frankly they are not going to be able to handle massive widespread violence , paramilitary action, state succession or any of the the other fun times coming down the pike."
The psychopaths are the ones that own-select our political "Leadership". They ARE the Powers that be. The Politicians are scared, not so much the Powers that Be. They have real safe holes.
The Political Face People are DISPOSABLE to the Powers that Be as Scapegoats to deflect the anger of the sheeple away from them.
I am greatly concerned why given the Return of Obama and the media chewing on Biden WHY he's not been given the medical-family reasons retirement.
So far the media build up for this event hasn't happened. WHY?
What horrific event the psychopathic Powers that BE have need of a Presidential level Scapegoat for? Canned sunshine?, bioweapons? cyber-economic collapse? I don't know but it is a concern of mine.
Time will tell. Protect your families and friends.